Handcart Ensemble

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet Paul Muldoon on Handcart’s The Burial at Thebes

“I simply can’t imagine a better production of The Burial at Thebes. Handcart Ensemble is a spectacularly gifted group, absolutely equal to the subtleties of Heaney’s text. I’ll go anywhere to see anything they do.” —Paul Muldoon

Mission Statement

Handcart Ensemble is a New York City theater company devoted to bringing new life to literary masterworks by combining bold, inventive staging with language-rich translations, adaptations, and classically inspired new works.

Since its founding in 1999, the company has been ambitious in its choice and creation of material. The ensemble selected Andromaque, a seventeenth century French tragedy, for its debut production, and staged it in an original, rhyming verse translation that brought new flair to its crisp, suspenseful plot. The next production used carefully choreographed, evocative stage movement and a minimum of costumes and set pieces to re-imagine an entire nineteenth century novel, Balzac’s The Wild Ass’s Skin.

Handcart has continued in this adventurous spirit, translating foreign-language plays and theatricalizing non-dramatic sources over a period of six years and eight productions. In building upon the ages’ finest and most enduring literary accomplishments, the group seeks to edify, inspire, and entertain its audiences.

Read more about our philosophy...

About Us

Old Wine in New Bottles

Handcart Ensemble produces new adaptations, new translations, and new works for the theater, drawing primarily from classical sources. Read our mission statement for more information.

From our photo archives

The set for Ordet
The set for Ordet, as Act I opens.

Gearing Up for 2008/09

Thanks to our patrons for supporting Oedipus at Colonus, touted by NYTheatre.com as “another feather in Handcart’s cap as the city’s most reliable and interesting presenter of contemporary renditions of classic theatre texts.” Our one-night benefit performance of W.B. Yeats’s Purgatory was another success, its sell-out box office returns laying the groundwork for an ambitious 2008/09 season that will include Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood as you’ve never seen it before. Watch for more details on this thrillingly crafted production, arriving in New York after years of development and acclaim at international theater festivals…

Copyright © 2001 - 2008 Handcart Ensemble. Last updated April 17, 2005