Daniel Irizarry ’04 Directs and Stars in ‘Class Dismissed’ at La MaMa
Acting alum Daniel Irizarry ’04 directs and performs in Class Dismissed at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Class Dismissed is a play set in a psychedelic world of academics. Irizarry stars as the senile Professor Watson, whose grad students hallucinate a post-capitalist manifesto. The show runs from April 18–May 4, 2025.
The exuberant play, written by Robert Lyons, encourages audience participation. Guests are invited to bring books to swap with other theatre-goers and to join the cast on stage to share their libations.
Laura Collins-Hughes wrote of the play in The New York Times: “There is a certain sort of effusively unhinged experimental theater that feels particular to downtown Manhattan. The collaborations between Robert Lyons (late of the scrappy, shuttered New Ohio Theater) and Daniel Irizarry are absolutely this brand of weird.”
Class Dismissed is the pair’s third collaboration. Lyons has written two other shows for Irizarry’s production company, One-Eighth Theater: the short play Yovo and the acclaimed musical My Onliness. “[Irizarry] has me write text for him and then he takes it into the rehearsal room and expands with techniques derived from clowning and physical performance,” Lyons said of their collaboration in American Theatre.
Emeritus Theatre Faculty Arnold Aronson said of Class Dismissed, "Imagine if the Marx Brothers staged Karl Marx and Derrida in an asylum that is actually a university while enjoying freshly baked bread and rum. The sheer energy of this production could power an entire city, and the text is an uncanny reflection and critique of our times.”
Daniel Irizarry is a New York-based, Puerto Rico-born experimental theatre director, performer and educator. He lectures at MIT Music & Theatre Arts and directs One-Eighth Theater, a production company that has created bold experimental theatre projects in New York City and abroad since 2008. Class Dismissed reflects Irizarry’s interest in pataphysics, a satirical science that ridicules the heights of pretension in academia.