This Winter Horse Trade and EXIT Theatre return to bring you a festival that is uncensored, unjuried and totally downtown.
The Beggars Group The Expatriates |
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This Winter Horse Trade and EXIT Theatre return to bring you a festival that is uncensored, unjuried and totally downtown.
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The Expatriates is a fast paced, physically charged, drama about F. Scott Fitzgerald confronting other luminaries of his lifetime. Exploring the similarities of the lives he wrote and the life he lived, this show is sure to engage as it paints a literary genius barreling toward his demise.
The fourth incarnation of a play that was first produced in 2000. The Expatriates uses the endless supply of stories from 1920’s literati to illuminate the human condition. Historical facts blend with imagined scenes to paint portraits that are at once distant and familiar. This production, grounded in the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, plays with the idea that he wrote his life and subsequently had to live the life he wrote culminating in the concept that he ‘the artist’ became his greatest creation. |
The Beggars Group was founded in 1999 with the world premier of Testing Average, a new play written by Randy Anderson. The company quickly grew and after its first year it had mounted six different productions including the East Village smash hit, Theodora, She Bitch of Byzantium by Charles Busch.
In the summer of 2000, after a year of research and writing, The Beggars Group produced The Expatriates at the New York International Fringe Festival. Written entirely by the performers, The Expatriates was an exploration of decay using the lives of Ernest Hemmingway, Dorothy Parker, Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald as the vehicles of expression. Rewritten, The Expatriates was produced in its second incarnation at Under St. Marks and accompanied by the three piece improvisational Jazz combo.
In 2001, The Beggars Group concentrated on developing Do It! A play based on the book of the same title by YIPPIE radical Jerry Rubin. The first production ran for four sold out weeks in Manhattan, and brought high praise from press and audiences alike. With its revolutionary energy and mind-blowing stunts, Do It! illuminated the difficult debate between peaceful resistance and violent revolution.
In the summer of 2001, The Beggars Group traveled to Atlanta, GA to hold a weeklong symposium entitled Stopping The World. During this week, participants took workshops such as; Improvisational Movement, Music as a Character, Storytelling, and Stopping the World, a concept workshop that generated 4 new plays one of which was presented at the 2001 New York International Fringe Festival.
In April of 2002, The Beggars Group produced a third version of its opus in progress, The Expatriates. This time with a musical score performed live by A Brief View of the Hudson. Once again written and directed by the performers, this third version tested the boundaries between art and life, audience and actor. It was loud, chaotic and absolutely beautiful in its self-destruction.
Now six years later, a fourth version of this imaginative show will blossom at the 2009 FRIGID Festival. This time, centering the story around F. Scott Fitzgerald and the colliding paradigms of lives he wrote and the life he lived.
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