Alumnus Colm Summers ’21 Assistant Directs ‘Wednesday’

Recent Directing alumnus Colm Summers ’21 is the assistant director for Wednesday by Raja Feather Kelly and his company, the feath3r theory. 

Wednesday is a dance-theatre documentary that began development before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The project began as a reimagining of the film Dog Day Afternoon as “a queer fantasia where psychological realism meets pop soap opera.”

Dog Day Afternoon is a 1975 biographical crime drama film. It chronicles the events following a bank robbery by John Wojtowicz and was inspired by a 1972 Life magazine article, “The Boys in the Bank” by P. F. Kluge. The film details the events of a true crime in which two men held up a small bank, and through a series of comic misfires, this leads to a 14 hour standoff with the police. The hook of the story was that Wojtowicz was robbing the bank in the hopes of funding his partner's  gender-affirming surgery. 

40 years after the debut of Dog Day Afternoon, the feath3r theory began developing a production that would identify the true motivations and outcome of the bank robbery. Raja Feather Kelly started this project when he wrote an essay for himself titled, Who Gets To Tell Whose Story?” The production itself examines the complexity of story-telling, representation, community, and ultimately the search for self. 

Additionally the company seeks to build a community around this production by including live and recorded virtual events, interviews, links, and resources. They are also developing a platform for those still exploring the themes and experiences depicted in the production.

Wednesday runs from December 1 through the 10 at New York Live Arts. There will also be an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter at the performance on December 9. 

Colm Summers (Ó Somacháin) is an Irish stage director for theatre and opera, based between New York and Dublin. He is a writer for theatre and an essayist. Recent credits include The Kill One Race, (Playwrights Horizons, NYC), La Clemenza di Tito (dir. Milo Rau, Grand Théatre de Geneve), The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane (National Theatre of Ireland, The Abbey), Bite/Scratch (Live Collision International Festival), Dike by Hannah Benitez (Urbanite Theatre, Florida), Love à la Mode (Smock Alley, Dublin and Trafalgar Square), Gays Against the Free State! (Dublin Fringe Festival), Enemy of the Stars by Wyndham Lewis (Dublin & Fes, Morocco), God’s Ear by Jenny Schwartz, (Samuel Beckett, Theatre, Dublin). Colm has worked with The Wooster Group, Milo Rau and the International Institute of Political Murder, Dead Centre, and Pan Pan (Dublin/New York), and continues to work with the feath3r theory.