MISSION
The Drunkard's Wife is a theater company led by Normandy Sherwood and Craig Flanagin that creates theatrical and musical spectacles in New York City. Our mission is to create and produce experimental musical plays and site-specific theatrical environments with a generous, maximalist design sense. Our plays are darkly comic, language-drunk, full of reverence for the hand-made and therefore wholeheartedly feminist and anticapitalist. We are drawn to represent festivals and celebrations in our work, as well as complex moments of moral and emotional ambiguity. As such, our theatrical style combines our impulses towards camp, the carnivalesque, and the maximal with an appetite for subtlety, complex argument and tenderness. We make music that draws from folk mountain music traditions and no-wave dissonance, and that incorporates complex time signatures and improvisation.
PEOPLE
Normandy Sherwood is a theater maker who has been building worlds in NYC for two decades. She is a writer, a director, a costume and scenic designer and occasionally a performer. Her shows include PSYCHIC SELF DEFENSE, Beast Visit, Madame Lynch, Tiny Hornets, Permanent Caterpillar, and The Golden Veil, and they have been presented by The New Ohio Theatre, Rubulad, HERE, The Kitchen, The Brick, The Public Theater and more. She and Craig Flanagin make no-wave music-driven spectacles with their theater company, The Drunkard’s Wife and their band God Is My Co-Pilot. From 2001-2017 she was a core collaborator in The National Theater of the United States of America (R.I.P.) and with this company she toured the U.S., won an OBIE award and published a book called A New Practical Guide to Rhetorical Gesture and Action (53rd State Press). As a costume designer she has worked with Faye Driscoll, Tina Satter/ Half Straddle, Young Jean Lee, Rachel Chavkin/Anne Washburn and Kristin Marting. Recent design collaborations: scenographer/co-creator of Theater in Quarantine’s 2023 3-D for-your-phone Nosferatu, a 3-D Symphony of Horror; design for projects by Bailey Williams and Emma Horwitz and Lisa Fagan/CHILD Performance company. She has been an artist in residence at HERE, MacDowell, Yaddo and Millay Arts. She is developing a new work called The Mushroom with Nikki Calonge through the New Georges Audrey Residency. She is a Clinical Associate Professor in Expository Writing at NYU and has an MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College.
Craig Flanagin is a guitarist, composer, playwright, theater director and carpenter. He is a member of the bands God Is My Co-Pilot, Attractive Nuisance, and Vermit. He has toured worldwide as a guitarist, playing in more than 40 countries over three decades. As an improviser, he has recorded or appeared on stage with the likes of John Zorn, and Elliott Sharp-- and has booked the Noise Workshop music series since 1994. He is writing an opera called All Trees are Hardest to Feel Terrible.
Cherished Collaborators over the years include Ean Sheehy, Nikki Calonge, Juliana Francis Kelly, Christina Tang, Daniel Allen Nelson, Yung Oh Le Page, Lisa Clair, Admiral Grey, Kevin Shea, Sam Kulik, Braulio Cruz, Hannah Kallenbach, Jess Barbagallo, Haruna Lee and more!
The Drunkard's Wife
Normandy Sherwood, Co-Artistic Director:
normandy@thedrunkardswife.com
Craig Flanagin, Co-Artistic Director:
thedrunkardswife@gmail.com