The Riot Group

Writing Sarah Flood

Adriano Shaplin — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:38:47 +0000

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Sarah Flood in Salem Mass

Adriano Shaplin — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 05:06:17 +0000

When is this? This is too late, they’re executing someone already. We messed up.

No this is only, this is late August.

There were no executions before it started.

That we know of.

What if the sensors are wrong?

Where’s the sun? Tell me where the sun is and I’ll tell u when u are.

I don’t see the sun.

It’s August. the sensors aren’t wrong.

I can’t. I can’t talk. I’m in sight.

How does the suit look, in the light?

I don’t know. They’ll see my lips moving. Goodbye.

I’m still here.

No don’t talk to me.

I’m just listening.

Don’t listen. Watch.

Put you on mute. ‘Don’t listen’ I’ll listen.

Back to the action.

About my firewood.

Get away from me now. Just, get away.

Who’s that girl?

Refugee.

She’s old to be a refugee.

Maybe she’s a young widow?

Perhaps a young widow.

Indeed a young widow.

Mouth to feed.

Too true.

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Encounter with Kalan Sherrard AKA EnormousFace in VT

Adriano Shaplin — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 17:02:10 +0000

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Adriano Shaplin — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 05:46:58 +0000

Shouts out to Olmsted Falls, Reno, Portland, Colorado Springs, Chicago, Ripton, Kansas City, Jersey City, Brooklyn, and Berlin.

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Adriano Shaplin — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 03:58:58 +0000

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Adriano Shaplin — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 02:30:52 +0000

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Adriano Shaplin — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 18:40:03 +0000

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Adriano Shaplin — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 18:37:11 +0000

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Adriano Shaplin — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 21:29:34 +0000

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Adriano Shaplin — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 02:28:44 +0000

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Adriano Shaplin — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 18:29:09 +0000

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Adriano Shaplin — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 01:17:19 +0000

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Adriano Shaplin — Fri, 31 May 2013 20:48:12 +0000

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Adriano Shaplin — Fri, 31 May 2013 20:41:44 +0000

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sarah flood

Adriano Shaplin — Fri, 31 May 2013 03:48:50 +0000

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www.theriotgroup.com “recent visitor activity”

Adriano Shaplin — Fri, 31 May 2013 02:45:36 +0000

What’s up Oslo? What’s up Paris? What’s up Zapopan?

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Sarah Flood Workshop

Adriano Shaplin — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 03:13:00 +0000

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Total Radical Fiction

Adriano Shaplin — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 05:37:02 +0000

READ THE ARTICLE

“Total Radical Fiction: Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s Ibsen Saga” by Andrew Friedman in the new issue of Theater Magazine

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Flavorpill Editor’s Pick

Adriano Shaplin — Tue, 15 May 2012 03:32:56 +0000

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“Thoughtful and funny…Nothing has quite captured the decade’s embrace of death and darkness like Sophie Gets the Horns…Alice’s final anthropology project is an explosive climax to this feminist fever dream.”

Photo by Zack Lane

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New York Magazine Review

Adriano Shaplin — Sat, 12 May 2012 05:53:17 +0000

“It’s a great piece of black box theater…Anyone who went to college in the pre-9/11 era will appreciate Riot’s delicately self-mocking approach to that twilight of the old era, back when collegiate alienation wasn’t something you posted on your Facebook page…a pop version of the Theater of Cruelty.”
photo by Zack Lane

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Backstage Critic’s Pick

Adriano Shaplin — Fri, 11 May 2012 21:33:05 +0000

“Absurdly superb…alluring and intense…a supple memory play…Kristen Bailey renders the inner clash between Sophie’s innocence and her attempts to exorcise it with a churning accuracy.”

Photo by Zack Lane

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Time Out Review

Adriano Shaplin — Fri, 11 May 2012 20:07:54 +0000

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“Delicately hilarious…a clear-eyed ethnography of our own species at a specific developmental stage…the ensemble seems exquisitely tuned to a difficult chord of poignancy and awkwardness.”

Photo by Zack Lane

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New York Times Review

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 10 May 2012 04:05:13 +0000

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“Director Rebecca Wright teases out precise, lived-in performances that for the most part maintain a naturalism while fitting into a stylized and fluid production…The drama works here because of the specific and intelligent performances by the committed actresses.”
photo by Zack Lane

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Village Voice Review

Adriano Shaplin — Wed, 09 May 2012 23:10:11 +0000

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“Unassailable proof that the Riot Group deserve a wider audience…Mary Tuomanen captures the stage physically, her gymnastics conveying a haunting sense of unpronounceable frustration and loss.”

Photo by Zack Lane

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I Interview Playwrights Part 446

Adriano Shaplin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 03:11:53 +0000

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Q: Tell me about Sophie Gets the Horns.

A: It’s about a group of young artists attending a liberal arts college in the ‘90s. Just as I was starting to work on the piece, I saw an amazing student production of The Glass Menagerie, so I was thinking about memory plays. I was also reading a lot of Sylvia Plath, mainly her diaries as well as The Bell Jar and reading a bit about her relationship with Ted Hughes. I was drawn to something in these stories, something about the way they used their pasts, and that started me writing about young artist in the 90’s, attending an elite school, and I started to want to measure the distance between then and now.

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Sophie

Adriano Shaplin — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:45:41 +0000

Photo by Kathryn Raines

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Sophie: Research 2

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:25:39 +0000

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Sophie: Research 1

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:24:58 +0000

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M.M. 2008 Nicola Samorì

Adriano Shaplin — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 21:44:53 +0000

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The Poet Laureate of Capitalism

Adriano Shaplin — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 04:48:04 +0000

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The Poet Laureate of Capitalism

Adriano Shaplin — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 14:27:59 +0000

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The Poet Laureate of Capitalism

Adriano Shaplin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:13:37 +0000

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The Poet Laureate of Capitalism

Adriano Shaplin — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 02:01:33 +0000

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Drexel: Day Four

Adriano Shaplin — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 06:28:09 +0000

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Drexel: Day Three

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 04:05:30 +0000

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Drexel: Day One

Adriano Shaplin — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:12:00 +0000

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Dramaturgy

Adriano Shaplin — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 00:24:07 +0000

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Poet Laureate: A Rendering

Adriano Shaplin — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 16:23:57 +0000

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Early Work

Adriano Shaplin — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 18:10:46 +0000

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Working On It

Adriano Shaplin — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 20:44:58 +0000

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Swailing

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 03:45:54 +0000

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Freedom Club Published in Theater

Adriano Shaplin — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 20:02:37 +0000

READ IT HERE

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Village Voice: Freedom Club Takes Aim

Adriano Shaplin — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 05:48:40 +0000

READ THE REVIEW

“Many reasons have been offered for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but historians rarely cite Shakespeare. In Freedom Club, however, playwright Adriano Shaplin blames the Bard. This collaboration between Philadelphia companies New Paradise Laboratories and the Riot Group is set both in 1865, just before the offing of Honest Abe, and in 2015, as a pro-choice radical prepares to shoot the female president.”

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New York Magazine: Most Eerily Prescient Show of the Week

Adriano Shaplin — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 05:43:31 +0000

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“A shared national trauma has a way of infusing everything we see and hear with echoes and portents: It’s natural, if not always accurate, to see the Zeitgeist moving behind every curtain. This weekend, as news of the assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords swallowed the country, I saw two shows about American madness and its complex and stochastic relationship with American politics…”

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1999

Adriano Shaplin — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 19:22:02 +0000

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Citypaper

Adriano Shaplin — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 23:39:47 +0000

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“…Freedom Club inspires laughs through a charged juxtaposition of sex and violence and a bold, straight-out-to-the-audience performance style. In “1865,” superstar John Wilkes Booth (fantastic Jeb Kreager) proclaims “You need an actor to save you!” while plotting against Drew Friedman’s moody Lincoln. “2015” shows hapless radical activists in pink and green camouflage disintegrating in sex and squabbling — except for one (Kreager, equally mesmerizing) ready to change the world with a gun. Brilliantly eerie (thanks also to Whit MacLaughlin and Adriano Shaplin’s pulsing sound design) Freedom Club slyly skewers today’s polarized politics…

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Culturebot

Adriano Shaplin — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 22:04:47 +0000

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“…The collaboration is fruitful, for not only is a seamless new ensemble born—one possessing a unique, violent and total language, at once written, spoken, and played—but FREEDOM CLUB is political theater that avoids falling flat on its face. From the perspective of Jeremy M. Barker’s recent post on political theater, perhaps this can be attributed in part to the play’s lack of a precise moral argument, though biases and opinions are inevitably detectable. As epic theater, FREEDOM CLUB simply suspends us between stylized fragments of a known past and of an imagined future, giving us a chance to look around…”

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Variety

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:22:56 +0000

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“…A daring mashup by two experimental companies (Philadelphia’s New Paradise Laboratories and New York’s the Riot Group) and two eras (1865 and 2015), “Freedom Club” indicts fanatical radicalism in America. Aptly self-described as “a hallucination on national themes,” the satire vividly skewers self-aggrandizing extremists from John Wilkes Booth to a feminist collective that spawns another presidential assassin…”

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Philadelphia Weekly

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 09:57:15 +0000

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“What ties the two disparate parts together is not just the theme of revolutionary violence, but the style of acting—a blend of the “grand style” of the 19th-century romantics (noted for emotional outbursts) with a rather formal declamatory style in which the actors address their lines to the audience rather than the other characters. Two tales of revolution from two terrific theater companies, Freedom Club is a must-see.”

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HEARTS OF MAN THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:02:32 +0000

“It’s tight, it’s compelling, and – most impressively – every side of the issue is cogently represented in this world premiere by Adriano Shaplin, about a man accused of using the Internet to lure a 14- year-old boy into sex… You can’t watch this fascinating piece without thinking about the Patriot Act – do people have to commit terrorism to be terrorists? …But Hearts of Man stands forcefully on its own, without any reference to the news. It’s produced and performed by the New York-based Riot Group, with all- around excellence, from the performances to the percussion accompaniment designed by the playwright.”

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Switch Triptych The List

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:59:31 +0000

“Shaplin’s crisply aphoristic text leaps from one profound, complete and witty observation to the next. The strange poetic style of the language creates the perfect distance from which to view the play’s issues, while the insistent, discordant electric piano score punctuates the rhythm like a broken metronome, pushing and pacing the stage action. This, in front of a metallic, cage-like set, is visually very striking, creating tableaux after tableaux, driving us away from naturalism and into other, more lucid, realms of thought.”

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Pugilist Specialist VARIETY

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:58:08 +0000

“As a corrosive rumination on the Byzantine strategies of 21st century war, this is pithy, utterly gripping and uncomfortable to watch, its extreme artifice countered by cool control and intelligence. In addition to their tightly wound, fat-free performances — they’re seated for most of the duration — the cast members also collectively designed and directed the play, lit with the uneasy intimacy of an interrogation scene and underscored by Shaplin’s obsessive soundtrack of ambient noise, scrambled audiotape and faint drowsy music.”

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Pugilist Specialist SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:57:06 +0000

“Pugilist Specialist isn’t out to seduce new converts to the armed services, but rather to explode the seductive ideology of American imperial hubris from within. Just about all its bellicosity comes packed in lethal rounds of rhetorical one-upmanship, macho posturing in wonderfully elevated dialogue draped in the floss of military argot, which lights up the practically bare stage like a volley of tracer rounds.”

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Pugilist Specialist TONY KUSHNER

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:56:14 +0000

“A beautiful, horrifying play with an ethical, tragic heart. I was bowled over by the performances, the staging and most of all by the writing—There’s nothing better than encountering, unexpectedly, something new and exhilarating in the theater.”

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Victory at the Dirt Palace The Village Voice

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:54:46 +0000

“The Riot Group gives a vigorous impression of a corps intimately linked. Though the actors pass much of the play staring straight at the fourth wall, barking out their lines to the stage lights, they all seem to sense every gesture and expression of their fellows. This sensitivity contrasts nicely with Shaplin’s prickly dialogue. An announcement of another Riot Group show in New York—now that would make excellent news.”

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Victory at the Dirt Palace THE IRISH TIMES

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:53:43 +0000

“The daring nature of the piece lies in its tone, which refuses to be merely zany but combines madcap hysteria with high seriousness. Its wild humour is contained within a stark, beautifully simple form. There are no elaborate sets, just two desks, two chairs and a table…This potentially static set-up is kept in motion by the sheer intensity of the ensemble playing and the ferocious pace of the action, which is packed into a breathless 70 minutes. The methodical madness builds towards a perfectly pitched crescendo of lunacy, followed by a wickedly hilarious epilogue. Strange as it may seem the frenetic, wired style does achieve a kind of mock-Shakespearean grandeur that makes the use of King Lear not entirely bathetic.”

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Victory at the Dirt Palace THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:51:25 +0000

“This is a ferocious and slick farce. Everyone stares icily out front as if eternally ready for the cameras to roll. Chilly professional posturing is intercut with wildly vicious personal phone calls, and modern slanging matches are unsettlingly shot through with archaic curses and a subtle lyricism.”

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Victory at the Dirt Palace Time Out London

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:50:31 +0000

“Blistering, breakneck and thoroughly committed, US company the Riot Group put Edinburgh in a spin last year. Fused with Shakespearean allusion and post-September 11 political angst, writer and performer Adriano Shaplin’s play garnered plaudits aplenty. With sodium red lighting and an incessant, ambient-beat loop hyping the levels of expectation, adrenalin and anxiety, we are firmly thrust into the deadline-driven world of broadcast news.”

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Victory at Dirt Palace The Guardian

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:49:13 +0000

“Entwining a satire on the demands of 24-hour news and the need to fill yawning airtime with a modern interpretation of King Lear, Shaplin’s dense, often smartly funny script rains down a storm of words and is given a full-frontal production that boasts terrific ensemble playing from the cast of four.”

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Zero Yard The Scottsman

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:46:06 +0000

“But even if the style of the performance is debatable, there’s no doubting its high energy slickness and precision. The Riot Group remain a formidable, driven company, impossible to ignore.”

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WRECK AT THE AIRLINE BARRIER

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:40:23 +0000

“A fantastically well crafted cauldron of dramatic chaos, the aptly named Riot Group’s Wreck the Airline Barrier is possibly the most visceral, disturbing and cerebral piece of theatre you will see on the Fringe this year…The labyrinthine script of glass-sharp fragments of language and the violently unleashed performances are simply incendiary…As should be clear by now, this play will be simply too weird and too explosive (you might be hit by a flying expletive) for some. An acquired taste it may be, but Wreck the Airline Barrier is one of the most excoriating plays this critic has seen in a long time, truly an exhilarating and terrifying powerhouse of dramatic inventiveness.”

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Why I Want to Shoot Ronald Reagan

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:19:00 +0000

“Apart from a few violent outbursts, the four actors are static, producing a ceaseless flow of confession, commentary and questioning, a dazzling polyphony that fluctuates between harmony and discord. In theatre, there is little to compare it to, but imagine a collaboration between Allen Ginsberg, Hal Hartley and Chris Morris and you’re getting close…Definitely not for the fainthearted, but as a piece of experimental theatre, it is stimulating and cerebral and as a performance truly breathtaking.”

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GUARDIAN on Oil Heart Other

Adriano Shaplin — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:26:56 +0000

“Props then at least to Adriano Shaplin for his contribution, a gloriously messy burst of reckless absurdity, pitting the excesses of a symbolically male science against a feminised nature in a conflict ending in a crushingly inevitable mutual destruction. It was brash, difficult, horrifying and inconclusive. It both underlined Barker’s claims for the importance of tragedy and did much to brutally tear the evening’s head from out of its own self-satisfied behind.”

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