This week in PUSHPLAY: Doubt

For our second PUSHPLAY event, our Idea Lab series for The Wildness, we’ll be focusing on the theme of Doubt.  Joining us this Thursday (3/10) will be  The Wildness director Sam Buntrock, composer/lyricist César Alvarez, DJ Rebecca Birmingham, and host Clay Mcleod Chapman. To read more about PUSHPLAY, check this out! You can also listen to the MIXTAPE made by our guests and audience members at our first PUSHPLAY event that focused on the theme of Faith.

Sam Buntrock‘s directing credits include Sunday in the Park With George – Broadway, West End, Menier and 5^th Avenue Seattle (Tony, Olivier and Drama Desk Nominations for Best Director), Turn of the Screw at BAM (New York City Opera), the current European tour of The Rocky Horror Show (since 2008), the World Premiere of John Guare’s Are You There, McPhee? and Travesties (both at The McCarter, as Director in Residence), Ed, Downloaded by Michael Mitnick (Denver Center), The A to Z of Mrs P (Southwark Playhouse), Much Ado About Nothing (Two River), A Maze (New York Stage & Film), Cradle and All (MTC), McReele (Juilliard), Lenny Henry’s Cradle to Rave (UK & Australian National Tours), God Collar (Edinburgh, UK National Tour and West End), the World and American Premieres of Take Flight (Menier and McCarter), the first London revival of Assassins (New End), Get a Life and Help Yourself (both Edinburgh and UK tour). He has also worked as an Animation Director on numerous projects, including the feature film Stuart, A Life Backwards for Neal Street Productions, HBO and the BBC. His multi-award winning live action short Recursion (Director, Editor & Producer) screened at 24 international film festivals throughout 2014 (including 2 Oscar qualifiers). His second live action short, Fetch, is currently in post-production. Sam trained at Bristol University and as Resident Assistant Director at the Donmar Warehouse. He is Creative Director at IONIC Design Group.

César Alvarez is a New York-based composer, lyricist and writer. Recent composition credits: FUTURITY directed by Sarah Benson (Soho Rep/Ars Nova, A.R.T, Walker Art Center, Mass MoCA); Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon (Soho Rep, TFANA. Drama Desk Nomination); Washeteria (Soho Rep); The Foundry Theater’s Good Person of Szechwan (LaMaMa, Public Theater. Drama Desk Nomination); Mac Wellman’s 3 2’s; or AFAR (Dixon Place), Full Still Hungry for Contra-Tiempo (Ford Amphitheater, Dance Motion USA). In development: The Universe is a Small Hat, a multi-player participatory musical (Berkeley Rep Ground Floor, Civilians R&D Group, PRELUDE NYC, Babycastles, Sarah Lawrence College), The Elementary Spacetime Show (Ars Nova Uncharted, EST/Sloan Commission, Polyphone) and Castro with Lucas Hnath (Berkeley Rep Ground Floor and Space at Ryder Farm). César is an Artist-in-Residence at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and the Artistic Director of Polyphone, a festival of the emerging musical at UArts.  www.musicisfreenow.org.

Rebecca Birmingham is a New York-based record collector, radio host, and DJ. Her program Honky Tonk Radio Girl, currently airing on Wednesdays at 8 P.M. EST on freeform station WFMU, focuses on country music from the 1950s to the 1970s. In addition to being an avid scholar of hillbilly, rockabilly, and country music, she also collects R&B, soul, and gospel 45s, which she shares at DJ nights around NYC. Her collection was featured in the 2014 book Dust & Grooves: Adventures in Record Collecting. During daylight hours, she is the Creative Director and General Counsel of the development firm Macro Sea, where she focuses on historic preservation and adaptive reuse.

Clay Mcleod Chapman is the creator of the rigorous storytelling session The Pumpkin Pie Show. Publications: rest area, miss corpus, and The Tribe trilogy—Homeroom Headhunters, Camp Cannibal and Academic Assassins (Disney). Film: The Boy (SXSW 2015), Henley (Sundance 2012) and Late Bloomer (Sundance 2005). Theatre: Commencement and Hostage Song (w/ Kyle Jarrow). Comics: Edge of Spider-Verse, The Avengers, Amazing Spider-Man, Ultimate Spider-Man, Vertigo Quarterly: SFXand Self Storage. He is a writing instructor at The Actors Studio MFA Program at Pace University. Visit him at:www.claymcleodchapman.com

Join us for PUSHPLAY: 3 GUESTS. 3 SONGS. 1 CONVERSATION Thursdays in March!