En Garde Arts


En Garde Arts is shaping how contemporary theatre is made by creating site-specific work that is deeply rooted in place, community, and lived experience. Working across New York City’s neighborhoods and gathering spaces, the company creates performances that collapse the distance between artist and audience and transform everyday sites into unforgettable stages.

Recent productions exemplify this practice. SpaceBridge was a multimedia work created with 19 teenagers, including 11 Russian refugees living in shelters, that centered youth voices and global conflict through an immersive theatrical lens. The Wind and The Rain unfolded as a site-spanning journey that began aboard the Waterfront Museum Barge and culminated in large-scale projection mapping at Sunny’s Bar in Red Hook, turning the neighborhood itself into a living stage. Last Call, a Play with Cocktails brought theatre into nine distinct apartments across New York City, inviting audiences into intimate, shared spaces and foregrounding the power of community and gathering.

Together, these works reflect En Garde Arts’ commitment to theatre that is socially resonant, artistically rigorous, and inseparable from the places in which it lives. By meeting audiences where they are, En Garde continues to expand what theatre can be, creating experiences that respond to the present moment and reimagine how we come together.

Recent Productions

  • Last Call, a play with cocktails - 2025

    Created by the artist-led collective The Pack
    Written by Hansol Jung
    Dramaturgy by Lexy Leuszler
    Performed by a rotating cast: Chris Bannow, Esco Jouléy, Dorcas Leung, Brian Quijada, Nicole Villamil, and Mitch Winter.

    Last Call: A Play with Cocktails was an intimate, immersive, site-specific performance staged in 9 real New York apartments for 22 performances.

  • Seagull: True Story

    Conceived & Directed by Sasha Molochnikov
    Written by Eli Rarey

    “Molochnikov raises important questions around the cost of conscientious objection that go beyond Putin’s war, and apply, ever disturbingly, closer to home. What action do you take when a war is fought in your name and when various kinds of protest around it become outlawed? What action can a theatre take? These questions linger.” – Arifa Akbar, The Guardian

  • SPACEBRIDGE - 2025

    Conceived and Directed by: Irina Kruzhilina
    Written by Clark Young and Irina Kruzhilina
    Commissioned in part by the Joan D. Firestone Commission

    “SpaceBridge” could have coasted on its inherent emotional power — most of the Russian children in the show are still waiting to hear about their asylum requests — but Kruzhilina has made a very theatrical work. — New York Times

  • THE WIND AND THE RAIN: A STORY ABOUT SUNNY’S BAR - 2024

    Written by Sarah Gancher (Obie wInner for this production)
    Directed by Jared Mezzocchi

    Performed at the historic Waterfront Museum in Red Hook, Brooklyn

    “Five performers took us down through the ooze of Red Hook and back to its days as an English fishing village, as a Dutch settlement, as a hunting ground for the Lenape and the Wickquasgeck, even to its dormancy beneath a great glacier. Gancher stacked layers of time onstage and let us peer through them, creating a gorgeous, music-tinged meditation on what lies beneath the places we live, on how we change them, and how they change us.” – Sara Holdren,

    New York Magazine, “The Best Theater of 2024”

  • helen - 2023

    Written by Caitlin George
    Directed by Violeta Picayo

    “We’re used to things beginning with Helen — all those ships — but here, it would seem something ends with the infamously beautiful Spartan princess.” — Sara Holdren, New York Magazine

  • Downtown Stories - 2022

    “Uncovering Downtown: A Magical Expedition of Unrecorded Dreams” by Jessica Holt and Mona Mansour, directed by Jessica Holt 

    “We the People (Not the Bots),” written by Eric Lockley and directed by Morgan Green

    “Sidewalk Echoes,” by Rogelio Martinez and directed by Johanna McKeon

    ‘“Downtown Stories,” [is] a series of interactive theater being staged through June 25 in downtown Manhattan. Presented by Downtown Alliance, a nonprofit organization that manages Lower Manhattan’s business improvement district, and En Garde Arts, an experimental theater company, the three productions — two guided tours and one “docu-theater” play — weave New York City’s landmarks into the storytelling. — Rachel Sherman, The New York Times‘

  • Downtown LIVE- 2021

    A performing arts festival comprising 36 in-person outdoor performances, co-presented with the Tank and Downtown Alliance.

    “Occupying three plazas and loading docks in the Financial District, Downtown Live uses the cow-path twistiness of lower Manhattan to seem larger than it was. You can come around a corner and find David Greenspan singing Sondheim to 30 people in an alleyway or stumble into a grim garage loading dock to hear the angel-voiced Kuhoo Verma singing standards… I was able to ricochet from show to show, the old familiar fear of missing something finally erasing the recent awfulness of missing everything.” – Helen Shaw, New York Magazine

  • A DOZEN DREAMS - 2021

    Created by Anne Hamburger
    Conceived by Anne Hamburger, John Clinton Eisner, and Irina Kruzhilina
    Featuring work by Sam Chanse, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, Martyna Majok, Emily Mann, Mona Mansour, Ellen McLaughlin, Rehana Mirza, Liza Jessie Peterson, Ren Dara Santiago, Caridad Svich, Andrea Thome, and Lucy Thurber.

    Performed at Winter Garden at Brookfield Place

    “A dark room with a naked bulb hanging over a headless, but dressed, seated mannequin. A nightmare room of shattered glass. A room of Tetris-ed cardboard boxes. A wishful room of sunrise or sunset, depending on your disposition. Part art installation, part immersive theater, En Garde Arts’s endlessly intriguing “A Dozen Dreams” takes audience members on a self-guided audio tour through the pandemic dreams of 12 female playwrights, rendered in a dozen rooms exquisitely designed to replicate the surreal, chameleonic chambers of the mind at rest.” – Maya Phillips, The New York Times, Critic’s Pick

  • FANDANGO FOR BUTTERFLIES & COYOTES - 2020

    Written by Andrea Thome
    Directed by José Zayas
    Music by Sinuhé Padilla

    “As the festive notes of a guitar fill the room, and smartly dressed men and women set up towers of tamales that threaten to overwhelm their containers, it feels for a moment as if nothing could go wrong in the world of Andrea Thome’s rapturous “Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes).” But the truth is that most of the characters in this En Garde Arts production are undocumented immigrants gathering in a church on the eve of an ICE raid that threatens their presence in the United States.

    Following its premiere at La MaMa, where I saw it, “Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes)” will be presented in every borough of New York, in the hope of reaching immigrant communities and audiences who don’t always go to the theater. May they come to realize there are maladies that can only be healed by a guitar.” – Jose Solís, The New York Times

  • red hills - 2018

    Written by Asiimwe Deborah Kawe and Sean Christopher Lewis
    Directed by Katie Pearl
    Music Composition by Farai Malianga

    “In “Red Hills,” a clever, site-responsive play produced by En Garde Arts and directed Katie Pearl, the comfortable precincts of a nonprofit fund-raiser are soon pulled away and the audience is thrust into Rwanda itself.” — Alexis Soloski, The New York Times

  • Harbored - 2017

    Written & Directed by Jimmy Maize
    Composed by Heather Christian
    Choreographed by Wendy Seyb
    Featuring Downtown Voices Choir, Mama Foundation, Wednesday Sings Choir

    Co-commissioned by Arts Brookfield and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council as part of the River to River Festival 2017

    “Brookfield Place, a high-end mall, sits by the Hudson River, and you can see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island from there, if you crane your neck just so. That makes it a reasonably propitious place to present a musical-theater piece tackling immigration’s role in shaping America’s soul.” – Elizabeth Vincentelli, The New York Times

  • Wilderness - 2016

    Written by Seth Bockley & Anne Hamburger
    Directed by Seth Bockley
    Movement by Devon DeMayo & Patrick McCollum
    Music by Kyle Miller & Towr’s, Kyle Henderson & Desert Noises and Gregory Alan Isakov

    “A fierce, sad gale blows through Wilderness, a terrific, moving new multimedia theater piece about troubled youth being presented by En Garde Arts in association with Abrons Arts Center… Despite the complexity of its structure, the production’s emotional fluency is bell-clear, as is its honesty about the complex and sometimes mysterious roots of the characters’ problems.”— Charles Isherwood, The New York Times, Critic’s Pick

  • Big outdoor site specific stuff (B.o.s.s.s. Fest) - 2015

    Conceived by Anne Hamburger

    Presented at Hudson River Park, NY, a free festival of work by nine creative teams comprised of New York’s rising generation of innovative theatre artists

    “Presented by En Garde Arts, it’s all part of Ms. Hamburger’s bold re-entry into New York theatre.” — The New York Times

  • basetrack live - 2014

    Created by Edward Bilous
    Composed by Michelle DiBucci, Edward Bilous, & Greg Kalember
    Co-adapted by Jason Grote, in collaboration with Seth Bockley & Anne Hamburger
    Directed by Seth Bockley
    Music Direction by Michelle DiBucci

    Premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music followed by a 40-city American tour.

    “The experience of these American service members — fighting for their country abroad, and sometimes fighting new battles on the home front when they return — is given riveting life in this production, a powerfully moving work of documentary theater from the newly resurrected En Garde Arts company, run, now as before, by Anne Hamburger. [...] Most of us know about the impact of the wars on the soldiers… but this production brings the gritty, brutal truths alive in ways that nothing I’ve read or seen has succeeded in doing.” — Charles Isherwood, The New York Times, Critic’s Pick

Legacy

Long before “site-specific” entered the common theatrical vocabulary, En Garde Arts established a new way of making theatre: one in which location is not a backdrop, but a central dramaturgical force.

Founded in 1985 by visionary producer Anne Hamburger, En Garde Arts is a New York–based 501(c)(3) not-for-profit and the city’s first exclusively site-specific theatre company.

EGA redefined how performance is created, produced, and experienced by embedding story within real-world environments.

The company transformed Central Park, the Chelsea Hotel, East River Park, Penn Yards, and the Meatpacking District before gentrification into immersive theatrical landscapes, collapsing the distance between space, story, and spectator and permanently expanding the boundaries of the form.

Working alongside and championing artists such as Reza Abdoh, Anne Bogart, María Irene Fornés, Charles L. Mee, Jr., Tina Landau, Jonathan Larson, Bill Rauch, Fiona Shaw, and Mac Wellman, En Garde Arts produced original and adapted works that confronted urgent social realities, including the AIDS epidemic and the city’s widening economic divides. These groundbreaking productions were recognized with six OBIE Awards, two Drama Desk Awards, and an Outer Critics Circle Special Award, with The New York Times naming the company “an invigorating urban presence.”

Legacy productions

  • Wasteland - 1989

    Presented at Liberty Theatre, NY
    Written by T.S. Eliot
    Directed by Deborah Warner
    Starring Fiona Shaw

    A one-woman recitation of one of the most important poems of the 20th Century, shifting between voices of satire and prophecy. Winner of two Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding One Person Show and Unique Theatrical Experience.

    “A spellbinding interpretation.” — The New York Times

  • FATHER WAS A PECULIAR MAN - 1990

    Written by Mira-Lani Oglesby & Reza Abdoh
    Directed by Reza Abdoh

    Presented in Meatpacking District, NYC. A deconstruction of The Brothers Karamazov presented as a sprawling pageant.

    “The performances are as large and passionate as the audacity of the conception.” —The New York Times

  • Crowbar - 1990

    Presented at The Victory, NY
    Written by Mac Wellman
    Directed by Richard Caliban

    A ghost play illuminating The Victory’s storied past, salvaging the 42nd Street theatre following decades of decay.

    “Crowbar, the newest site-specific project of Anne Hamburger’s En Garde Arts company, is an act of reclamation and renewal.”— The New York Times

  • another person is a foreign country - 1991

    Written by Charles L. Mee, Jr.
    Directed by Anne Bogart

    Presented at Towers Nursing Home, Central Park West,- A surrealistic exploration of what it means to be an outsider.

    “ANOTHER PERSON surges with vitality, but it doesn’t shrink from its vision of the world as a chamber of horrors where only a lucky few get to sit at the banquet table and happily gorge to their hearts’ content.” — The New York Times

  • orestes - 1993

    Presented at Penn Yards, NY
    Adapted by Charles L. Mee, Jr.
    Directed by Tina Landau
    Starring Jefferson Mays

    A modern retelling of the ancient Greek play by Euripides, with America as collapsed Greece.

    “Another of the En Garde Arts company’s site-specific shows, ORESTES proves among the best.”—Variety

  • Stonewall: Night Variations - 1994

    Conceived and directed by Tina Landau

    “Such is the ingeniously metaphoric preface to a play about liberation. What follows, on a vast open-air stage that stretches into the Hudson, tells the story of how each of the characters introduced in the carnival is sprung from social captivity in June of 1969.” – Ben Brantley, The New York Times

  • jp morgan saves the nation - 1995

    Music by Jonathan Larson
    Libretto by Jeffrey M. Jones
    Directed by Jean Randich

    An interweaving of economics, and theatre, surrounding JP Morgan’s attempt to save the nation from collapse during the panic of 1907.

    “This is surely your only chance to watch stockbrokers strangling each other on Wall Street to the rhythms of a rock minuet.”— The New York Times

  • the trojan women: a love story - 1996

    Written by Charles L. Mee, Jr.
    Directed by Tina Landau
    Starring Sharon Scruggs

    A modern retelling with a world reduced to such disarray and anguish that it will never recover.

    “There is a perversely appealing logic in a production that equates the Trojan War with an Astaire and Rogers picture, where the only thing that got injured was Edward Everett Horton’s dignity.” — The New York Times

“As the founder and artistic director of En Garde Arts, Ms. Hamburger presents theatrical events in nontraditional settings. During its nine years of operation, En Garde has found site-specific performance spaces in the unlikeliest of circumstances - near a Brooklyn pier, on a Harlem street, in abandoned storefronts, warehouses and churches, in the meatpacking district and around the Lake in Central Park (and up in the Belvedere Tower). With the audience enveloped by the action, En Garde is a valuable link between virtual reality and imaginative drama.

Usually the site and subject come first, then a relevant play is written. Every location becomes a discovery. Three one-acts about the bohemian Chelsea Hotel were staged in 1989 in rooms at the hotel. Behind the derelict facade of West 42d Street, Mac Wellman's 1990 "Crowbar" briefly reclaimed the Victory Theater for a ghost story about that building's once-illustrious past.

As the architect Hugh Hardy, an admirer of the company, says: The troupe "makes people aware of the city, makes them respond to places." It uses environmental art as an instrument of social commentary.” – Mel Gussow, The New York Times, Jan. 1994