Dan Fishback
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE: THEATER
Dan Fishback has been writing and performing in New York City since 2003. His play, You Will Experience Silence (Stephen Brackett, dir.) debuted at Dixon Place in 2009. Of that show, The Village Voice wrote: “Fishback has a Kushnerian sense for the complexities of historical memory, and while You Will Experience Silence might not be as panoramic as Angels in America, it’s sassier and more fun.”
Fishback has performed and developed previous work at Performance Space 122, Joe’s Pub, Galapagos Art Space, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Collective: Unconscious and the Sidewalk Cafe. He is currently developing two new theater pieces: The Material World, a pop musical about socialist Jews in the 1920s, and thirtynothing, a solo performance about growing up in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic.
Also a performing songwriter and recording artist, Fishback began his solo music career in the East Village’s anti-folk scene. His band, Cheese On Bread, has toured Europe and North America, and has released records in the United States and Japan.
Fishback has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and Dixon Place. He was a 2007-2009 recipient of the Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists.
For more information on Dan Fishback, click HERE to visit his website.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
The Material World is a pop musical about The Fensters — a family of socialist Jews living in the Bronx in the 1920s. 12-year-old Gittel Fenster wants desperately to move to Russia to participate in the great communist experiment, while her father wants to stay in America where life is comfortable. Gittel lets off steam by hanging out with her family’s anachronistic tenants — Madonna, Britney Spears, and Ian Fleishman — a young gay man from 2011 who is trying to overthrow his government by making political comments on people’s Facebook pages. Will he change the world? Will the Fensters join the Soviet revolution? Will Madonna use secret Kabbalistic codes to harness the power of God and fix everything wrong with the universe? These questions will be answered… in song. The Material World is the second play in the Ian Fleishman Trilogy. The first installment, You Will Experience Silence, was called “sassier and more fun than ‘Angels in America’” by The Village Voice in 2009.
