Villa

March 1–April 1, 2017
ChileU.S. Premiere
Meet the Artists

Guillermo Calderón (Writer/Director) is a Chilean theatre artist. His plays have toured extensively throughout the world. New York audiences know him from his productions at The Public Theater including Neva,
and Diciembre and Escuela in The Under the Radar Festival with his own company. His screenwriting credits include The Club and Neruda, both directed by Pablo Larraín (Golden Globe nominees for Best Foreign Language Film).

William Gregory (Translator) trained as an actor at Drama Studio London and directed his first translation, Julio Escalada’s Springtime, at the Finborough, London in 2003. He has since translated over 100 plays. Recent US work includes Blanca Doménech’s The Sickness of Stone (Access Theatre, New York) and Mar Gómez Glez’s Numbers (Rutgers-NJIT). UK highlights include Rodrigo García’s Goya (Gate, London) and Abel González Melo’s Chamaco (HOME, Manchester). In September 2017, he translated Guillermo Calderón’s world premiere, B (Royal Court Theatre, London).

Crystal Finn (Actor) is thrilled to be working for the first time with WP, and to be back working with PlayCo after performing in their production of one of her all-time favorite plays Villa, by Guillermo Calderon. NY theater includes many world premieres at Playwright’s Horizons, Roundabout, MTC, 59E59, Fulcrum, and Clubbed Thumb where she is an affiliated artist. In 2022 she made her Broadway debut in Birthday Candles, by Noah Haidle, for which she won a Theater World Award. She is also a writer and is working on a solo show about Wittgenstein and a book of essays about acting.

Vivia Font (Actor) is a performer and theater maker. She performed in Recent Alien Abductions and Villa with Playco. She has worked on very new and very old plays at CSC, Rattlestick, NYClassical, The Huntington, NJ Rep, Merrimack, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Old Globe, Denver Center, and more. She has worked on a variety of voiceover projects including commercials and audiobooks. She teaches at Princeton, Marymount Manhattan College, and NYU, and produced/directed/created many different projects. TV/Film: FBI: Most Wanted, For Life, Love, Repeat, Sarbanes Oxley. NYClassical Associate Artist and Actors Center member.

Harmony Stempel (Actor) has been seen all around NYC, including favorite projects with Play Company, Clubbed Thumb and BRIC. She is a new mom and recently trained as a postpartum doula.

Molly Shea (Stage Manager) Select Theatre Credits: we are continuous (Williamstown Theatre Festival), A Walk On The Moon (George Street Playhouse), Tambo and Bones, BachelorX (Playwrights Horizons) Sing Street (Broadway & NYTW) Notes On My Mother's Decline, Time's Journey Through a Room, Oh My Sweet Land, Villa (PlayCo) Little Women (Primary Stages) This Is The Color Described By The Time (New Georges). Select TV/Film Credits: Tony Awards Ceremony, That Damn Michael Che, Younger, Beat Bobby Flay.

If you double-click on an icon that says: VILLA, click-click, a description comes up of everything that actually happened to her in the villa. Click. Who she hugged. Click. Who she spoke to. Click. Who she helped. If you Click click on an icon that says: THE ROAD NOT TAKEN, you see what the family and friends think would have happened if nothing had happened to her. If she’d never been in the villa.

This is a story about reclaiming your country. In this slyly surprising and gripping play, Guillermo Calderón puts us in the room with three women charged with deciding the future of the Villa Grimaldi, an infamous detention camp of Chile’s Pinochet government.

Villa stares down the gun of history with gut-wrenching intimacy and a disarming sense of humor.”
–Theater Is Easy

The script is an exceptionally eloquent statement about the ripple effects of dictatorship, how such ghastly abuses of power reverberate long after they have ended.
–Lighting and Sound America

Featuring

Crystal Finn Vivia Font Harmony Stempel

Production Designer

María Fernanda Videla Urra

Sound Design

Mark Van Hare

Production Stage Management

Jenny Kennedy

Production Manager

Jonathan Zencheck

Company/House Manager

Daniel Roberts

Artwork

'The Geometry of Conscience' by Alfredo Jaar Photo by Cristobal Palma

Venue

The Wild Project 195 East 3rd St. New York, NY