Company History
Thick Description was founded in New York City in 1988 by Karen Amano, Tony Kelly, Rick Martin, and David Yezzi. The name comes from anthropologist Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures. The term, originally coined by Gilbert Ryle, refers to the inevitable interpretive quality of an anthropologist's thorough description of any event, or for that matter, of any person's comprehension of any event. For us, theater is our thick description of the world around us.
Our first production, Faust, performed in the fall of 1988, combined the texts of Faust plays by Goethe, Marlowe and Lessing with the modern poetry of Walt Whitman and William Burroughs. In 1989, we became the resident performance company of Ceres Gallery in New York City, a collective of women visual artists located in Tribeca. While in residence at Ceres, Thick Description produced the American premiere of Heiner Müller's Lessing's Sleep Dream Scream, the Bread and Puppet Theater's A Man Says Goodbye to His Mother, Brecht's The Trial of Lucullus, and original work.
In the fall of 1989, Thick Description moved to San Francisco. In 1990 we performed our first West Coast season of three plays at the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco: Wha...i, Whai, A Long Long Time Ago by Korean novelist Ch'oe In-hun; Ben-Hur, a revisionist adaptation by acclaimed science fiction writer Thomas Disch; and the second American production of Ödön von Horváth's Figaro Gets a Divorce, translated by Roger Downey.
In 1991, Thick Description performed the West Coast premiere of Tiny Dimes by Peter Mattei, and the premiere of a music-theater adaptation of Euripides' Iphigeneia at the Bay of Aulis. Our production of Tiny Dimes was revived at the Asian American Theater in the fall of 1991; this production received Drama-Logue awards for direction and ensemble performance. In 1991, we also received the Edith Lew Award, in recognition of professionalism and achievement in Bay Area theater, from the Bay Area Theater Workers Association.
We performed the premiere of Han Ong's Bachelor Rat in April of 1992, and presented Han Ong in his solo piece Symposium in Manila at The Marsh at the same time. We also performed the premiere of a new adaptation of Sophocles' Electra in June, and the West Coast premiere of two David Greenspan plays (in repertory), Jack and 2 Samuel 11, Etc., in September and October. In 1992, Thick Description also received its first grant from the National Endowment for the Arts Professional Theater Companies program.
In 1993, our schedule of performances included new adaptations by company member Karen Amano of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens (January 1993), Euripides' Orestes (with a live rock band; April 1993), and Shakespeare's King Lear (August 1994). In December 1993, Thick Description presented eight performances of Santos & Santos, a sweeping new play by Octavio Solis, at the 280-seat Theater Artaud. This hugely successful production was featured in the December 1993 issue of American Theatre; Octavio Solis received the 1993 Will Glickman Award for the best new play to premiere in the Bay Area, and a 1994 Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.