Houses hold histories, memories, and secrets—whether small or large, whether rented or owned—our homes are a vital part of who we are. In a moment of mass migration and displacement, Theater Mitu upends Anton Chekhov’s 1903 text The Cherry Orchard to explore how families across the globe must again and again find ways to redefine the idea of home. Interjecting Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 cult horror film HOUSE, text from company conducted interviews, and live music, this technology driven work creates a detailed portrait of what we value, what haunts us, and what gives us the courage to move forward.

Imagine Shakespeare’s Hamlet has been buried in a mass grave with its predecessors, Saxo Grammaticus’ Amleth, Belleforest’s Hamlet and the originating Scandinavian mythologies of this epic (known as the UR-Hamlet). Among all of these buried bodies of text live the memories of death, madness, revenge, compassion, and love that plague the human existence. Now imagine Theater Mitu unearths this grave.

Resisting a traditional staging of Hamlet, Theater Mitu investigates these remains as material that amplifies, explores and wrestles with what it is to be born, to truly live and to die. Part installation, part theater, part rock concert— the piece both harmonizes with and revolts against Hamlet’s narratives, languages and histories. Theater Mitu challenges the boundaries between classical adaptation and contemporary performance with this site-specific, hyper-theatricalized production.

As globalization moved forward in this past decade, blurring and yet accentuating national borderlands, one city – Cd. Juárez – emerged in 2008 as the “Murder Capital of the World.” Directly across the Mexican-American border, El Paso,TX has branded itself as the “Safest Large City in America.” Led by Juárez-born-and-raised Founding Artistic Director Rubén Polendo, and drawn by the vortex of questions within and around Cd. Juárez, Theater Mitu’s company members traveled to the region five times in 2012 and 2013, conducting research and interviewing citizens on both sides of the border. “JUÁREZ: A Documentary Mythology,” based on an archive of hundreds of hours of interviews, has emerged as an exploration of this border community’s memories from the past, both recent and distant, and hopes for the future, near and far.

Heart Piece is an international performance project in collaboration with renowned Mongolian vocal artist Nominjin and Theater Mitu that explores the many expressions of love in the differing cultural climates of America and Mongolia.  As Mongolia transforms due to unprecedented profit from mining windfall, ideas of the “American dream” encourages its citizens to continually reinvent themselves, for better and for worse. Thus creating a tectonic shift in ancient belief systems that have historically stabilized this landscape.  The changes affect gender, family roles, marriage, work roles; but at the core, it affects beliefs around the subject of love. Theater Mitu is interested in asking, what becomes of love and the human heart in such unstable cultural landscapes? How do superstitions, beliefs, and traditions survive amidst such rapid change? The answers to these questions serve as the foundation for this performance project.

HEARTPIECE is the first international performance collaboration with Mitu actors and a foreign collaborator. Inspired by East German writer Heiner Müeller’s theater text Herzstück (Heart Piece), and incorporating compositional theories of Mongolian Long Song, American love songs, and rigorous physicality, this expressionistic piece creates a vivid panorama of love across borders.

The culmination of this project premiered at the Black Box Theater in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.  It then traveled to Mongolia’s second-largest city, Erdenet, with support from the US State Department.

Amidst a fascination with alchemy, eastern thought and Christian mysticism, August Strindberg wrote one of his most enigmatic and emotional plays.  This adaptation focuses on the epic nature of Strindberg’s work.  Witnessing each of these characters less like visions of some impending future, but more as creatures from a collective mythology that explores love, suffering, struggle, and above all, the ability to acknowledge that what defines us also confines us.  Using Theater Mitu’s Whole Theater approach, this piece energizes the text with acrobatic physicality, modernist design and an impactful live music score, as well as strains of Japanese Butoh, Noh, and Indian Kathakali.

This piece investigates the idea of “waiting” and all of its many definitions. This non-narrative piece is performed on a vertical wall (traditionally used for military training) using found music, projections, interview texts, original text and found texts. The piece is inspired by the incredibly complicated landscape of Abu Dhabi and the ethos of waiting that defines this place.

Theater Mitu folds Pirandello’s themes of travel and migration into an emotional landscape of despairing mothers, possessed lovers, trickster scribes and magical craftsmen. Working with the elegant forms of Japanese, Balinese and Arabic traditions, and featuring original live music, this expressionistic piece creates a vivid panorama to delve into the heart of the migrant experience. Mitu’s new work asks: How does hope survive amidst CHAOS?

World Premiere presented by the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute in collaboration with the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage

This work began with a simple question presented to every Theater Mitu actor: As an actor, what would be the most terrifying role you can think of playing? What follows is an exploration of artistic fear and impossibility melding elements of Japanese Noh and Butoh with early German cinema theory as Theater Mitu delved deep into the heart of one of the most violent and dark of human crimes. In this ancient Greek classic by Euripides, Medea – jilted bride of the Greek hero Jason – confronts betrayal, sorrow, passion, love, and ultimately death in her quest for vengeance. The company engages in a violent adaptation that examines the play’s perceptions of gender by presenting the famed villain Medea as a man and her paramour, Jason, as a woman.

In a warn-torn landscape populated by an absurd cornucopia of characters on bicycles, a mother desperately tries to survive. Her tools? Laughter, sex, money, her children and an unhealthy obsession with Julie Andrews and The Sound of Music. This collaboration between NAATCO and Theater Mitu merges abstractions of Musical Theater, Peking Opera and German Cabaret for a radical new take on Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children.  Filled with songs and live music composed by Adam Cochran (for which he received a nomination for a Drama Desk Award for outstanding music in a play), the piece explores survival, greed, humor and the heartbreak that sits at the core of Brecht’s masterpiece.

Imagine you awake one morning and don’t know who you are and you have no memories. Your task becomes to construct a life using the evidence that you can find. Such is the work of the actor …and the circumstance of the ensemble in the New York premiere of Theater Mitu’s DR.C (OR HOW I LEARNED TO ACT IN 8 STEPS). This opera in eight parts juxtaposes the physicality of the 1919 silent film THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI against a live score, state-of the art technology, and a new text created from the words of eight of history’s leading acting theorists–Aristotle, Appia, Stanislavski, Brecht, Artaud, Grotowski, Brook, and Bogart–to ask, “what is acting …and why do we care?” It is an unintentional homage to the people and ideas that, for better or for worse, have irrevocably shaped the way we view the art of acting.