page_title: En Garde Arts
section_title: En Garde Arts in the 1980s and 1990s
hierarchical_section_title: En Garde Arts / En Garde Arts in the 1980s and 1990s
caption_attribution_description: English: J.P. Morgan Saves the Nation 1995
context_page_description: En Garde Arts is a New York City-based theatre company, and a pioneer in the field of immersive theater.
  Founded in 1985 by Anne Hamburger, the company was New York’s first exclusively site-specific theatre, leading audiences to unexpected locations across the city for innovative, contemporary, highly visual new work. En Garde’s productions earned six Obie Awards, two Drama Desk Awards, the Special Outer Critics Circle Award and the Edwin Booth Award. The company ceased operations in 1999 when Hamburger relocated to the West Coast, first as artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse, and later to run a global division for the Walt Disney Company. She returned to the East Coast, reformed the company, and re-launched En Garde in the fall of 2014.
context_section_description: From 1985-1999, Hamburger commissioned playwrights, directors and composers to create theatrical pieces for architectural sites and neighborhoods. The roster of En Garde’s alumni artists includes playwrights Charles L. Mee, Mac Wellman, María Irene Fornés; composers David Van Tieghem, Jonathan Larson; directors Michael Engler, Tina Landau, Anne Bogart, Reza Abdoh, Jim Simpson and Bill Rauch; and actors Carl Hancock Rux, Fiona Shaw, Fisher Stevens, Tyne Daly and Jefferson Mays. Intrepid audiences followed their work to a variety of locations, including Central Park, the Meatpacking District,  Penn Yards, East River Park, Pier 25, the Chelsea Hotel, the Victory Theater (New Victory Theatre, and the intersection of Wall and Broad Streets in Lower Manhattan.
  In 1989, En Garde produced a series of three plays at the Dairy, Belvedere Castle and Bow Bridge (Central Park) in Central Park to great critical acclaim.  Obie Awards for Best New American Play and Best Director were given to Bad Penny playwright Mac Wellman and director Jim Simpson.  The New York Times wrote, “Moving environmentally through the streets and buildings of Manhattan, En Garde Arts is an invigorating urban presence.”  The following year, Wellman’s play Crowbar became the first legitimate theatrical production to be held in 42nd Street’s Victory Theatre for 60 years.  Designed and built for Oscar Hammerstein in 1900, the theatre’s elaborately decorated interior remained intact despite decades of neglect, including 20 years as porn theatre.  Crowbar was produced before 42nd Street’s redevelopment, and En Garde Arts could not find a cleaning company willing to take on the job, so a group of volunteers cleaned the interior to make way for Mac Wellman’s new play.  Directed by Richard Caliban with music by David Van Tieghem, Crowbar won Obie awards for En Garde Arts and actor Elżbieta Czyżewska, and was granted a special award by the Outer Critics Circle.
  
  Now firmly in league with New York’s most influential and innovative theatre companies, En Garde continued to produce iconoclastic, critically acclaimed, award-winning work throughout the 1990s.  Reza Abdoh & Mira-Lani Oglesby’s spectacular, AIDS era cri de coeur, Father Was a Peculiar Man took place over 9 distinct locations through the Meatpacking District, long before its gentrification.   
    In an abandoned Victorian hospital on West 106th Street, Charles L. Mee’s Another Person Is a Foreign Country confronted the social marginalization of unconventional people; in fact, it was a celebration of difference, played like a beautiful human symphony under a blanket of stars. Director Anne Bogart’s cast included a blind choir with seeing-eye dogs, a group of emotionally disturbed rock musicians, and a man and woman, both 3’ tall, all staged against the Gothic, empty Towers Nursing Home (New York Cancer Hospital).  The evening ended with a stunning waterfall cascading down the building’s stone facade.
  En Garde would win further Obie Awards for Tina Landau & Charles L. Mee’s  Orestes in the Penn Yards, and Trojan Women in East River Park Amphitheatre. Deborah Warner’s adaptation of The Wasteland with Fiona Shaw earned two Drama Desk Awards.  Hamburger used the New York Stock Exchange as a backdrop for JP Morgan Saves the Nation by composer Jonathan Larson.  On opening night, he slipped her a cassette tape of the work he was just developing; it would become the musical phenomenon RENT. Hamburger was recognized with the Edwin Booth and Lee Reynolds Awards for the impressive body of her work.  In 1999, she was offered and accepted the post of artistic director with the La Jolla Playhouse.  Within six months of moving to California, she received an offer to establish a new creative division for the Walt Disney Company, where she remained until returning to New York.
caption: J.P. Morgan Saves the Nation 1995
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