Aquila Theatre Announces Season; To Include Heller's 'Catch 22'

 AQUILA THEATRE (Peter Meineck, Artistic Director) is proud to announce that the upcoming season will include the World Premiere of the stage adaptation of Joseph Heller's Catch 22, adapted and directed by Peter Meineck. Performances begin November 14th, with opening night scheduled for November 23rd. This limited engagement continues through December 20th. All performances will be at the Lucille Lortel Theatre (121 Christopher Street, between Bleecker & Hudson Streets). For tickets, visit TicketCentral.com or call 212/279-4200. For more information, visit www.aquilatheatre.com

Spring will see the first New York staging of Homer's Iliad in its entirety, beginning March 27th, and continuing through April 26th.  Casting for both productions will be announced shortly.

PAGE and STAGE: Theater, Tradition, and Culture in America will be an in-depth partnership between libraries and the theater. Aquila received a groundbreaking grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to spearhead this innovative new program linking public libraries and performing arts centers across America.

Aquila was last seen in New York in 2007 when they presented Prometheus Bound. Since then the company has been touring internationally, performing in festivals throughout Europe, in Greece, Poland, Hungary, Germany and the United Kingdom. Now Aquila is back in New York and will present regular seasons of 2 to 3 plays a year.

Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is a modern American classic. The term itself has entered the language as a description of a ridiculously cyclical situation. The book by Joseph Heller was first published in 1961 and immediately caused a huge furor in the literary world. In 1971, Heller himself created a play based on his best-selling novel.                                                        

Since then, Catch-22 the play has not received a professional production. Aquila feels this is a work by one of America's great creative geniuses, and it deserves to be seen. Yossarian is a bombardier on a B-25, based on a small island off the coast of Italy in 1944. He starts to question the futile and ridiculous administration of his air base and seeks a way to preserve his life when the whole world around him seems to be going mad. Like a modern-day Achilles, Yossarian protests with powerful and often hilarious results. Catch-22 tackles huge things with rich metaphors, boldly drawn characters and near-impossible situations. It is a work of great theatricality with superb language and a sense of dark surrealism. Heller dares to examine the very philosophy of war and what it does to the humans that fight them. For a whole new generation of Americans, Yossarian Lives!

Aquila explored the first part of Homer's Iliad in a groundbreaking production at Lincoln Center in 1999, returning to the project several times over the past nine years with performances at Classic Stage Company, NYU and Columbia University. There can be no doubt that Homer's epic story of Achilles and the Trojan War is one of the greatest works in world literature.
Aquila's production is inspired by the cover of Stanley Lombardo's translation, which is a photograph of the D-day landings, entitled, "Into the Jaws of Death." A disparate group of soldiers and refugees take refuge from a savage war and find solace and humanity in Homer's epic tale. Nine years after the start of the Trojan War, the Greeks are still unable to defeat their enemy. Agamemnon, the commander clashes with the best warrior, Achilles over the division of war-prizes and is forced to give back the girl Chryseis to her father after Apollo sends a terrible plague. Agamemnon claims Achilles' war-prize Briseis to save face and the furious Achilles withdraws from the fighting and asks the Gods to turn the war against the Greeks. This marks the first time all three parts of Homer's Iliad will be presented in NYC.

"How can we find meaning in war? We are presenting two plays that deal with the human response to warfare. Homer's Iliad is a 2700 year-old text originally created for performance that tells the story of the rage of Achilles, the cost of war, and his personal search for honor and meaning. In many ways Catch-22 is an American Iliad, and Yossarian, a modern-day Achilles, a decorated war hero, makes a stand against the way the war is waged. I feel both Homer's epic poem and Heller's own play, based on his ground-breaking novel, need to be seen on stage," said Peter Meineck.

Peter Meineck has directed and/or produced over 40 productions in NY, London, Holland, Germany, Greece, Scotland, Canada, Bermuda, and the US in venues as diverse as Carnegie Hall, the ancient Stadium at Delphi, Lincoln Center, and the White House. Peter has published several volumes of translations of Greek plays including Aeschylus' Oresteia, which won the Lewis Galantiere Award for Literary Translation from the American Translators Association, Sophocles' Theban Plays (with Paul Woodruff) and Philoctetes and Ajax and Aristophanes' Clouds, Wasps & Birds. He has also written several literary adaptations for the stage including The Man Who Would Be King, Canterbury Tales, The Invisible Man, in addition to Catch-22. He also acts as a mythological advisor, most recently to Will Smith on I Am Legend.

 The Aquila Theatre Company was founded in London in 1991 by Peter Meineck and has been based in New York City since 1999. Aquila's mission is to bring the greatest theatrical works to the greatest number. Aquila presents a regular season of plays in New York, at international festivals, and tours to approximately seventy American towns and cities a year. Aquila also provides access to excellent theatre for people in under-served rural and inner city communities. The Aquila performance approach is a technique developed by Peter Meineck that combines text and physical action based in a theory of theatrical unity. The technique is aimed to create an aesthetic environment where the performer can create and recreate a role in a consistently changing theatrical atmosphere. Aquila Theatre broadens the classical cannon, collaborates across the performing arts, deepens a commitment to artistic excellence, teaches and exchanges idea and embraces new technology.

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