Welcome
to the world Premiere of
73 Seconds
73 seconds
Creative team
Jared Mezzocchi
Creator, Writer, Performer
Aya Ogawa
Director & Co-Developer
Calvin Anderson
Production Designer: Scenography Lead & Production Manager
Ryan Gamblin
Production Designer: Sound Lead
Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew
Production Designer: Light Lead &
Projection Consultant
Vinny Mraz
Production Designer: Technology Lead
Olivia Fletcher
Production Coordinator
Carly Osnow-Levin
Production Manager
Alex DeNevers
Associate Lighting Designer & Supervisor
Jeremy Kadetsky
Assistant Sound Designer
Additional Team Members
Lauren Vargas
Lower Eastside Girls Club Venue Manager
Steven Brenman
Technical Director
Katie Runions
Box Office & Front of House Coorindator
Hayley Herman
Front of House Coordinator
Additional Credits
John Wyszniewski
Everyman Agency
Press Agent
Moti Margolin
Pre-Production Videography
Amanda Szeglowski
Marketing Consultant
A note from anne hamburger
Tonight is about something humans have done for thousands of years: gathering beneath the stars to hear a story unfold, surrounded by friends, family, and strangers.
As En Garde Arts celebrates our 40th anniversary, I return to a simple question: what are we craving most right now? I believe it is nights like tonight. Not the glow of another screen, or another moment spent alone. We are hungry to be together in places that mean something.
Jared Mezzocchi and I first met years ago when he directed the Obie Award-winning The Wind and The Rain with En Garde Arts. That meeting has grown into a multi-year collaboration and friendship, developing 73 Seconds alongside our amazing director Aya Ogawa. Collaborations like this are the lifeblood of En Garde.
This work has been carried forward by a constellation of supporters, including the Dr. David M. Milch Foundation, Bernard M. Prensky and Family, Dementia Springs, and residencies at Catskill Art Space, the Colorado New Play Festival, the Quick Center for the Arts, and Ideal Glass Studios NYC.
From the beginning, we have known the most powerful stories unfold in places that already hold deep meaning for the people who inhabit them every day. Tonight, that place is the planetarium inside the Lower Eastside Girls Club. This is not a site we discovered, it is a space we have been welcomed into, already vibrant with purpose and community. We are deeply grateful to the Girls Club for opening their doors and allowing this room, designed for curiosity and learning, to become a place where storytelling gathers us beneath the cosmos.
For us, site specific theatre is not simply a form, it is a response to the moment we are living in. As so much of our lives unfolds digitally, gathering somewhere real feels more important than ever
Tonight we gather, and something new begins.
Annie, Executive Artistic Director,
En Garde Arts
A note FROM jared mezzocchi
As a multimedia theatermaker, I have created three autobiographical shows: The One Stoplight in Hollis, made in college after my father passed away; On The Beauty of Loss, made during the pandemic when my grandfather passed away; and 73 Seconds, made in a moment of aging for both my mother and for me. Each of these pieces marked a new way of telling stories – blending theater and pre-recorded film, live-mixing camera feeds, and now, using 1980s technology.
What is it about theater that compels me to create work like this, in front of both camera and audience? To me, the tension between theater and film is the tension between the mortal and immortal. One is a technology made to capture life and allow it to be replayed over and over, while the other can only exist in real time and space. Like life, theater is not re-produceable in an exacting way: no matter how consistent you try to make a given performance, it will always be a little different. Film, on the other hand, is like the past: immortal, permanently the same. Or is it?
We may think our memories are etched in stone, but every time we process them, they become something new. Just how we may think film is static, through theater, we can make it malleable and distorted. I use these opposing forces to recreate my lived experience of grief and joy. And in this way, I can process my own memories and remind myself, in real-time, what it means to be a human confronting seemingly permanent truths.
Jared Mezzocchi, Creator, Writer, & Performer
A note FROM aya ogawa
When Jared first approached me in 2023 to be a sounding board for a new piece he was crafting, I wondered what I could offer to this theater tech maverick. As we approached our first in-person work session, he shared with me his obsession with 80s technologies as well as a massive google folder stuffed with intimate anecdotes from his childhood and adolescence. From there the work of piecing this deeply personal narrative began, and my role became clear: to edit the family stories into a coherent constellation of memories and to bear witness to a complex process of grieving.
Earlier this spring I premiered a play that I’d written titled Meat Suit, or the shitshow of motherhood. As comical as the title is (and it was largely a comedic piece), one of the underlying reasons I made that play was to create a space to mourn the death of my mother 15 years ago. To be able to accompany Jared on his journey of mourning his living mother felt like a very special and private way to imagine a different path for my own grief.
This process has taken us from a branch of the New York Public Library to Steamboat Springs, Colorado to this jewel of a secret planetarium, with so many joyful and painful moments along the way. I’m grateful for the grace and humor we have collectively shared in arriving at this point, and for the discovery that an image created from a goldfish bowl and construction paper can be just as magical as the universe projected on an immersive dome.
Aya Ogawa, Director & Co-Developer
73 seconds support
73 Seconds was developed with support provided by the Dr. David M. Milch Foundation, Bernard M. Prensky and Family, with additional support provided by Dementia Spring and residencies at the Catskill Art Space, the Colorado New Play Festival, the Quick Center for the Arts, and Ideal Glass Studios NYC.
Special Thanks From En Garde Arts
Clara Alonso, Jenny Dembrow, The Hamburger-Jenney Family, HERE Arts Center, Erikka James, The Jefferson Market Library, Elliot Mitchell, Willard Morgan, Lori Jones and Russ Nagy, Katie Scibelli, Thai Singer, Lee Manning & Ruder FInn, Ivan Valladares, Sally Wright.
About En Garde Arts
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En Garde Arts
Since 1985, En Garde Arts has turned unexpected places into unforgettable stages. New York City’s streets, piers, and hidden corners become sites where audience and architecture blur, and urgent, poetic, and political stories come alive. Born from the belief that art belongs everywhere and to everyone, En Garde launched the site-specific theater movement, redefining how audiences experience performance by collapsing the distance between space, story, and spectator.
Now, as we approach our 40th anniversary, En Garde Arts is more alive than ever. We’re investing in tomorrow’s voices; artists who demand change, invent new forms, and hold space for stories too often silenced. Through our signature programs like Uncommon Voices, The Joan D. Firestone Award, and Playdate / Playdate FEST, we incubate 5–7 bold new projects every year. Recent works by artists such as Hansol Jung & The Pack, Flako Modesto Jimenez, Samora la Perdida, Irina Kruzhilina, Sarah Gancher, Aya Ogawa, and Jared Mezzocchi push boundaries and reimagine how theater can heal, unsettle, and transform.
We believe in theater that is socially resonant, deeply rooted in a distinct place, and unafraid of the messiness of now. The city is our stage, and our craft is connection. Connection between artist and audience, site and story. As we step into the next decade, En Garde Arts remains dedicated to risk, reinvention, and making performance that speaks to the world as it is, and what it might become.
meet the team
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Jared Mezzocchi
CREATOR, WRITER, PERFORMER
Jared Mezzocchi is a two-time Obie Award-winning theater artist. Based out of New York, Mezzocchi’s work has appeared nationwide: Playwrights Horizons, Vineyard Theater, The Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, Arena Stage, TheatreWorks Hartford, Woolly Mammoth, and beyond. In 2016, he received the Lucille Lortel and Henry Hewes Award for his work in Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone at Manhattan Theatre Club. In 2020, the New York Times spotlighted Mezzocchi, alongside Andrew Lloyd Webber and Paula Vogel, as an artistic hero of the pandemic. His work on Sarah Gancher’s digital production of Russian Troll Farm awarded him his second Obie for Directing. Most recently with En Garde Arts, Mezzocchi directed The Wind and The Rain: a Story about Sunny’s Bar which was performed on a barge in NYC and called “Highbrow Brilliant” by NY Magazine. Mezzocchi is a two-time MacDowell Fellow, a 2012 Princess Grace recipient, and has a BA in theater and film from Fairfield University, and an MFA in performance and interactive media arts from Brooklyn College.
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AYA OGAWA
DIRECTOR & CO-DEVELOPER
Aya Ogawa (they/them) is a Tokyo-born, Brooklyn-based theater-maker. They received an Obie Award for The Nosebleed (Japan Society/Chocolate Factory Theater, Lincoln Center Theater) which subsequently ran at Woolly Mammoth Theatre (2023) and toured to Walker Art Center, REDCAT and Wexner Center for the Arts in 2024, and to On the Boards and the New National Theatre, Tokyo in 2025. Doris Duke Artist Award (2025), Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting (2023); Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2023); The Playwrights’ Center’s McKnight Foundation National Residency & Commission (2023-24); Resident playwright, New Dramatists; MacDowell Fellow.
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CALVIN ANDERSON
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: SCENOGRAPHY LEAD & PRODUCTION MANAGER
Calvin Anderson is a designer and production manager located in Western Catskills, NY. They have a strong pull towards the devised, the radical, and the risky while leaning towards projects with heart and trust. Highlights include The Christine Jorgensen Show, Body As a Site of Faith and Protest, Blythely Ever After, Oscar at the Crown, Strings & Serpents (US Tour), and Piano Battle (US Tour). Calvin toured the world with Ailey II as Lighting Director, and worked with The Bearded Ladies Cabaret as Director of Production for eight years. Calvin is the Resident Designer and PM for FJK Dance and a proud member of USA829, Wingspace Design Collective, and a mentor with USITT’s Gateway Program. www.coandersondesign.com
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Ryan Gamblin
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: SOUND LEAD
Ryan Gamblin (they / them) is a sound designer, composer, and performance-maker based in Brooklyn, NY. Their practice centers found media, original composition, and the use of systems as instruments. Recent: Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire (Vineyard / The Civilians), Bowl EP (Vineyard / National Black Theatre), For All Your Life (Leslie Cuyjet / BAM), Manon (Heartbeat Opera), Weathering (Faye Driscoll / New York Live Arts), Time Signatures (Exponential Festival), Godbird (Exponential Festival), The March (Big Dance Theater / PACNY), The Following Evening (600 Highwaymen / PACNY), Cold Water (Little Engine Theater). Recent solo work: SPLICE (Reforesters Laboratory). Ryan is currently a fellow at the Target Margin Theater Institute.
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Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: LIGHT & VIDEO LEAD
Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew is an award-winning designer for theatre, dance, opera, musicals, music performances and large-scale immersive installation. NY Times described her designs as “clever” and “inventive.” As a designer, Jeanette aims to create a visual environment that is organically integrated into the landscape and language of the production. Her designs have been seen national and internationally at Havana (Cuba), Prague (Czech Republic), Lima (Peru), Edinburgh (Scotland), Tokyo (Japan), Graz (Austria), Shanghai (China), and Bloemfontein (South Africa). Excited to be back to En Garde Arts since A Dozen Dreams. Arts Professor and Head of Lighting Design Training with NYU Tisch Drama. www.jeanetteyew.com
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Vinny Mraz
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: TECHNOLOGY LEAD
Vinny Mraz is a multidisciplinary theater-maker based in NYC. His work has been seen at the The Vineyard Theater, Golden Thread Productions, HERE Arts, La Mama, New Ohio, Object Movement Festival, The Evolution Festival, The Tank, Dixon Place, Andy’s Summer Playhouse, Little Theater, and The Dallas Solo Festival. Recently Vinny worked with Jared Mezzochi and Sona Tatoyan on Azad (The Rabbit and the Wolf) on its world premiere with Golden Thread Productions. The SF Chronicle called it “wondrous….with uproarious shadow puppetry”. He's excited to join Jared and the whole 73 Seconds team! MFA Sarah Lawrence College.
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Carly Osnow-Levin
PRODUCTION MANAGER
Carly Levin is a NYC based production manager & stage manager
Credits include Waiting for the Sibyl (William Kentridge, international tour), Aanika’s Elephants (New Victory & US tour), A Marvelous Order (Opera premier at PSU), Time:Spans (DiMenna Center), Bric Jazz Fest, The Good Swimmer (BAM), The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy (Sinking Ship, NYTW, Lucille Lortel), Donwtown Stories (En Garde arts), 4:48 Psychosis (Prototype), Fellow Travelers (GWLT/Prototype), Anatomy Theater (Bric/BMP), Kurt Vonnegut’s Happy Birthday Wanda June (Wheelhouse), Please Continue (EST). Technical Supervisor at GWLT/John Jay ’19-’21, The American Tap Dance Foundation 2012-2020.
Thanks to Seth and the Osnow-Levin clan for the behind-the-scenes support and to Noah for the masterclass in multi-tasking
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Olivia Fletcher
PRODUCTION COORDINATOR
Olivia R. Fletcher is a freelance Rehearsal and Production Coordinator based out of NYC. Selected theatrical credits include Bughouse (PSM); This Much I Know (PSM); AZAD: the rabbit and the wolf (PSM); The Wind and The Rain (PSM); Brits off Broadway 2025 (PSM). She has loved working with the entire creative team and En Garde Arts on this process. She hopes to continue working with them in the future.
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Jeremy Kadetsky
ASSISTANT SOUND DESIGNER
Jeremy Kadetsky (they/them) is a writer, designer, technologist, and performance maker based in Brooklyn, NY. A portion of their post-theater performance duo doxies’ evening-length piece desire lines will be presented at the ?!: New Works festival at The Brick this spring. Jeremy’s collaborative video and sound design work in theater, dance, multimedia performance, and opera has been featured in New York City’s downtown scene, Off-Broadway, and Internationally. Recent credits include Stacy Grossfield’s metamorphosis III, Episodes 1–4 and Give Me Carmelita Tropicana at Soho Rep. Education: Johns Hopkins University (BA), Sarah Lawrence College (MFA). @kadetskyj www.kadetskyj.com.
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Alex deNevers
ASSOCIATE LIGHTING DESIGNER
Alex deNevers is a New York-based Lighting Designer and a graduate of Fordham University at Lincoln Center. Recent work includes; La Mama ETC, Columbia Stages, The Cell Theater, Ma-Yi Theatre Company, Less Than Rent, 59E59. 6 years working as Associate for Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew including Kimberly Akimbo, The Thanksgiving Play, and Life & Trust. Proud member USA Local 829.
About Anne
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Anne Hamburger, Founding Executive Artistic Director
Anne Hamburger (she/her) Founded En Garde Arts in 1985. As Executive Artistic Director, she is responsible for pioneering site-specific theatre in New York, using its streets and historic landmarks as her stage. Hamburger has produced the work of artists that are now internationally renowned: Anne Bogart, Charles L. Mee, Tina Landau, Jonathan Larson and Reza Abdoh, with large-scale predominantly outdoor work. As its Executive Artistic Director, her leadership model is highly collaborative and anti-hierarchical while leading the creative and strategic vision of the company.
She is committed to nurturing a new generation of theatrical risk-takers, encouraging artists to explore and rigorously experiment with their creative practice. Her relationship with artists extends beyond the stage, offering mentorship, friendship, and a commitment to their creative and personal growth.
For her work, Hamburger has won 6 Obie Awards, 2 Drama Desk Awards, an Outer Critics Circle Award, Lee Reynolds Award and the Exceptional Merit in Media Award from The National Political Women’s Caucus. She graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Yale School of Drama and is the proud mother of two children Hannah and Owen Jenney.
En Garde Arts Staff
Anne Hamburger
Executive Artistic Director
Spencer Armstrong
Managing Producer
Sarah Bellin
General Manager & Senior Producer
Sophie Siegel-Warren
Development Manager &
Associate Producer
Max Mooney
Assistant Producer
Amanda Cooper
Management & Planning Consultant
Isabelle Holmes
Business Manager
John Clinton Eisner
Creative Producer in Residence
Morgan Lindsey Tachco
AD Hamingson & Associates
Development Consultants
Lucian Sheldon-Wesley
Producing & Marketing Intern
Elsa Marrian
Producing & Marketing Intern
En Garde Arts BOARD
Anne Hamburger
Executive Artistic Director
Meg Walker
Board Chair
Ilia Gorodnichev
Treasurer
Bria Peace
Secretary
Lieutenant Colonel Retired
Art DeGroat
Joan D. Firestone
Ronald Guttman
Irina Kruzhilina
Artist Board Member
Jared Mezzocchi
Artist Board Member
Lee Riffaterre
Michael Schubert
lower eastside girls club
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Since 1996, the Lower Eastside Girls Club (LESGC) has created a safe space of "Joy, Power, Possibility" where young people dream big, discover their passions, and connect with peers and careers through free, year-round programming and mentoring. Our Center for Wellbeing & Happiness extends this mission with healing-centered wellness services for all ages and genders across the Lower East Side — because thriving communities are built when everyone has the support to flourish.
PUBLIC SUPPORT PROVIDED BY:
New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council
New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature
our values
En Garde Arts acknowledges that we are on the unceded ancestral lands of the Lenape people, the original stewards of this land. Our site-specific theater practice is deeply rooted in a love for the unique stories that each location holds. We recognize that the land itself is a living archive, carrying the histories, cultures, and traditions of the Lenape and all indigenous peoples who have called this place home. As we create theater in diverse spaces throughout the city, we honor the stories embedded in the land and are committed to respecting its significance, ensuring our work amplifies these histories and reflects the communities we engage with.
land acknowledgment
At En Garde Arts, we are committed to creating an environment rooted in equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility. As a company dedicated to community-centric theater, we work to elevate voices that have been historically underrepresented. We prioritize the stories and contributions of artists whose experiences are often excluded from mainstream narratives. By fostering inclusive spaces, we aim to amplify these voices and ensure our work is reflective of the diverse communities we serve.