Ice Factory is our OBIE award-winning summer festival of new work.

Every summer we invite the most exciting downtown companies to present their latest projects in an environment of generosity, dialogue, and inspiration. ICE FACTORY is a place where artists can take risks, try out new ideas, and bring their projects to a new level.

Plays introduced in Ice Factory have gone on to garner Drama Desk nominations, OBIE Awards, Audience First Awards in Edinburgh, Off-Broadway productions, commercial runs, and national and international tours.

As I digest the play The Anthropologists Save the World! by the theater collaborative The Anthropologists and directed by company founder Melissa Moschitto, the challenge of art making is crystallized. A piece of theater needs more than just the belief itself — it needs an original idea, or the sense of an original idea, or, well, at least some investigation of an original belief. Without it, a play will feel TV-caricatured and get tired very quickly, despite stemming from a genuine purpose. The Anthropologists sets up two situations: Aldous Huxley monitoring a quit-smoking group, and a band of survivalists living through a doomsday scenario in New York City. This is set up into two sections, each with very bare design ideas. The dialogue feels improvised, notwithstanding a few specific monologues. The play wants to be about the paradox of humans as an insensible parasite, our host being our slowly deteriorating planet, and our mockable and ultimately selfish attempts at change. All of those ideas are abundantly clear, because simple ideas are simply communicable through text and plain stage images. What’s not there is an investigation of that belief, a feeling about that belief th …Read more