PlayCo to Present English Language Premiere of Guillermo Calderon's VILLA

Led by Founding Producer Kate Loewald, The Play Company (PlayCo) has a unique commitment to premiering work from around the world to advance a dynamic, international experience of contemporary theater in New York. That tradition continues this Spring with the U.S. English language premiere of Guillermo Calderón's Villa (March 1-April 1). Calderon is best known to New York audiences for Neva, which was presented at The Public in 2013, and his 2011 and 2016 appearances in the Under the Radar Festival with his own company Teatro en el Blanco.

Calderón's slyly surprising and gripping play focuses on the demolished site of the Villa Grimaldi, an infamous detention camp located just outside Santiago, Chile. In fact, Villa was first performed on the grounds. In Villa, three women have been tasked with deciding the fate of the historical site, where about 4,500 people were held and tortured during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship during the late 1970s. Should the villa be reconstructed, or should a museum be built in its place? Or a park? How do we walk the path from remembrance to renewal? How do we use painful collective memory to move forward as a country? With Villa, Chile's preeminent contemporary writer/director injects wry humor into the complex process of making a new Chile.

The cast and creative team for Villa will be announced at a later date.

Performances of Villa will take place from March 1 to April 1 at The Wild Project (195 East 3rd Street, Manhattan). Tickets, which go on sale January 9, are $35 for general admission and $45 for reserved seating, and can be purchased by visiting playco.org or calling 866-811-4111. $15 Student advance tickets are subject to availability (must present ID at box office) and $10 Student rush tickets are available at the box office 30 minutes prior to curtain for each performance, no advance sales, with a valid student ID.

Guillermo Calderón is a playwright and director based in New York. He graduated with a degree in Arts specializing in Acting from the Universidad de Chile and studied abroad graduating from the Della'Arte School of Physical Theater in California, USA. He also has a Master of Liberal Arts with a specialization in Film, from the City University of New York.

His first play as a writer & director was Neva, which won multiple awards including: Best Play of the year in 2006 by the Art Critics Circle of Chile, three Altazor Awards in 2007 and the 2008 Jose Nuez Martin Award. In 2008, he debuted Clase, which also won Best Play of the Year (Art Critics Circle of Chile) and was nominated as Best Playwright for the Atazor Awards. In 2008 he wrote and directed December, which won the 2010 Bank of Scotland Angel Award (Edinburgh International Festival). His recent plays include the duo of Villa and Speech, which premiered in Chile at the international festival Santiago A Mil, and then went on to run at the Memory Museum in Santiago. He recently worked on the screenplay for Violeta (se fue a los cielos), Chile's 2012 entry for the Oscar Awards in the Foreign Film category.

Mr. Calderón's plays have extensively toured the world, including Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Canada, Portugal, Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, England and of course, Chile. Festival stops have included The Buenos Aires International Theatre Festival, Edinburgh International Festival, Seoul Performing Arts Festival, Chekhov Festival in Moscow, Iberoamerica Theatre Festival in Spain, TeatroStageFest, Vienna Theatre Festival, World Theatre Festival in Brussels, The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival, and RADAR L.A., accompanied by the 2011 TCG conference.

The Play Company is an OBIE Award-winning Off Broadway theater Production Company. PlayCo has produced 31 new plays from the United States, Germany, Romania, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Japan, India, Mexico, France, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England. Their most recent production is the acclaimed New York premiere of Caught written by Christopher Chen and directed by Lee Sunday Evans. PlayCo develops and produces adventurous new plays from the U.S. and around the world, advancing a dynamic global practice of contemporary theater and expanding the American theater repertoire.

As the only New York company regularly producing outstanding contemporary plays from around the world alongside new American work, PlayCo's distinctive international programming links American theatre with world theater, American artists with the global creative community, and American audiences with a whole world of plays.