'Nicu's' Spoon' is a theater production company, founded in 2001, which does creative and fearless theatre, rather than talk about it. This company salutes the 'impossibles' that we believe are possible; all the 'not taking no for an answer', all the ways in which 'thinking outside the box' is worth the risk. We celebrate true diversity of performers and our audiences; young, old, female, male, gay, straight, black, white, brown, physically challenged, refugee and US born. We seek to involve both performers and audience in inspiring, creative and fearless exploration of new works and re-imagined classics.

Description and/or History:
We are an award winning company - producing three major shows per year as well as up to 5 original scripts in our reading series. We invest in the disabled artists in the city and work with them as performers, designers, directors, etc. We are the only company providing regularly interpreted work for the deaf community in NYC.
Nicu’s Spoon began its first season with our off-Broadway production of ‘Displaced’, a new play written by five women, based on stories, testimonies, songs and poetry of women and children refugees from around the globe. This was sponsored for submission for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. Additional performances and workshops with urban teens were at the New York Museum of Natural History in March 2002.

In 2002 we presented a multi-racial, multi-abled ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ hailed by Backstage as ‘Nothing short of inspiring!’ in the spring. We completed our 2002 season with ‘In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe’ a story of a young woman who is a ghost writer for racist propaganda and the choice she must make in regard to this work. This piece was chosen as a Village Voice ‘Voice Choice’ for 2002. We presented our first new plays with (American Sign Language) ASL interpretation that year.

In 2003 we presented ‘George Orwell’s 1984’ (A Village Voice ‘Voice Choice’ and an editors choice ‘NyTheater.com’) and ‘A Murder of Crows’, both pieces about individuality and risks taken to honor it. We continued to include handicapped actors in both shows and were chosen as the WNYC ‘Salute the Arts’ (STAR) Initiative winner.

In 2004 our Spring show ‘Suburbia’ won the New York OOBR award for best production and was followed by our multi-racial ‘Ordinary People’. In 2004 we were also an Alliance of NY State Arts Organizations ‘Advancing Cultural Development’ Award Nominee and a Peter S. Drucker Award for Innovative Theater Nominee.

In 2005 we were profiled in ‘United Stages; Seeing Stars’ series and were Editors choice in NYTheater.com for our spring production of ‘The Swan’, as well as profiled for our fall production ‘Stumps’ which introduced a new kind of performance for both deaf & hearing audiences, called ‘co-playing’.
2006 has brought us the spring US Premiere of ‘Skin Tight’ by New Zealand playwright Gary Henderson, the summer US Premiere of ‘Cherish’ by New Zealand playwright Ken Duncum and the 2006 Thom Fluellen Award from the NYU Community Fund for excellence in programming and service delivery to the marginalized populations of NYC.

Contact person: Stephanie Barton-Farcas, Artistic Director, (email)

Address:

PO Box 2058 New York, NY 10163