TWEED TheaterWorks was founded 1983 and has grown from presenting tiny, late night shows in East Village dives to producing full-scale productions at premier Manhattan venues. For three decades TWEED has produced innovative and unusual live theatrical work, including performance art, original plays, musicals, dancetheater and category-defying extravaganzas. TWEED began by producing the early plays of Sam Shepard, Eugene Ionesco, Tennessee Williams, and original adaptations of the works of Dorothy Parker, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy and Mary Shelley among others. Over the decades, TWEED has produced under several different names, theaterTweed, Tweed Ensemble, Club Etc., T.W.E.E.D. (TheaterWorks Emerging/Experimental Directions and, later The Wildest Entertainments Ever Devised), TWEED TheaterWorks, and just plain TWEED. The original idea behind the use of the word “tweed” was to describe a concept for a production company that wove together several different types of live performance. In 1984, when the East Village Art Scene was thriving, TWEED was one of the first theater companies to embrace performance art and bring a variety of work from that arena, primarily nightclubs, and produce them in legitimate Off-Off Broadway theaters. For eleven years the company presented a curated festival of new works - The TWEED New Works Festival (1984-1995) - that presented the early work of many of today’s recognized theater artists, including Bill Russell (Side Show), Lisa Kron (Well), Diana Son (Law & Order), Adrienne Kennedy, Mac Wellman, Joshua Fried, Mark Dendy, Edgar Oliver, and John Kelly, among others. Other on-going endeavors include The TWEED Music Series that has featured Antony, of Antony and the Johnsons, Kate Pierson of The B52’s, Nora Jones, Annie Golden, Joey Arias, Lana Cantrell, and a vast array of downtown musicians. The TWEED Fractured Classicks Series presents staged readings and full productions of classic American plays and films employing unique casting choices. The idea, much to our delight, has been brazenly copied by many major theater companies since our iconic reading of CAGED that starred Isabella Rossellini, Lily Tomlin, Joan Rivers, Carole Shelley, Charles Busch, Wallace Shawn and a dozen others. TWEED has produced the majority of the work of John (Lypsinka) Epperson for the past 20 years, and is in the process of presenting a Lypsinka retrospective in New York next season.
