NOMADS again on the move off-B’way

On a chilly Friday afternoon, a 99-seat off-Broadway black box theater stirs energetically as actors prepare with vocal warm-ups, costumes hang on hooks, and crew members holler lighting cues across the theater.

It’s a few hours before the unexpectedly crowded first preview of an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s only published novel, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”—an exploration of aestheticism and beauty—and the writer, Daniel Mitura, CC ’09, watches from the last row.

Though he has graduated, Mitura has found a way to bring a piece of Columbia with him to the (almost) Great White Way—Mitura partnered with producer Adam Blanshay and Columbia’s theater group NOMADS to develop the project.

While at Columbia, Mitura spent the bulk of his undergraduate life acting in thesis projects and writing plays of his own, such as the musical “Plan B,” which was also developed at NOMADS and transferred to an off-Broadway venue.

In producing “Dorian Gray,” Mitura’s goal, in addition to entertaining audiences, is to show students that theatrical success can continue beyond Columbia’s gates.

“There is not a huge line between what people are doing in Lerner’s black box and what they can do here,” Mitura said, referring to the Theatre Row complex in which “Dorian” is playing.
In fact, Mitura used this ethos to bring Columbians into the fold. Included on his technical team are director Henning Hegland, SoA ’10, stage manager Molly Braverman, CC ’09, and producing assistant Casey Hayes, CC ’10.

Kurt Kanazawa, CC ’11 and president of NOMADS said Mitura first approached him with the script in September.

“We commented on the script, and he incorporated our changes,” Kanazawa said. “We thought we were only going to be his bank account, where he would deposit tax-free donations, but we were given a larger role in the creative process.”

To finance the play, Mitura drew upon private donations from alumni, a grant from the Columbia Alumni Association, and a $500 grant—acquired with the help of NOMADS—from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation Student Arts Support Fund. The Gatsby Fund is administered by the Columbia University Arts Initiative and supports non-academic student artwork. Arts Initiative events & outreach coordinator Chad Miller served as the Gatsby mentor for the play.

The production is a boon for NOMADS. Dorian,” its fourth off-campus production since the group’s creation in 2003, kicks off the spring season, which will include an original opera, a new work festival, an electronic show, and a mixed media performance.

For Mitura, the play represents his growth since high school when he first adapted Wilde’s story. “I had years of experience,” he said. “It’s almost as if I’d been working on it for five years.”
Mitura said he found the material compelling because it raises provocative questions about art and enjoys popularity.

According to Barnard English professor William Sharpe, stage versions of Dorian Gray proliferated after World War I and have experienced a recent resurgence in popularity. “I suspect the current interest is due to the revival of all things Victorian and ‘Victorian,’—that is to say, our contemporary fascination with Victorian texts and topics … is in part a genuine fascination with the past and in part a fantasy designed to explore our own obsessions by transplanting them to a costume—drama world of the filthy rich and the even filthier poor,” Sharpe said in an e-mail.

For Mitura, the trick of adapting the text for a stage was making it his own while preserving Wilde’s voice. “It’s reading the novel and re-expressing it in terms of the stage. I haven’t changed any plot things,” he said. “And yet I’ve emphasized certain elements over others, and in that way it’s mine.”