Dick Latessa Named New Creative Alternatives New York Board Chariman

Celebrating 40 years of using theater to help New York’s most vulnerable children and adults, Creative Alternatives of New York (225 West 99th Street) has named Broadway veteran and Tony Award-winner Dick Latessa as their new Board Chairman.  Latessa heads an illustrious panel of theater artists, including  long time board member Academy Award-winner Susan Sarandon and CANY Honorary Board members Olympia Dukakis, Arthur French and Elizabeth Wilson.

Creative Alternatives of New York (CANY) provides hope and healing through the art of theater for children and adults with emotional and/or social challenges. Partnering with leading social service agencies and health care institutions, CANY provides 1,400 theater groups annually to over 2,000 underserved children and adults in the New York metropolitan area.  Theater is a rich and powerful transformative art and can have profound impact on emotional healing and connection. The CANY method combines the creative tools of the theater arts with group dynamics to help clients re-discover their innate potential while promoting resilience and the development of social and emotional health. Applying the action-based theater techniques of improvisation, music, poetry, and movement, CANY trained staff guides clients to discover potential of the imagination, write new life stories and enact new roles for their future.

Currently, CANY works with children in residential treatment centers and alternative schools, survivors of domestic violence (both women and children), refugee youth from war zones,  veterans with traumatic stress, clients in psychiatric treatment, persons with HIV/AIDS, and seniors.

Dick Latessa made his Broadway debut in The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N in 1968. Additional theatre credits include Follies, Rags, The Cherry Orchard, Damn Yankees, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Awake and Sing!, Cabaret, and Hairspray, for which he won both the Tony and Drama Desk Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical.  Throughout the years he also has been featured in several Neil Simon plays, including Chapter Two, I Ought to Be in Pictures, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Broadway Bound, Rumors, and Proposals.  His screen credits include The Substance of Fire, Alfie, and Stigmata.   He has appeared in numerous television movies, including “Izzy and Moe,” “The Trial of Bernhard Goetz, and “Pudd'nhead Wilson,” and primetime series such “Get Smart,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Ironside,” “Spenser: For Hire,” “The Sopranos,” “Ed,” and “Law & Order.”

Photo Credit Walter McBride/Retna Ltd.