CURRENTLY IN DEVELOPMENT
THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE
WILLIAM SAROYAN
Written in 1939 by Armenian-American author William Saroyan, The Time of Your Life received both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Set in a San Francisco waterfront saloon, the play brings together outsiders, immigrants, dreamers, and people searching for connection and meaning.
Locus29 is exploring a contemporary, site-specific production envisioned inside a working New York City bar. Surrounded by a real audience and the natural atmosphere of the space, Saroyan’s characters and ideas would come alive through encounters that feel immediate, intimate, and unpredictable.
The project is currently in its early fundraising and development stage.
Moliere Lab
An 8-week free intensive program for professional actors to explore the unique method developed by Anatolii Vasiliev and his student Masha Kotlova.
Actors engaged in physical, verbal, and psychological aspects of the practice, training for four hours twice a week.
The lab’s goal was to equip participants with new tools and techniques to create original work rooted in this approach.
Locus29 Labs are part of our ongoing educational mission: to support artistic growth through access to rigorous, process-based training. We create space for experimentation, learning, and the development of new performance languages.
Cinematheque
Locus Cinemateque is a dedicated screening program within Locus29, featuring influential films from the 1970s—a period that reshaped cinematic language worldwide. This selection celebrates the bold storytelling, visual experimentation, and deep social commentary that marked the era, spanning European New Wave, American indie cinema, Soviet avant-garde, and New Latin American movements.
While future programs will explore other periods, Locus Cinemateque now invites audiences to experience the transformative power of 70s cinema and the visionary filmmakers whose work remains resonant today.
Up next
Past Events
November 2 -12, 2023
The Sheen Center
Written during WWII, a cataclysm that shook humanity's sense of security and identity, Jean-Paul Sartre's play "No Exit" (Huis Clos) highlights the precariousness and shadiness of the things we tell ourselves about our lives and motives. Three recently deceased individuals are locked in an absurdly opulent room together, where they will be their own torturers as they spend eternity processing their now-finished lives under each other's claustrophobic scrutiny.
As the last vestiges of faith in the goodness of humanity are reduced to ashes, and in a now-godless universe, the fundamentals of human life — war, love, justice, identity — arise as if for the first time as we face the prospect of a post-apocalyptic eternity.
In this adaptation, Sartre's "No Exit" is brought starkly into the present moment through physical and verbal improvisation. Similarly, the eternal urgency of these same themes is brought to life through work with the Dialogues of Plato.
Friday, December 9 – Midnight
Thursday, December 15 – 10 pm
TERYKONY/BONEY PILES is a harrowing film about the impact of war on children and how it affects their psyche. Dissonant images of youth and the consequences of war are shown in striking contrast to one another. The film explores the lives of children who live near the front lines of Ukraine’s war with Russia, the Donbass region. For the children featured in the film, their lives resemble the Hunger Games—dystopian. They scavenge for pieces of metal or dig graves for subsistence while day by day they forget what their former lives were before the war started. more info>>>
July 20th, 2022 7:30 pm
Zemlya is an iconic 1930 silent film by the Ukrainian director Oleksandr Dovzhenko. The film is commonly regarded as Dovzhenko's masterpiece and was named one of the top 10 greatest films of all time by the International Film Critics Symposium. However, in the Soviet Union, the tape came under ideological censorship. It was banned nine days after its original release and was celebrated in Ukraine only after Dovzhenko's death in 1956.>>>
October 28th, 2021 7pm
Locus Lab
UNIQUE 3-week acting intensive
This Lab is designed for actors and directors who want to dive deep into a unique acting method created by the revolutionary European theater director Anatoli Vasiliev to develop and nurture skills rooted in the Chekhov technique. This in-depth training encompasses physical, psycho-physical, verbal, and improvisation work with Vasiliev’s student and protege, director Masha Kotlova.
Gallery
Press
The Front Row Center
“Hell Dialogues”
By David Walters
"The play is built on a foundation of improv and movement, a technique that director Masha Kotlova is exploring in her work, so no two performances will be alike.
Hell Dialogues is a play full of a lot of ideas blended together in a pot, vigorously stirred, carefully watched, and left to slightly ferment.
Anyone who has a keen interest in self-reflection can gather at The Sheen Center to taste the collective brew"
The Theatre Times
In Conversation with Sartre and Plato: Locus29’s “Hell Dialogues”
By Rhiannon Ling
"Hell Dialogues boasts an incredibly strong ensemble cast. Its utilization of music—written by Marc Ribot, The Tiger Lilies, and Beliy Ostrog—is near-perfect. It provides excellent query, my favorite of which being “What is a tyrant?
It was a delightful evening of philosophy and oddity."
Continue to the article
Our Mission
Locus29 is a New York–based nonprofit that invites European artists to develop work on American ground. We are interested in what happens when European artistic traditions encounter the realities of American production—its structures, spaces, audiences, and pace. Rather than simply presenting European work in New York, we create conditions for it to change through collaboration and experimentation. The result is not predetermined; discovering what emerges from that encounter is the work.