Animals and Plants

Adam Rapp (Stone Cold Dead Serious) has been the recipient of the Herbert & Patricia Brodkin Scholarship, two Lincoln Center le Compte du Nouy Awards, a fellowship to the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, the1999 Princess Grace Award for Playwrighting, a 2000 Suite Residency with Mabou Mines, a 2000 Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, and the 2001 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights.

The World Premiere of Nocturne was produced by the A.R.T.'s New Stages Program to enormous public and critical acclaim. It received Boston's Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding New Script as well as Best New Play by the Independent Reviewers of New England. Nocturne was co-produced Off-Broadway by New York Theatre Workshop and the A.R.T. in May of 2001, is slated for productions at Berkeley Repertory and the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival, and will be published by Faber & Faber. Nocturne was also selected as one of the Burns Mantle Ten Best Plays of the 2000-2001 Season. In the spring of 2001 Animals and Plants also received its World Premiere in the New Stages Program at the A.R.T.

In the spring of 2000 he directed a workshop production of his play, Blackbird, which went on to receive its World Premiere at the Bush Theatre in London. Blackbird will make its American debut at Pittsburgh's City Theatre in May, 2002. Mr. Rapp's Faster will receive its World Premiere in January 2002 at the Culture Project in New York City.

Trueblinka was presented at The Public Theater's 1997 New Work Now! Festival and went on to the 1997 O'Neill Playwrights Conference. Ghosts in the Cottonwoods was selected for the 1996 New Work Now! Festival, went on to The 1996 O'Neill Playwrights Conference, and received its World Premiere in the fall of 1998 with the Rivendell Theatre Ensemble at Victory Gardens in Chicago. In the spring of 2000 Ghosts in the Cottonwoods was produced at the 24th Street Theatre in Los Angeles. Finer Noble Gases was presented at The 2001 O'Neill Playwrights Conference.

Originally a fiction writer, Mr. Rapp is also the author of th novels Missing the Piano (Viking/Puffin), The Buffalo Tree (Front Street/HarperCollins), The Copper Elephant (Front Street), the upcoming Under the Wolf, Under the Dog (Candlewick Press) and Little Chicago (Front Street, Spring 2002).

A graduate of Clarke College in Dubuque, IA, Mr. Rapp also completed a two-year fellowship at Juilliard where his play Dreams of the Salthorse was produced.

Director of the American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theatre School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University. Founding member and past Artistic Director of New York’s Atlantic Theater Company and past Director of the Atlantic Theater Acting School, where he still serves as Senior Acting Teacher. Co-author of the widely used text A Practical Handbook for the Actor.  Mr. Zigler has taught acting at universities around the country as well as in Canada, Italy, and Australia.  Directing:  Broadway: The Old Neighborhood by David Mamet; Off-Broadway: Dust (World Premiere); Atlantic Theater Company: Premiere of Tom Donaghy’s adaptation of The Cherry Orchard; The Woods; Sure Thing; Strawberry Fields; Suburban News; As You Like It; National Tour: Oleanna; Regional: Phildelphia Theatre Company: Race; Steppenwolf Theatre Company: The Cryptogram; A Fair Country; American Repertory Theater: Romance; world premiere of Ellen McLaughlin’s Ajax in Iraq (ART Institute); Copenhagen; Animals and Plants; Absolution; The Cripple of Inishmaan; The Old Neighborhood (world premiere); Other Regional: Glengarry Glen Ross (McCarter Theatre); The Cryptogram (Alley Theatre); Spinning Into Butter (Repertory Theatre of St. Louis).

J. Michael Griggs, the set designer for No Child … , is the design and technical advisor for Harvard student theater in the Loeb Drama Center. Previously for the American Repertory Theater he co-designed Boston Marriage and designed sets for No Man's Land, Animals and Plants, How I Learned to Drive, Nobody Dies on Friday, and numerous productions for the American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theater Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University, including Pants on Fire, The Seagull, Overboard, Three Sisters, and The Interview. He currently teaches courses in stage design at Harvard University. Stage designs for the Súgán Theatre Company include Talking to Terrorists, Women on the Verge of HRT, Sanctuary Lamp, Well of the Saints, Mojo Mickybo, Howie the Rookie, The Lepers of Baile Baiste, Molly Maquire, Bailegangaire, The Lonesome West, This Lime Tree Bower, Perfect Days, and St. Nicholas. White People, New Repertory Theatre; Design for Living, Publick Theatre; 9 Parts of Desire, Lyric Stage Company of Boston. Other stage designs include the award-winning Strindberg Sonata with director Anne Bogart in San Diego, King Lear at the Maryland Stage Company, and Lydie Breeze and Old Times at the Illinois Repertory Theatre. He has also designed for the Cricket Theatre in Minneapolis, A Director’s Theatre in Los Angeles, the South Florida Shakespeare Festival in Miami, and the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago, among others. He has taught at the University of Illinois, Carleton College, and the University of Maryland. Mr. Griggs also works as a designer for WGBH public television in Boston and is a member of United Scenic Artists 829.

Jane Stein (costume designer for Animals and Plants) designed costumes for the off-Broadway production of Lebensraum at the Miranda Theatre, and worked at many resident theaters across the country, including Berkeley Repertory Theatre, The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, The American Stage Festival, New Repertory Theatre, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, Boston Musica Viva, and North Shore Music Theatre. She worked as Resident Designer at Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Gloucester Stage Company, and Theatre by the Sea (Fourquest Entertainment). Ms. Stein is responsible for the 1996 season attire for Host Russell Baker on PBS's Masterpiece Theatre.

Lighting Designer John Ambrosone has designed over thirty productions for the American Repertory Theater, including Lysistrata, Absolution, Marat/Sade, Othello, Animals and Plants, Mother Courage (2001 Elliot Norton Design Award), The Doctor's Dilemma, Three Farces and a Funeral, Nocturne, Ivanov, The Cripple of Inishmaan, The King Stag, Boston Marriage, Charlie in the House of Rue, Valparaiso, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, How I Learned to Drive, Nobody Dies on Friday, Man and Superman, The Old Neighborhood, When the World Was Green (A Chef's Fable), Alice in Bed, Slaughter City, and Buried Child. On Broadway he designed The Old Neighborhood. Work in resident theaters includes the Alley Theatre, Long Wharf Theatre, the Coconut Grove Playhouse, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Walnut Street Theatre, Trinity Repertory Company, and Arena Stage. Mr. Ambrosone also has designed in Singapore, Moscow, Japan, Brazil, Taiwan, Mexico, Germany, and France.

Sound designs by David Remedios have been heard in Sexual Perversity in Chicago/The Duck Variations, Romance, Trojan Barbie, Endgame, The Seagull, The Communist Dracula Pageant, Let Me Down Easy, When It’s Hot It’s Cole, Cardenio, Julius Caesar, Copenhagen, Donnie Darko, A Marvelous Party, No Man's Land, Oliver Twist, Britannicus, The Onion Cellar, The Island of Slaves,  Orpheus X, Romeo and Juliet, No Exit, Three Sisters (2005), The Keening, Amerika, Olly's Prison, Desire Under the Elms, Dido Queen of Carthage, The Provok'd Wife (original music and sound), The Miser, A Midsummer Night's Dream (2003), Snow in June, Lady with a Lapdog, The Sound of a Voice, Pericles, Highway Ulysses, Uncle Vanya, Lysistrata, Absolution, Marat/Sade, Stone Cold Dead Serious, Enrico IV, Othello, Animals and Plants, The Doctor's Dilemma, Mother Courage and Her Children, Three Farces and a Funeral, Antigone, Nocturne, How I Learned to Drive, and Man and Superman. He has also toured regionally and internationally with the A.R.T.  Other credits include Farragut North and Yankee Tavern (Contemporary American Theater Festival), The Merchant of Venice (Actor’s Shakespeare Project), Ah, Wilderness! (CenterStage Baltimore), The Diary of Anne Frank (New Rep), The Scottish Play (La Jolla Playhouse), Leap (Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park), Daughter of Venus, Action Jesus and Dressed Up! Wigged Out! (Boston Playwrights’ Theatre), Sideways Stories from Wayside School, All of a Kind Family and The Fabulous Invalid (Emerson Stage), Samson Agonistes (92nd St. Y), Our Town (Boston Theatre Works), Far East (Vineyard Playhouse), Only You (Efron Entertainment). Dance soundscapes include works for Concord Academy Dance, Snappy Dance Theater Company, and Lorraine Chapman.  Awards: 2007 Connecticut Critics Circle Award (No Exit, Hartford Stage), 2001 Elliot Norton Award (Mother Courage and Her Children, A.R.T.), seven Independent Reviewers of New England Award nominations.