Five Plays by the Team - (Oberon Modern Plays) by The Team (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Founded in 2004, the TEAM is an internationally-acclaimed Brooklyn-based collaborative ensemble. Once described as "Gertrude Stein meets MTV," the TEAM's mission is to make new work about the experience of living in America today. Released in celebration of the company's 10th anniversary, Five Plays by the TEAM includes a timeline of events, exclusive production and rehearsal images, personal introductions to the plays by members of the company, and a foreword by John Tiffany (Blackwatch, Once).

"A chaotic composite of dubious French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard, John Saade's Reality TV Handbook and Nixon's White House transcripts, among others, it bores into the 21st century American nightmare like a reckless dentist who has no anaesthetic." - The Sunday Herald on Give Up Start Over

"This remixed Hamlet touches on a whole range of idea: the destruction of idols, nature of democracy, and very question of how to be good...the show is as challenging as it is mad." - The Scotsman on A Thousand Natural Shocks

"Simultaneously intelligent, rueful, celebratory, delightful and devastatingly sad, the show actually lives up to its ambitions." - Time Out New York on Particularly in the Heartland

"How stimulating to wake up in 2009 in the hands of a present-tense theater company who knows what it's doing... Architecting] considers, with a refreshing lack of judgment, just what allows people to survive catastrophe, acquiring a poignancy and humanity and quietly summoning entire lives of everyday loss." - Ben Brantley, New York Times on Architecting

"Its mix of the epic and everyday, myth and madness, music and storytelling, create a glorious patchwork in which pitch and tone - are as crucial as intellectual argument. A theatrical tornado, and a sideways glimpse into America's tarnished, weary soul." - Guardian on Mission Drift

Review Quotes

"How stimulating to wake up in the hands of a present-tense theater company who knows what it's doing." --The New York Times

"One leaves the theatre thrilled by a company so determined to push the boundaries of theatrical possibility." --The Telegraph

"The TEAM bring the past, present, and future in a glorious mélange of jumble and judicious ordering onto the stage at the same time...visionary in concept

and execution, this show reminds you of Tony (Angels in America) Kushner and sometimes of Robert (The Dragons' Trilogy) Lepage." --The Independent

"The TEAM are theatrical excavators of American culture, American dreams and the American psyche, understanding the intimate connection between past and present, celluloid and reality." --The Guardian

"The trademark of the TEAM's work is a fierce, endlessly creative willingness to try to understand the stories and the meaning of their own country. And their

approach to theatre makes no concessions to any traditional idea of what this art-form should look like..." --The Scotsman

About the Author

The TEAM is a Brooklyn-based ensemble dedicated to creating new work about the experience of living in America today. Once described as "Gertrude Stein meets MTV," the TEAM's work crashes American history and mythology into modern stories to illuminate the current moment. They combine aggressive athleticism with emotional performances and intellectual rigor, keeping the brain, eyes and heart of the audience constantly stimulated.
The company was founded in 2004 by a group of 6 NYU alumni, and has since grown to 13 core members and a continually expanding group of associate artists. They devise plays by examining a wealth of material, ranging from existing texts (fiction, theory, drama, etc.) to images taken from visual art and film, and then combining that research with original writing and staging. To date, they have created and toured 9 works nationally and internationally. The TEAM has performed all over New York (including the Public Theater, PS122, and the Ohio Theatre); nationally (including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the A.R.T. in Cambridge); and internationally (including London's National Theatre, Barbican Centre, Almeida Theatre, and Battersea Arts Centre; Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre; Lisbon's Culturgest; the Salzburg Festival; the Perth International Arts Festival; and the Hong Kong Arts Festival).

Four-time winners of the Scotsman Fringe First Award, Winner 2011 Edinburgh International Festival Fringe Prize, 2011 Herald Angel, 2008 Edinburgh Total Theatre Award, Best Production Dublin Fringe 2007, and were nominated for the Drama League Award for Outstanding Musical. We were recently cited on 'Best of 2013' lists on 3 continents.