Mallory Catlett / Restless NYC

“In the theater I can reconfigure time. I can take things apart, mix mediums, separate the narrative from the need to talk, to tell - live bodies in communication. I want the audience to focus on the need, be aware of the gaps and the role they play in filling them; to consider how the story they make reveals who they are.” —Mallory Catlett

Mallory is an Obie award winning director, dramaturg and creator of performance across disciplines. She works with audiences, ensemble theater companies, performers, composers, musicians, choreographers, visual artists, technicians, designers and writers—the living and the dead. In theaters and out of them. These practices reflect an interest in expanding what the theater can contain. Restless NYC is a company Catlett created to push the limits of her own authorship and to pursue a specific interest in therelationship between time (how we live in it) and the destructive impulse. Employing strategies of disruption - site-specificity, mixed media, fragmentation and reconfiguration - she uses the literary and theatrical cannon as source for contemporary performance. The dismantling and repurposing of stories that have already been told is a practice in transformation; an attempt to create openings, to find a way out, and forward. 

Her work has premiered in New York at HERE, Ontological-Hysteric, PS122, Abrons, Chocolate Factory, Roulette & Collapsable Hole; been featured at the Ice Factory, COIL, Prelude, Prototype and BAM’s Next Wave; and developed in residencies at the Performing Garage, Ontological, Abrons Arts, HERE, Mabou Mines, LMCC, Chashama, MacDowell, Yaddo and the Harry Ransom Research Center.; as well as toured regionally (American Repertory Theater, ASU Gammage, DiverseWorks, Z Space & Redfern Arts Center) and internationally to Canada, France, The Netherlands, UK, Ireland & Australia. Her work has been funded by the Jerome, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NY Council for the Humanities, NYS Music Fund, NPN, NYSCA, LMCC, Puffin, NYSCA (2 individual artist commission), Bel Geddes, Tobin Theatre Fund, Mary Duke Biddle, Greenwall, MAP Fund, NEFA and Mid Atlantic Arts & Foundation for the Contemporary Arts Grantee.Her writing has been published in Theater Magazine, Canadian Theatre Review. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at SUNY Stony Brook.

Press Quotes

Credit goes to the director, Mallory Catlett, for fusing a multitude of elements into an integrated whole – a portrait of a fractured mind that, somehow, holds together. —New York Times

From elliptical imagery and approximate rhyme, director Mallory Catlett has conjured a complete, unique universe. —Village Voice

Mallory Catlett’s directing is as comprehensive and nuanced as ever, completely creating a hermetic dreamscape world. —Culturebot

Upcoming Projects

M/F FUTURE

NYC TBA, 2017
M/F FUTURE is a diptych of performance installations about how we imagine what we will become. DECODER 2017, a concert at night, and DEAD TIME OF PLENTY, a novel in a gallery by day, draw on the prophetic writings of Burroughs and Lessing to make prophesies for our own time. 

February 4, 2016 @ PuSH International Performing Arts Festival

Decoder 2017

Decoder 2017, performed by analog tape DJ and sound artist G Lucas Crane and Jim Findlay, is a cut-up of sound, video and spoken word designed to test Burroughs’ statement, "when you cut-up the present the future leaks in." Part Burroughs reading tour, part noise show, Findlay and Crane act both as characters within a fictional reality and systems operators who create the work live in performance.

Decoder 2017 was created with commissioning support from Gibney Dance. It was developed in residence at Mount Tremper Arts in March 2015 and will have a commissioned residency and performance at the PuSH International Performing Arts Festival in February 2016.

Dead Time of Plenty

Dead Time of Plenty takes up one of Doris Lessing’s apocalyptic dreams, Memoirs of a Survivor, with Black-Eyed Susan, a girl and a dog. The novel and the gallery frame a performance of associative actions, moments of female adolescents and old age, human and animal together, against the backdrop of a slow-burning apocalypse.

Dead Time of Plenty was developed at the MacDowell Colony in July 2015 and was performed at the PRELUDE Festival in October 2015. It will have residencies at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in February 2016 and at Gibney Dance in Fall 2016.

APAP 2016 One Sheet Available here

Recent Projects

THIS WAS THE END

A work for four actors in their sixties, cassette tapes, video projection, and the wall of the Mabou Mines Studio about memory and forgetting and the convergence of past and present, that asks, "What do we do with our past? What can we make of it?" This Was The End was awarded a 2014 Obie, a Bessie for visual design (and was nominated for sound and best production), and the Hewes Design Award.

Restless NYC
The Chocolate Factory, LIC/NYC, 2014