Rob Jansen as The Tramp.
(Cincinnati, OH) Diogenes Theatre Company presents THE TRAMP’S NEW WORLD, a new work that adapts a lost, legendary, and never produced screenplay written for Charlie Chaplin.
In 1949, Pulitzer Prize winner James Agee wrote a tragicomic screenplay involving Charlie Chaplin’s “Tramp” character as the lone survivor of a super-atomic blast. In it, the internationally beloved childlike Tramp wanders through a crumbling world after the disastrous events of a super-atomic blast. While the screenplay was discussed between Chaplin and Agee, in the end it was never produced and remained “lost” for many years. Writer-performer Rob Jansen’s one-man show THE TRAMP’S NEW WORLD brings the previously untold cinematic tale to the stage for the first time. This new multidisciplinary theatrical work combines projections, physical comedy, music, and silent film technique to tell the story of how after the world is destroyed, the Little Tramp attempts to create a new one.
THE TRAMP’S NEW WORLD is created and performed by Rob Jansen and marks a return to his hometown for performances at the Fifth Third Bank Theater in the Aronoff Center for the Arts. “This play asks us how we respond when our world comes to an end,” says Jansen. “While Agee’s screenplay was a direct response to the dropping of the atomic bomb, the Tramp’s story of survival amidst ultimate destruction and his ability to find laughter in the darkest of places is universal in its relevance to any time.“
Director Joseph Megel says, “Given the volatility of the world we live in, Rob uses the poetry of Agee to connect us with our own humanity through the character of Chaplin’s Tramp. How we find what is worth saving, what is valuable about being human in the face of total annihilation”
The production is coming off a critically acclaimed run in Washington, DC, at Cultural DC’s Mead Theatre Lab:
“A complex, rich, interconnected performance…The Tramp’s New World offers moments of wonder, moments of joy, moments of sorrow…” -Robert Michael Oliver, DC Metro Theatre Arts.
Jansen is “always engaging and artful in his movements and audience interactions, conveying a heartfelt love for the deep humanity underlying Chaplin’s creation.” -Robert Steven Abelman, DC Theatre Scene.
Creative Team Created and Performed by Rob Jansen From the Screenplay Treatment by James Agee Directed by: Joseph Megel Set Design: Andrew Cohen Associate Set Design: Paige Hathaway Lighting Design: Sara Watson
Projection and Sound Design: Doug Borntrager
Prop Designer: Michael Redman
Performance Schedule
Performances run Wednesday through Saturday, JUNE 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12 & 13 at 7:30 p.m.
There will be a Sunday matinee JUNE 7 at 2:00 p.m.
All performances are held at the Aronoff Center for the Arts, Fifth Third Bank Theater, 650 Walnut Street, Cincinnati, Ohio (entrance on Main Street at the Corner of Seventh Street)
Ticket Prices:
- General Admission $22
- CincyShakes Subscribers $15
- Students $11
For tickets and general information:
www.CincinnatiArts.Org
(513 621-2787 [ARTS]
CAA Ticket Offices (Aronoff Center)
About the Artists
James Agee was an American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. His autobiographical novel A Death in the Family won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1958. An assignment for Fortune Magazine led to the writing of Let Us Know Praise Famous Men about the experiences of Alabama sharecroppers during the Dust Bowl. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S., writing for both Time Magazine and The Nation. For Time he wrote the cover story op-ed after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and followed this in 1949 with the screenplay treatment for The Tramp’s New World as an artistic response to the Atomic Age. Agee and Chaplin exchanged letters around the screenplay and developed a friendship, but Chaplin felt both silent film and the Tramp were no longer alive to audiences anymore. Other screenplays by Agee include The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter. His death of a heart attack in New York City on May 16, 1955, at the age of forty-five, ended the career of a unique American writer.
Rob Jansen (Writer/Adapter/Performer) is an actor, director, adapter, and teacher. As a resident artist at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company for six seasons, he performed in 26 productions of classic plays. Favorite roles at CSC include Orlando in As You Like It, Troilus in Troilus and Cressida, and Edmund in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Cincinnati theatregoers have also seen him at Know Theatre, New Stage Collective and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. Roles have included Joshua in Corpus Christi (Cincinnati Entertainment Award, Best Actor in a Lead Role), Prior in Angels in America: Part I and II, Craig/Peter in Dying City, among others. Regionally he has performed with the Seattle Shakespeare Company, St. Croix Festival Theatre, 1st Stage, Synetic Theater, Arena Stage, and the Tennessee Williams Centennial Festival at Georgetown University. His play Ah, Eugene O’Neill! Or, the Birth, Death, and (Impractical) Rebirth of American Theater was selected and performed as part of the Eugene O’Neill Festival at Arena Stage in Washington, DC. International work includes performing in Beijing, China, as Peter Quince in the bilingual production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the National Academy of Chinese Arts. He served as Assistant Director to South African writer and director Yael Farber during the development of her new work Nirbhaya in New Delhi, India, through the world premiere at the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe Festival (Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award). He has taught at the University of Maryland School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies where he graduated with a MFA in Performance. Currently, he serves as the Associate Director for the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University.
Joseph Megel (Director) is artist in residence in Performance Studies at UNC’s Department of Communication Studies where he runs the Process Series: New Works in Development. He is also Artistic Director of StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance. Directorial credits include: Guillermo Reyes’s Men on the Verge of a Hispanic Breakdown in its Off-Broadway production (Outer Critics Circle Award) and in Los Angeles (Best Director Ovation Award nomination, Best Production Award winner); Jennifer Maisel’s The Last Seder at EST West in Los Angeles, Theatre J in Washington, D.C., The Organic Theatre in Chicago (winner of the Kennedy Center’s Fund for New American Plays Grant); Elisabeth Lewis Corley’s adaptation of The Miser at Duke University; and Derek Goldman’s adaptation of Studs Terkel’s Will The Circle Be Unbroken in Chapel Hill, NC and Washington, D.C. (starring David Strathairn, Theodore Bikel, and Kathleen Chalfant). With Christine Evans and Jared Mezzocchi, he developed Christine Evans’s You Are Dead. You Are Here, directing its first workshop production at H.E.R.E. in NYC. For Manbites Dog, in Durham, NC, Megel directed The Best of Enemies, The Brothers Size, The Goat, and Nixon’s Nixon. Recent direction for StreetSigns includes: Blood Knot, Poetic Portraits of a Revolution, Dream Boy, White People, Trojan Barbie, and Freight: The Five Incarnations of Abel Green.
