WHY?

Eduardo Machado (Playwright) was born in Cuba and came to the United States when he was nine. He is the author of over forty plays, including, The Cook, Celia and Fidel, Havana is Waiting, The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa, Fabiola, In the Eye of the Hurricane, Broken Eggs, Once Removed, A Burning Beach, and Stevie Wants to Play the Blues. His plays have been produced at The Arena Stage, Seattle Repertory Theatre, the Goodman Theatre, Hartford Stage, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Mark Taper Forum, Long Wharf Theatre, American Place Theatre, The Cherry Lane Theatre, INTAR Theatre, Theater for the New City, and Repertorio Español, among many others. His plays have also been produced in South America and Europe. Mr. Machado's television credits include: Executive Story Editor on Season 2 of the Starz drama Magic City, and Executive Story Editor on two seasons of the HBO television show Hung. He has written pilots for, AMC, Identity (2020); Starz, Havana Red (2018); and Amazon, Tropicana (2017). He wrote and directed the film Exiles in New York, which played at the A.F.I Film Festival, South by South West, The Santa Barbara Film Festival, and The Latin American International Film Festival in Havana, Cuba. Mr. Machado served as the head of playwriting at Columbia University and the Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.  He is the former Artistic Director of INTAR Theatre in New York City. His plays are published by Samuel French and TCG, Tastes Like Cuba: An Exile’s Hunger for Home a food memoir by Eduardo Machado and Michael Domitrovich, is published by Gotham Press.

Anton Butakov (Director) is a native of Kazakhstan and a graduate of the Yekaterinburg State Theatre Institute. He started acting in 2006, and since 2008 he has worked with the Kolyada Theatre in Yekaterinburg. Anton is the Director of the Center for Contemporary Drama in Yekaterinburg and the New Youth Theatre in Nizhny Tagil. He is a member of the Union of Theatre Workers and the Russian Federation, and a founding director of multi-genre FishFabrik Festival and MyEKB Drama Contest.

Alisa Kravtsova (Veronica) graduated from Yekaterinburg State Theatre Institute, class of A. Blinov and A. Blinova, in 2008. Acting credits include Center for Contemporary Drama and Kolyada Theatre. Alisa has had roles in plays by Alexey Sal’nikov, Nikolay Kolyada, Yaroslava Pulinovich, Svetlana Bazhenova, and Anton Chekhov. She has also appeared in films by Sergey Loznitsa and Andrey Fedorchenko, and in music videos of Kurara band. Alisa received a Best Female Actor Award at the festival Fabrika Stanislavskogo and became a laureate at Bravo-2016 Festival.

Andrey Lukyanov (Billy) is a one-of-a-kind mining engineer/actor He is a graduate of both the Ural State Mining University and the Yekaterinburg State Theatre Institute, class 2020 of A. Rusinov. Andrey works at the Center for Contemporary Drama where he appears in plays by Alexey Sal’nikov, Nikolay Kolyada, and Yaroslava Pulinovich among others.