Manifest Destiny's Child: LIVE in NYC & Boston
ABOUT THE SHOW
February 2019 UPDATE: On February 10, in partnership with the critically acclaimed NYC Theater Wheelhouse Theater Company, Manifest Destiny's Child received a workshop production at Dixon Place.
The next goal is a full production & I am grateful to all of the support. - Dennis
MANIFEST DESTINY’S CHILD is a provocative, intelligent, and humorous meditation on how the American left lost its way and woke up in Trumplandia. The real story of a man who goes from a cushy job teaching at a boarding school to the frontlines of the Occupy movement, to an unlikely job launching Jill Stein’s well-meaning but flawed Presidential campaign, to facing down eviction orders at Standing Rock. Dennis Trainor Jr's solo show takes a pickaxe to the pillars holding up the toxic myth of American Exceptionalism.
January 2019 update:
Manifest Destiny's Child is getting a one-night-only “play in progress” production in both New York City and Boston.
In New York, I’ll be performing on February 10 at the Dixon Place. The evening is being co-produced by myself and Wheelhouse Theater Company. Tony-award winner Jeff Wise, the director of the recent critically acclaimed off-Broadway revival of Kurt Vonnegut’s Happy Birthday Wanda June, will direct.
>>> Details about the Boston event will be made public shortly.
This is a significant positive next step towards my goal of a fully staged production.
I'm co-Producing the event in New York and self-producing the event in Boston. To help make this happen, I’ve set a modest fundraising goal of $10K.
We are already over 60% towards that goal (with the initial 50% having funded our summer and fall development). I’m counting on people like you to help me meet the current target. This is a significant positive next step towards my goal of a fully staged production. I’m counting on people like you to help me meet the current target.
Individuals who donate will be offered free tickets for the show of your choice before those tickets are made available to the public.
Your generous support will be put to work immediately to fund rehearsal time and space, travel, multi-media elements included in the show, and more. This is an amazing opportunity to continue the development process of the show towards a full-scale production, and it has been a process made possible by the individual contributions of people like you.
DEVELOPMENT TIMELINE:
Summer, 2018: After completing a 1st draft (okay, a 4th or 5th draft) of the play, I launch a modest crowdfunding campaign to support the continued development of the play. Beautiful and generous people respond with donations. I get in the rehearsal studio with a director and use that to craft further revisions.
Fall, 2018: To combine the creative and financial development of the show, I begin to perform the play in progress at private events, including places like Woodstock, NY also and Medina, OH. The feedback garnered from a live audience was invaluable as I continue to revise the piece.
Winter, 2019: Continued rehearsal and workshops culminating in a one-night performance of the play in progress in both New York and Boston. These showcase events aim to find a producer or theater company to produce a full-scale production of Manifest Destiny’s Child.
For more details about the project, check out this video I made for you:
If you are not familiar with my work, know that I have a proven history of taking modest crowdfunding campaigns and exceeding expectations. I raised less than 30K to follow the Occupy Wall Street movement and created the first documentary with a
theatrical release and it was a critical success. Check out the quotes from The New York Times, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and MichaelMoore.com on the trailer below:
I also crowdfunded my way out of creating videos in my basement with a few clip lamps (see here:)
to producing and hosting a nationally syndicated TV show filmed in a fancy Los Angles Studio:
So, when you donate to one of my projects, you know I am going to make the most of it!
$ Donate any amount: Karma is a Boomerang. Enjoy the good feelings and good karma coming your way!
ABOUT DENNIS TRAINOR JR
Dennis Trainor Jr is a writer, actor, teacher, and multi-media storyteller with a focus on justice, resistance, and the intersection between the arts and politics.
He holds an MFA in Acting from the American Conservatory Theater and is a proud member of Actors’ Equity Association. Also a playwright, he has had two plays produced off-off-Broadway: Plug and I Coulda Been A Kennedy. He is currently at work on a solo piece, Manifest Destiny’s Child.
Selected acting credits include Straight White Men and Picasso at the Lapin Agile (New Repertory Theatre); In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play (SpeakEasy Stage); The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (Gloucester Stage); The Pain and the Itch (Company One); The Rainmaker (Foothills Theatre); November (Lyric Stage); The Sea Gull (The Publick). In NYC, he has performed at Soho Rep, The Flea, The Kraine Theatre.
Dennis was a founding co-Artistic Director of the New York-based Rude Mechanicals Theater Company, a position he held from 1998-2001. For the Rude Mechanicals, he acted in Plug (world premiere, also wrote) and A Winter’s Tale, wrote I Coulda Been a Kennedy (world premiere), produced Vlacav Havel’s Largo Desolato, and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Additional theater directing credits include Charles L. Mee’s Trojan Women: A Love Story at Stonehill College (“Striking Ensemble Award” at the North East Regional Kennedy Center, American College Theatre Festival competition), The Classics! series (National Tour) for Chamber Theater Productions, and over a dozen additional directing credits in academic settings.
Dennis is on the faculty at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, where he teaches acting in both the B.F.A. and M.F.A. programs.
As a filmmaker, his documentary on the Occupy movement, American Autumn: an Occudoc, garnered critical praise from The New York Times, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and more. See the trailer or watch the full movie for free here. He also wrote and directed Legalize Democracy, a documentary short about the Movement To Amend the Constitution.
He was the creator, host, and producer of two nationally syndicated TV programs: Acronym TV and The Resistance Report, each produced as part of the Young Turks Network and distributed by Free Speech TV— a national, independent news network available in 40 million homes.
From January 2015- September 2015 he served as Communications Director for Jill Stein for President. He returned to the campaign as an independent contractor in July 2016-November 2016 to produce several TV commercials and dozens of short-form video for the campaign’s social media platforms.
