ToyBox Live with Rinde Eckert

Rinde Eckert is a writer, composer, librettist, musician, performer, and director. Eckert creates solo work, chamber pieces, and through-composed operas with larger casts, and has long collaborated with other art makers including choreographers, composers, directors, and new music ensembles. His Opera/New Music Theater productions have toured throughout the U.S. and to major European and Asian festivals. Three of Eckert’s plays have run successfully Off-Broadway, receiving Drama Desk nominations and the Lucille Lortel Award. His theater writing credits include Highway Ulysses, Horizon, Orpheus X, and And God Created Great Whales, an Obie Award-winner that had three Off-Broadway runs. Current theater and music projects include My Lai with the Kronos Quartet; Aging Magician composed by Paola Prestini with design and direction by Julian Crouch; and Five Beasts with composer/performer Ned Rothenberg and beat box artist Adam Matta. Rinde Eckert was a 2007 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. He has received a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award in 2012, the 2009 Alpert Award in the Arts for Theatre, a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters, Marc Blitzstein Award. Rinde Eckert lives in New York.

Ellen McLaughlin (she/her/hers) has worked extensively in regional, international and New York theater, both as an actor and as a playwright. Acting work includes originating the part of the Angel in Angels in America, playing the role in workshops and regional productions through its original Broadway run.

Her plays have been produced Off-Broadway, regionally and internationally.  She is the recipient of the Writer’s Award from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund as well as other honors, including the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, The Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, and grants from the NEA.  Plays and operas include, Tongue of a Bird, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, The Persians, Penelope, Ajax in Iraq, Septimus and Clarissa, Blood Moon, and The Oresteia.  Producers include The Public Theater, National Actors’ Theater, Classic Stage Co., New York Theater Workshop, The Guthrie, The Intiman, The Mark Taper Forum, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Actors’ Theater of Louisville, Shakespeare Theatre, DC, Prototype, and The Almeida Theater in London.

She has taught in several programs, including Yale School of Drama, Princeton and Bread Loaf School of English. She has taught playwriting at Barnard College since 1995.