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The Brazilian actor and tenor Augusto Bittencourt has appeared in telenovelas on TV Globo and in the São Paulo productions of Les Miserables and Chicago.
The American soprano Karen Grahn created the roles of She in Still in Love and Linda in Fraternity of Deceit. Her other roles include Silberklang in Mozart's The Impresario at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Ghita in Martin y Soler's Una Cosa Rara at the Vineyard Theatre, the First Witch in David Clenney's La Contessa di Vampiri at the Kennedy Center, and supporting roles in John Adams' Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer.
Librettist Helena Soares Hungria is a globetrotting translator and interpreter based in São Paulo.
Jeffrey Johnson directed the Off-Off Broadway premiere of the Postindustrial Players' Fraternity of Deceit. He is the former artistic director of the St. Mary's Group, an ensemble based at the Ohio Theatre in Soho, and is currently on the music faculty of the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University. He maintains a busy career both as an early music singer, performing in the critically acclaimed ensembles Lionheart, Pomerium, the New York Collegium, and Voices of Ascension, and as a theatre artist, where his credits include The Cave, Einstein on the Beach, and The Three Musketeers.
Set designer Florence Neal is a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and the director of the Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn, New York.
Baritone Gregory Purnhagen created the roles of He in Still in Love and Sandy in Fraternity of Deceit. He has worked extensively with Philip Glass, for whom he created the roles of la Bête, Avenant, and le Prince for the world premiere of La Belle et la Bête. He was a featured performer in the revival tour of the Glass/Wilson opera Einstein on the Beach. His highly acclaimed 2008 cabaret review, Babalu-cy, is built around the repertoire of Desi Arnaz.
The Brazilian mezzo-soprano Angelica de la Riva has been compared to Maria Callas (Jornal do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro). She's at home in both classical and pop styles and has appeared in major reviews in Brazilian clubs, in the Brazilian touring production of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, and in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin in New York.
The American bass Peter Stewart created the role of Jim in the Postindustrial Players' 1998 production of Fraternity of Deceit. He has appeared at the Santa Fe Opera, the Kennedy Center, the Lake George Opera Festival, Opera Roanoke, the Manchester Opera, and has worked frequently with composer Philip Glass.
Cellist Francesca Vanasco, a veteran of innumerable Broadway orchestras, is the former principal cellist of the Orquestra Sinfonica de Maracaibo in Venezuela. She is the founder of the critically acclaimed Alborado Latino Chamber Ensemble for Latin American Music.
Violinist Lisa Wolfe is the recipient of a fellowship from the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music for her work in the contemporary music scene. She performs regularly with the Greenwich Symphony, Hudson Valley Philharmonic, Riverside Symphony, Bach Festival of Bethlehem, Brooklyn Philharmonic, and the Ellison String Quartet. She has appeared at the Pacific Music Festival of Japan and the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival.
Since its inception in 1996 the Postindustrial Players have been refining a performing style which combines the textual clarity of film with a plastic form of melody based equally on European classical music and American pop standards. Over the course of ten years the group's vocal settings have evolved from low-intensity, text-oriented accompanied recitative to a nuanced mix of higher-intensity operatic and pop technique. In our current work, A Ascenção e a Queda do Primeiro Mundo (The Rise and Fall of the First World) this agenda has been expanded to embrace the Portuguese language, with its distinctive rhythms and idioms, and the profound traditions of MPB (música popular brasileira).
In the group's original mission statement in 1990, I wrote:
The overall purpose of the ensemble is the reinvention of uplifting, cathartic tragedy and non-sarcastic comedy and the rescue of music from its self-inflicted, 100-year-long crisis of style. ... The audience must be seduced and challenged at the same time. ... The ultimate challenge in our time is to convince mature adults that everything worth saying hasn't already been said, that everything good worth doing hasn't already been tried and found wanting, and that living human beings are indeed capable of dealing with the ultimate truths of existence, no less so than our classical ancestors. In this sense, the group's mission is unapologetically optimistic. Without repudiating the accomplishments of the last hundred years, we stand in defiance of the generally pessimistic thrust of Western philosophical, social, and aesthetic evolution in the so-called "postmodern" age.
With nearly twenty years of hindsight, this original program seems somewhat quaint and more than a bit pompous. Nevertheless, its broad thrust still informs the activities of the ensemble, and the idea of seducing and challenging at the same time remains paramount for us.
—Michael Kowalski
Gregory Purnhagen and Karen Grahn Still in Love, Scene 2
Photo credit: Barbara Mensch
Gregory Purnhagen and Karen Grahn Still in Love, Scene 3 Photo credit: Barbara Mensch
Fraternity of Deceit, Scene 1Photo credit: Barbara Mensch
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