February 11th, 2002

     The first ever production of Subversive Theatre Collective was a staged reading of a new play written & directed by Kurt Schneiderman.  
     A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON MY WAY TO SHOOT THE CZAR is a stream-of-consciousness piece about an idealistic Red Army soldier who is part of the detachment ordered to shoot Czar Nicholas II and family in 1918.  But this soldier comes to question his orders as he stumbles backwards and forwards in time between his poverty stricken upbringing in 1914 and his eventual imprisonment in Stalin's gulags in 1936 -- not to mention a sudden intrusion by Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln from "The Endless Tea Party at the Far End of the Cosmos!" 
     Throughout this semi-surreal historical odyssey, the protagonist (and, hopefully, the audience) is forced to seriously weigh the pros and cons of violence as a means of achieving social change.
     The world-debut of A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON MY WAY TO SHOOT THE CZAR was performed for a standing-room-only crowd in the backroom of Allentown's Rust Belt Books by the following cast & crew: 

Director . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kurt Schneiderman*
Commissar of Costumes . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maura Price*
Generalissimo of Sound . . . . . . . . . . . . . Greg Kempf*
Videographer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jody LaFond

Yuri Gavrilov . . . . . . . . . . . . Timothy Patrick Finnegan
Yurovski/Goldstein/Abe . . . . . . . . . .  Philip Knoerzer*
Sergeant/Nicholas/Charles . . . . . . . . . . . .  Tim Newell
Fetiukov/Mother/Ermakov . . . . . . . . .  Arlene Clement
Rubashov/Tupachenko/Marie . . . . . . . .  Kate LoConti
Shaman/Chin Shyr-Huang . . . . . . . . . . .  Keith Elkins*
Nikulin/Julius/Ivan . . . . . . . . . . . . . Matthew LaChiusa

* = members of the Subversive Theatre Collective