OYL has created a workshop setting in northern Greece in a small village called Papingo. We create the majority of our productions in month-long retreats to Papingo where actors, designers, and the production team live, work, and create together. This unique experience allows for everyone involved to completely abandon themselves to the work at hand. Plus, where better to re-conceive the classics than the birthplace of theater?

Oh yeah, and red wine is a food group in Greece.

What else makes OYL so different from the hundreds of other New York up-and-comers?

OYL has a special place in the Off-Off-Broadway community in that it holds design and production at very high standards. We offer an outlet for designers to work on small productions with large budgets. Whether it is welding a steel mesh floor that can be lit from below, letting a sound designer build 440 sound cues (in a 90 minute production), giving a lighting designer as many moving lights as he wants, or filming music videos to play in TV embedded throughout a theater, we give our designers the freedom to think BIG.

Anything else you should know?

Out actors love working with us. If you don’t want to take our word for it, read what a few of our actors have said about working in Greece:


Danny Bernardy: Workshopping abroad was beneficial to me personally. Certainly the atmosphere of retreat helped me release my inhibitions as an artist and I feel blessed for the opportunity. Here's why: When you wake up every morning with the same nine people, bumping into each other with sleep in your eyes waiting for your turn in the bathroom, sharing the same dinner table and divvying up household duties, you are bound to break down fundamental walls of discomfort. My mother always said, “you never really know someone till you live with them."

This is an entirely unique experience and a fantastic display of resourcefulness, courage and trust. The resources and logistics to get nine strangers from the US to a small village in a foreign country… the courage among all of us to do controversial and challenging material in a very foreign and isolated situation… the trust and faith had to be in place ahead of time for all of us.


Susannah Melone: It was amazing. Even though time was tight and full, since we were working on three plays, having the vastness of the landscape and the mountains around us gave a feeling of time and space to work. It reminded me of what Walt Whitman says in Leaves of Grass I was "aware of the amplitude of time." And working together as a group in that foreign environment brought us all closer together and really helped us to find the ensemble we were working with for the plays. Incredible. The mountain faces behind us looked like faces of the gods, every time we turned around and saw them I was aware of something larger than myself of something huge and ancient.

Rehearsing in Greece was unlike anything I'd ever done before, as was working on three plays at the same time. As was working on three plays investigating the same story. We kept being astonished by it. Everyday, we approached these plays amid goats and beetles and villagers and the rocky landscape. Everyday we were aware of how different it was to use the walls, trees, shrines and courtyards as our backdrop—and how different it was from rehearsing in a little empty space in a NY rehearsal studio.