Everything That Rises Must Converge

From Compagnia de’ Colombari, the company and director whose SOLD-OUT run of KING LEAR at La MaMa surprised and delighted audiences in July comes (ETRMC), a short story by Southern American author Flannery O’Connor. Compagnia de' Colombari will perform Everything That Rises Must Converge at St. Paul's Church in Brooklyn (234 Congress Street) on Sunday, October 13 (doors open at 5:30pm, performance begins at 6pm, party at 7pm). The performance will mark the end of the company's U.S. and international tour of Everything That Rises Must Converge and will conclude Compagnia de' Colombari's triumphant 20th Anniversary Season. Please join us after the performance for a joyful celebration with refreshments! The afterparty is included in the ticket price!

Everything That Rises Must Converge is a tragi-comic seat-shifting dance between Blacks and whites on a bus in America's deep South, performed verbatim as written in O’Connor’s original 1961 text. Fear of the stranger, competing self-righteousness, and pretense are central to the American experience. Seven diverse actors explore these elements and hilariously perform them without a speck of sentimentality in Everything That Rises Must Converge.

The story draws upon the platitudes perpetuated by an older culture and the misery of disenfranchised youth. The collision of generations and races on a bus ride mines an existential truth: "If you know who you are, you can go anywhere."

Written in the early 1960s, the parallels with today are clear. We are in a post-Rosa Parks era, but are we really? O’Connor’s text (like Shakespeare’s) draws upon the overturning of many well-known proverbial sayings (“Rome wasn’t built in a day”). The story examines and overturns hideous cultural assumptions. The theater piece puts these assumptions in a relief that exposes–through comedy–the necessity for a new consciousness. In ETRMC, love takes no prisoners; everyone must converge together.

This year marks Compagnia de’ Colombari’s 20th anniversary season, and the return of Everything That Rises Must Converge to Rome for four performances with workshops and talkbacks fifteen years after its premiere at the International Flannery O’Connor conference in Rome, organized by the Poetics and Christianity Project in 2009. The show has toured the USA and internationally since and is embarking on a tour across America through October following the performances in Rome.

ETRMC will be witnessed for the first time in Texas, Ohio and North Carolina, with performances at two New York State detention centers and a return to New York City, Colombari’s home base. The theatrical adaptation of Everything That Rises Must Converge was first developed (with two other stories, A View of the Woods and Greenleaf) at the University of Iowa in 1998, at Sundance Theatre Lab in 1999, and Off-Broadway to sold-out audiences at New York Theatre Workshop in 2001.

Karin Coonrod is the sole adaptor of O’Connor’s works for theatre, given permission directly from the estate. She felt called to bring O'Connor’s–a compelling, courageous, and controversial writer–worlds and words to the stage after encountering her stories at age 19 in an American literature class. To Coonrod, O'Connor is the American Dante, from the red clay of Georgia to the realm beyond.

Throughout 2024, is celebrating 20 years of generating spectacle, disrupting and reconstructing texts and spaces under the direction of Karin Coonrod with a robust Anniversary Season. Of Coonrod’s direction, The New York Times proclaimed, “this experimental director has a knack for transforming high concepts into accessible theater” and calls her “a theater artist of far-reaching inventiveness” who uses a “style that deconstructs to construct.” Other season highlights include the world premiere of at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in June, the sold-out NYC debut at La MaMa ETC in July, and multiple U.S. tour dates for .

ETRMC is 55 minutes in duration. Doors open at 5:30pm, the show begin promptly at 6pm with an afterparty following the performance at 7pm.

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Critical Praise for Everything That Rises Must Converge:

“O'Connor's Southerners, warped to comic grotesqueness by societal change and the insularity of rural life or presumed privilege, are richly described and sympathetically observed. Overflowing with idiosyncrasies and postures of self-defense, they are among American literature's most painfully and amusingly doomed characters. All of this makes tasty fodder for the actors.” – Bruce Webber, The New York Times

“In Karin Coonrod’s production of Everything That Rises Must Converge in Rome, the ‘interracial ballet’ on stage invites interpretations about O’Connor’s narrative art, her politics of race, and her search to find ‘the hidden love that makes a man . . . give up his life to the service of God’s people.’” –Susan Srigley, Flannery O’Connor Review

About Flannery O’Connor (Author):

American author Flannery O’Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, along with many reviews and commentaries. When she died in 1964 at age 39, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers. The New York Times deemed her story Everything That Rises Must Converge one of “the few masterpieces in the form in English.” Her Complete Stories won the 1972 US National Book Award for Fiction. Next year, 2025, marks the 100th anniversary of O'Connor's birth, and her words remain as resonant as ever.

About Karin Coonrod (Director & Adaptor) is the founding Artistic Director of Compagnia de’ Colombari and has directed on stages worldwide. Notable productions include KING LEAR (International Festival of Arts & Ideas; La MaMa ETC); Henry VI, Love's Labor's Lost (Public Theater, NYSF); King John, Julius Caesar (Theater for a New Audience); Enrico IV (American Repertory Theater); Everything That Rises Must Converge (New York Theater Workshop); texts&beheadings/ElizabethR (Folger Theatre; BAM/Next Wave Festival); and The Merchant of Venice (Venice, Italy; International Festival of Arts & Ideas; Peak Performances at Montclair State University; The Hopkins Center; Dartmouth University). Coonrod, with Compagnia de’ Colombari, has launched new theater traditions in Orvieto, Italy and brought works into detention centers, jails, schools, pubs, libraries, parks, museums, galleries, piers, churches, and the streets. The book The Transnational Theatre of Karin Coonrod (Bloomsbury Press UK) is currently in development. She teaches directing at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.

About Compagnia de’ Colombari:

Compagnia de' Colombari is an international collective of performing artists, generating theater in surprising places for over 20 years under the vision of director Karin Coonrod. Colombari intentionally clashes cultures, traditions and art forms to bring fresh interpretations to the written word. It is founded on the twin principles that the magic of great theater can happen anywhere and be accessible to everyone. Colombari was born in Orvieto, Italy, in 2004, where the company re-imagined the medieval mystery plays and performed them in the streets and piazzas. The company launched a parallel theatrical experience at its New York City home base that same year. Colombari's 20th anniversary season focuses on unique theatrical adaptations of works by Walt Whitman, Flannery O'Connor and William Shakespeare. Compagnia de' Colombari's 20th Anniversary Season programs are made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, The Eucalyptus Foundation, and support from our donors.

COMPANY OF ACTORS:

Christopher McLinden

Paul Pryce

Stacey Scott

Ean Sheehy

Elizabeth Stahlmann

Carlton Terrence Taylor

Welker White

CREATIVE & PRODUCTION TEAM CREDITS:

Adaptor and Director: Karin Coonrod

Assistant Director & Music Director: Carlton Terrence Taylor

Costume Designer: Karin Coonrod and the company

Hat Design: Oana Botez

Costume Coordinator: Demarius Kennedy

Lighting Design: Christopher Akerlind

Production Stage Manager: Kasper

Company Manager: Anna Crivelli

Compagnia de’ Colombari:

Artistic Director: Karin Coonrod

General Manager: Jennifer Harrison Newman

Development Manager: Sofia Crouch

Publicist, Marketing & Communications Manager: Cindy Sibilsky

Host or Publisher Compagnia de' Colombari