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HISTORY & MISSION Inverse Theater is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization formed in 1998 to create, produce, and distribute new American verse plays. By enacting this mission, Inverse Theater hopes to satisfy the hunger among actors, directors, designers, and audience members for plays that meld the musicality, scope and intelligence of verse with the vibrant, colorful, fierce spirit of the modern world, to reunite theater and literature, to merge street-talk with poetics, to nourish the English language with new words, to portray a huge mix of characters in large, multi-faceted casts, and to explore the American-Global experience through comedy, tragedy, history, and undiscovered genres. In order to achieve this mission, Inverse is structured so that actors, directors, designers, and playwright can come into contact in a workshop process, craft a play in verse, and help bring the play to a successful showcase production, with the ultimate goal of seeing that play manifest itself before an audience in a multitude of venues, such as other theaters, Internet, publication, film, and video. In short, Inverse Theater brings poetic plays to the people. After doing plays together throughout the mid-1990’s as a part of the thriving theater scene on New York City’s Lower East Side, the original Inverse members (actors, designers, staff, and playwright) organized for the purposes of continuing their collaborations and expanding their audience. Since their first official play together (The Death of Griffin Hunter, Soho Rep, 1998), they have presented their work at a wide variety of venues, including theaters, parks, festivals, colleges, performance spaces, and parties. The company is structured to bring actors, directors, designers, and playwright into contact in a workshop process in order to craft a new verse play and bring it to a successful production. Each production features original poetic texts, virtuoso verse acting, elegant sets and costumes, and live music. Inverse also looks beyond our staged productions in order to deliver each of its plays to audiences in a multitude of formats, including sound recordings, publication, photography, and video/film. Inverse plays merge the intelligence, scope, and passion of verse with the vibrancy, dialects, and spirit of the modern world. They merge street talk with poetics and contemporary themes with classical structures to forge entirely new genres. The results are, in the words of one critic, “bona fide modern classics.”(LA Weekly)