Russian Troll Farm:
A workplace Comedy
Part I

By Sarah Gancher


PERFORMANCES

PERFORMANCES OF THIS WORK HAVE CONCLUDED

About the play

At the infamous (real-life!) Internet Research Agency, professional internet trolls work for days at a time to influence American popular opinion, creating the illusion of consensus—or conflict. There are floors for Twitter, for Facebook, memes, fake news, and comments sections.
 
Russian Troll Farm imagines the daily lives of these workers as they invent characters, stage conflicts, and create conspiracies. What happens to your grasp on the truth when your whole job is lying? How does your identity shift when you impersonate Americans for a living?

This new play developmental reading includes the first full act of Russian Troll Farm, and a conversation with the creative team about the process and what comes next.

About the playwright

Sarah Gancher is a playwright who loves epic stories, big ideas, and deep comedy. Her most frequent subject is how  history is reflected in individual lives—how places, communities, and debates evolve over time. Her plays have been produced or developed at London’s National Theatre, Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, The Public, New York Theater Workshop, The Atlantic, Berkeley Rep, Steppenwolf, New York Stage and Film, Ars Nova, WP Theatre, The Flea, La Jolla Playhouse, Seattle Rep, Hartford Stage, RoundHouse, Mosaic (DC), P73, NYC Summerstage, and Telluride Theatre, among others. She has been a Time Warner Fellow at the Women’s Project Playwrights Lab, a member of P73’s writer’s group Interstate 73, a Writing Fellow with The Playwrights' Realm, and a member of the Ars Nova Play Group. She is a newly minted member of New Dramatists.

Sarah is the winner of the Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theatre, New York Stage and Film Founder’s Award, the Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, the AR Gurney Prize, the Clifford Odets Ensemble Play Commission, a Toulmin Foundation Commission, and residencies from the Hermitage, Jewish Plays Project, Tofte Lakes, and SPACE at Ryder Farm. She has been a playwright-in-residence at Budapest’s Quarter6Quarter7 Festival, which presented Hungarian language staged readings of three plays from her 7th cycle (Seder, Klauzál Square, and Five Mothers.)

Sarah frequently collaborates with devising ensembles.  She has written two musicals with rock band The Bengsons: The Lucky Ones, a commission for Ars Nova, and Hundred Days, which had its New York premiere at the 2017 Under the Radar festival at the Public and went on to rave reviews at New York Theatre Workshop. Both The Lucky Ones and Hundred Days garnered a number of 2018 Lortel, Drama League, and Drama Desk nominations and wins. Sarah was the collaborating playwright on Mission Drift, a musical about capitalism and the myth of the frontier written with director Rachel Chavkin, composer Heather Christian, and The TEAM. Mission Drift toured to Coimbra, Lisbon, Salzburg, the Edinburgh Fringe, PS 122's COIL Festival, Perth, Hong Kong, and London's National Theatre, and along the way it won the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe Award, a Scotsman Fringe First, a Herald Angel, and a Drama League nomination  for Distinguished Production of a Musical. 

She has written for Blue Man Group and worked behind the scenes at The Colbert Report, The Metropolitan Opera Guild, The Big Apple Circus, and Norway’s Stellapolaris, among others. She currently teaches playwriting at NYU Tisch's Department of Dramatic Writing and The New School's MFA Playwriting program. As a jazz violinist, Sarah has played in groups from New Orleans to Budapest. A proud Oakland native, she currently lives in Queens. MFA: NYU.



RENATA FREIDMAN (Masha) makes her T2 debut. New York credits include Brooklyn Academy of Music, Second Stage, Roundabout Theatre Company, Page 73, Colt Coeur, Rattlestick, INTAR, New Victory Theater, Clubbed Thumb Winterworks. Regional credits include more than 30 productions including Yale Rep, Berkeley Rep, Milwaukee Rep, Humana Festival, Roundhouse, Barrington Stage Company, Portland Center Stage, TheatreWorks, ACT, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Intiman. She has developed new work with countless theatres including Playwrights Horizons, New York Theatre Workshop, Manhattan Theatre Club, Bushwick Starr, Clubbed Thumb, Cape Cod Theatre Project, LCT3 and more. TV credits include New Amsterdam, FBI: Most Wanted, Alternatino. Film credits include Protégé, In This, Our Time.


MIA KATIGBAK (Ljuba, Ensemble) makes her T2 debut. Selected Off-Broadway credits include The Headlands (LCT3); Recent Alien Abductions (PlayCo); Henry VI (NAATCO, Actors’ Equity Foundation’s St. Clair Bayfield Award); Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Transport Group); Scenes From a Marriage (NYTW); Dear Elizabeth (Women’s Project); Awake and Sing! (NAATCO, Obie Award); The Good Person of Szechwan (Public/Foundry); I’ll Never Love Again (Bushwick Starr). Other Off-Broadway credits include Foundry, New Georges, Soho Rep, Clubbed Thumb, Target Margin. Regional credits include Long Wharf, Yale Rep, Humana Festival, Two River Theater, Berkeley Rep, Guthrie. TV credits include How to Get Away With Murder; The Sinner; Chicago P.D.; Mysteries of Laura. Film credits include I Smile Back; Clutter. Winner of the Special Drama Desk Award 2019; Actors’ Equity Foundation’s St. Clair Bayfield Award; 2017 Fox Foundation Resident Actor Fellowship for Distinguished Achievement; Otto René Castillo Award for Political Theater; Lilly Award for Trailblazing. She is the artistic producing director/co-founder of NAATCO and holds a B.A. from Barnard College and an M.A. from Columbia University.


HASKELL KING (Egor) makes his T2 debut. Theatre credits include Isaac's Eye, Photograph 51, Please Continue, Turnabout, PTSD, The Great Pretenders, Bitter Taste, and Heaven Knows (Ensemble Studio Theatre); Brother (Paradise Factory); Afterclap (Rising Phoenix Rep); Take Me Out (Caldwell Theatre); Moons of Jupiter and Tales from the Schminke Tub (One Solo Arts Festival); Sweet Eros (Mary’s Space, dir. Austin Pendleton); Elvis and Juliet (Abingdon Theatre with Fred Willard); Mother (The Wild Project with Buck Henry and Holland Taylor). Film credits include The Fly Room (dir Alexis Gambis); In Praise of Shadows (with James Franco, dir. Jay Anania); Jimmy Crane; Happy Hour (dir. Brian Devine) Cannonball Luke. Television: As the World Turns; Law and Order: Criminal Intent; Member of Ensemble Studio Theatre.


IAN LASSITER (Steve) makes his T2 debut. Broadway credits include King Lear (Cort); Junk and War Horse (Lincoln Center); The Cherry Orchard (Roundabout). Off-Broadway and regional credits include Fabulation (Signature); Pushkin (Sheen Center), Ring Twice for Miranda (NY City Center), Pericles and An Octoroon (TFANA); Antony & Cleopatra (Public Theater, RSC); Great Comet of 1812 (Kazino); Mission Drift (Connelly; National Theatre, London); Kiss (Yale Rep); Hamlet and Richard II (Old Globe); Oliver! (Arena Stage); Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare & Co.); An Iliad: Guerrillas at Troy (Continuum Company in Florence, Italy); Henry V (Two River Theater). He is a member of the devised theatre group The TEAM and creator of the animated series Mixed Race Ambiguously Ethnic Haiku Storytime Time!


MATTHEW RAUCH (Nikolai) makes his T2 debut. He has appeared in five Broadway and 13 Off-Broadway plays, including The Great Society (Beaumont); Junk (Lincoln Center); The Merchant of Venice (with Al Pacino); Prelude to a Kiss (Roundabout); A Particle of Dread and Book of Days (Signature); Kin (Playwrights Horizons); The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare in the Park); and in The Revenger's Tragedy (title role), Edward the Second, and The Duchess of Malfi (Callaway Award) all at Red Bull Theater. Dozens of regional credits include title roles in Richard the Third (Battis Award for Excellence - Shakespeare Theater) and Macbeth (Connecticut Critics Best Actor - Hartford Stage). Films include The Wolf of Wall Street, The Tale, and Labor Day. TV work includes four seasons on Banshee; recurring roles on Chicago PD, Chambers, Blue Bloods, NCIS: New Orleans, and Treme, plus work on Seven Seconds, Bull, The Good Wife, Law & Order, and many others.



JARED MEZZOCCHI (Co-Director, Multimedia Designer) makes his T2 directorial debut. He received his M.F.A. in performance and interactive media arts at Brooklyn College. He is currently on faculty at University of Maryland, College Park, where he leads the projection design track in the M.F.A. design program. He is a resident artist at Wooly Mammoth Theater Company in DC and has directed and designed at theaters across the U.S. and in Europe, including designing for Big Art Group, The Builders Association, Rob Roth, 3-Legged Dog, Hearts Center, and UTC #61. He made his Off-Broadway debut at Manhattan Theatre Club with his projection design in Vietgone, written by Qui Nguyen and directed by May Adrales. In 2012, he received the prestigious Princess Grace Award, the first projection designer to be honored with this national theater award. In 2017, he received the first Lucille Lortel Award for the category of Outstanding Projection Design (Vietgone, Manhattan Theater Club). In addition to the Lucille Lortel, he received a 2017 Obie Award and nominations for an Outer Critics Circle Award and a Drama Desk Award. In Spring 2017, he was accepted as a fellow to the Macdowell Colony. Most recently, he wrote and directed an adaptation of Oliver Jeffers' book How To Catch a Star at the John F. Kennedy Performing Arts Center. He grew up in New Hampshire, where he returns to every summer as a producing artistic director of Andy's Summer Playhouse, an innovative children's theater producing original work by professional artists from across the country.


ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON (Co-Director, Dramaturg) Broadway and West End credits include: A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (Tony Award for Best Musical); Anastasia, The Inheritance (Olivier, Critics Circle, Evening Standard, GLAAD, and Drama Desk Awards for Best Play, Outer Critics Circle Honoree). Off-Broadway and regional credits include Primary Stages, Young Vic, Hartford Stage, Pioneer Theatre Company, Court Theatre, Steppenwolf, About Face, La Jolla Playhouse, Westport Country Playhouse, Theatre de La Jeune Lune, HERE, others. She was the former associate artistic director/director of new play development for Hartford Stage and Pioneer Theatre Company. An NEA Fellowship grant recipient, she is also a member of SDC and LMDA. Education: Oxford University, École Jacques Lecoq, Bennington College.


JERRY L. JENSEN (Production Stage Manager) joined T2 in 2016, where he has served as production assistant and for the past two seasons, as assistant stage manager. Favorite T2 shows include Peter and the Starcatcher, All the Way, The Champion, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Once. Other credits include Man of La Mancha (Inspire Theatre); Deathtrap (Citadel Theatre); Les Mis and The Odd Couple (Pioneer Theatre Company). A native of Utah, he holds a B.F.A. in theatre stage management from the University of Utah.


MARIA DE BARROS (Assistant Stage Manager) makes her T2 debut. Her recent credits include shows at Andy’s Summer Playhouse, Barrington Stage Company, and Maltz Jupiter Theatre. She is currently pursuing her theatre B.A. at the University of Maryland, College Park.


Digital Production Team

Alex Carr (Audio Technical Support)
Morgan Hicks (Zoom Support Lead)
Franklin Horvath (Lighting Technical Support)
Roland Liwag (Video Technical Support)
Andres Poch (Media Team)
Tori Schuchmann (Media Team)
Kiana Vincenty (Media Team)
Taylor Verrett (Media Team)
Kat Wepler (Director of Production)

Creative Media Support by ViDCo (Virtual Design Collective)


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