Best Ten Dollar Suit Pictures

presents

MIKE DAISEY    T. RYDER SMITH   PAUL WILLIS

starring in

    H O R R I B L E  C H I L D ^{a TK film}

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Mr. and Mrs. Child (T. Ryder Smith & Mike Daisey) live in perpetual enmity with their only mistake,
Horrible Child (Paul Willis). Their world is a bodyless echo-chamber of memory and hostility,
honed into baroque linguistic ritual. Mother and father have a dream: that one day The Exterminator
will arrive to cap HC and set them free. A visually minimal, sonically lush, perversely comic talk-opera
catalog of human dysfunction from Lawrence Krauser and Larissa Tokmakova.

NO HANDS, BODIES, SETS, OR ADULT LANGUAGE.

LAWRENCE KRAUSER (writer/director/music) is author of the novel LEMON (McSweeney's Books, 2001), and for the first U.S. and Dutch editions handdoodled 11,000 individual book covers. Other FICTION and nonfiction have been published in Textualities, The Believer, Bridge, McSweeney’s, Monkeybicycle, Sweet Fancy Moses, and The Muse Apprentice Guild, also elsewhere. A defected musician, Lawrence has also written many plays, working closely with the Printer’s Devil Theatre in Seattle. He copyedits for Doubleday Broadway Books, studied and taught American Poetry at Hebei University in China, and is house piano player for the Paranoid's Guide to History lecture series (playing at Barbes & The Brick in June '08. Other educative environments incude the New England Conservatory of Music, Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, and University of Hartford, from which he graduated. He has been writer in residence at Ateliers Fourwinds, Annex Theater, the Santa Maddalena Foundation, and Hawthornden Castle.

CLICK to see a previous LK / LT collaboration (drawing for CD cover)

LARISSA TOKMAKOVA (production design/editor) Her paintings can be seen this summer in New York at McNally-Robinson Booksellers, Ambienti Italia,and Deloitte-Touche headquarters, and at Le Chateau de la Napoule in Cannes. Previous exhibitions include solo shows at Columbia University and the Ministry of Tourism and Culture in Sao Paulo. Larissa has taught painting at France's Ateliers Fourwinds, Hebei Academy of Art in Baoding, China, and at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn, her work supported by grants and residencies from Ateliers Fourwinds, the Puffin Foundation, Kunstcentrum Sittard, and Fundaçion Valparaiso. She was born in Ukraine, studied painting at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Moscow, and now lives in New York City. More paintings can be seen at Artistsspace.org & on her website: www.tokmakova.com

PAUL WILLIS (Horrible Child & Co-producer), director of the 13P debut of Sheila Callaghan's CRAWL, FADE TO WHITE, currently running in NYC, is a theatre and film director living in Brooklyn, New York. Originally from the Northwest, he co-founded Seattle’s acclaimed Printer’s Devil Theatre in 1996, where he served as co-Artistic Director for five years.  In addition to Printer’s Devil, Willis has worked at Seattle Repertory Theatre, A Contemporary Theatre, Annex, The Empty Space, the Mark Taper Forum, and The Public. His stage production of Hedda Gabler for Printer’s Devil was named one of Seattle’s “Top 10 Great Theatre Events of the Decade” by Seattle newspaper The Stranger. Other theatrical directing credits include world premiere productions of Hurricane by Erin Cressida Wilson, Horrible Child by Lawrence Krauser, The Scandal by Kristen Kosmas, and The Gas Man by Herbert Bergel. Willis has also directed productions of Free Will and Wanton Lust by Nicky Silver, Mouthful of Birds by Caryll Churchill, and workshop productions of plays by Erin Cressida Wilson, Chay Yew, Annie Weisman, Heidi Schreck, and Kristen Palmer, among others.   From 1996 - 2001, as co-Artistic Director for Printer’s Devil Theatre, Willis co-produced a new play workshop called THE BONANZA, featuring new work by emerging playwrights, Sheila Callaghan, Naomi Izuka, Anne Washburn, Kristin Newbom, Adam Bock, Jennifer Haley, Erik Ehn, David Bucci, among others. In 2001 Paul was comissioned by Northwest Film Forum to create a feature film adaptation of his production of Hedda Gabler which premiered in competition at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2004. Additonal film credits include Wednesday, Hank, a short documentary about the Honky Tonk Revue with co-director Kristin Newbom, and the short rock opera film The Gas Man, composed by Herbert Bergel.  In 2002, Willis was honored to be one of 16 directors from the Northwest selected for a master director’s workshop with Peter Brook. Paul’s recent New York credits include work with SohoRep, Classic Stage Company, St. Ann’s Warehouse, The New Group, and Culture Project. and currently he is in preproduction with designer Gary Smoot and playwright Sheila Callaghan on her play Crawl, Fade to White, to be produced in New York by 13p Inc. in the spring of 2007. 

MIKE DAISEY (Mrs. Child) is about to commence a run of IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHNG at The Public Theater in New York. He has been called “the master storyteller” and “one of the finest solo performers of his generation” by The New York Times for his monologues, includingMonopoly!, TRUTH, Invincible Summer, Tongues Will Wag, The Ugly American, I Miss the Cold War, Great Men of Genius, Wasting Your Breath and 21 Dog Years, and over the past decade he has performed his unique brand of extemporaneous storytelling at venues such as the Public Theater, American Repertory Theatre, the Spoleto Festival, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Cherry Lane, Yale Rep, the Noorderzon Festival, Portland Stage Company, Intiman, Performance Space 122, and many more. He’s been a guest on The Late Show with David Letterman, and his work has been heard on the BBC, NPR, the National Lampoon Radio Hour, and his groundbreaking series All Stories Are Fiction is available through Audible.com. Currently he’s a commentator for NPR’s Day To Day and PRI’s Studio 360, a contributor to WIRED, Slate and Salon, a web contributor to Vanity Fair and Radar Magazine, a frequent performer and host with the Moth, and his writing appears in the anthology The Best Tech Writing 2006. His first film, Layover, is being distributed by Lars von Trier’s company Zentropa, and he stars in the Lawrence Krauser feature Horrible Child. His first book, 21 Dog Years: A Cubedweller’s Tale, was published by the Free Press and he is working on a second book, Great Men of Genius, adapted from his monologues about genius and megalomania in the lives of Bertolt Brecht, P.T. Barnum, Nikola Tesla, and L. Ron Hubbard. He lives with his director, collaborator and co-conspirator, Jean-Michele Gregory, in New York City. www.mikedaisey.com

T. RYDER SMITH (Mr. Child) is currently appearing in EQUUS on Broadway. His work has been called "Electric" by the New York Times, "Astonishing" by New York magazine, and "Phenomenal" by Time Out NY. In 2007 he won a Drama Desk award for his role in LEBENSRAUM Off-Broadway, and a Craig Noel award for the title role in the premiere of the play LINCOLNESQUE at The Old Globe Theatre. Recent work includes Sarah Ruhl's epic PASSION PLAY at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, and, in association with artist/activist Paul Chan, the Classical Theatre of Harlem and public-art presenters Creative Time, a site-specific production of WAITING FOR GODOT in New Orleans. New York stage credits include MARAT/SADE with the Classical Theatre of Harlem, Lear De Bessonet's TRANSFIGURES with the Women's Project, the premiere productions of Richard Foreman's THE GODS ARE POUNDING MY HEAD and KING COWBOY RUFUS RULES THE UNIVERSE at the Ontological, Will Eno's THOM PAIN at the Daryl Roth Theatre, David Greenspan's SHE STOOPS TO COMEDY at Playwrights Horizons, Glen Berger's THE WOODEN BREEKS at the Lucille Lortel, and UNDERNEATH THE LINTEL at Soho Playhouse, for which T. received a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Solo Performer. Regional theatre work includes the world premieres of Steve Drukman's IN THIS CORNER at San Diego's Old Globe Theatre, Charles Mee's BIG LOVE at ATL's Humana Festival, and Jeffrey Hatcher's STAGE BEAUTY at the CATF. Film and TV work includes appearances on CONVICTION and LAW & ORDER, playing the Trickster in the cult-film BRAINSCAN, and supplying voices for the notorious videogames MANHUNT and BIOSHOCK, as well as for several characters on the ongoing Adult Swim series THE VENTURE BROTHERS. T. was profiled in the September 2006 issue of American Theatre magazine, linked HERE. You can read a recent interview with him on nytheatre.com HERE. His IMDb page is HERE, and his Wikipedia page HERE.

LILA JAVAN (Director of Photography) has been in the film industry in Los Angeles since 1994, and working exclusively as a cinematographer for the past six years. Javan has shot a wide variety of projects in multiple formats, including seven feature films, documentaries, and shorts featured in numerous film festivals. Currently her feature film Venice Underground is availble on DVD. Javan holds a BA in photography and anthropology from the University of Arizona and an MFA in cinematography from the American Film Institute. 

JOSEPH MAHAN, singer of our themesong and an Uncle of five,
sings and draws "brilliantly" in his kitchen.
In the outside world he may be seen drinking vodka
and doing high-kicks on small stages around New York City.
He has acted in plays and daytime television dramas;
and has appeared as a drag-queen extra on film.
He has a green thumb, writes bad poetry,
buys all of his clothes second-hand, and loves Horses.
For less information you may visit his website at
www.josephmahan.com

Our postproduction sound was recorded by WINSTON SPENCER RICE. Visit his playground on the web: www.squidinc.us

See what our muse OOTE BOE has seen at www.ooteboe.com

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