Wayne Yeager (co-artistic director and resident expert on medieval history)

Since beginning theatre studies in 2002 at the University of Wisconsin: River Falls, Wayne Yeager has participated in over 80 productions as artistic director, technical director, set designer and builder, and producer. He founded and ran the Hearth Cricket Theatre Company for three years in River Falls, Wisconsin, before pursuing designs on New York.  During 2006 Wayne managed The Producer’s Club theatres on West 44th St, NY, and in 2007 co-founded Reality Aside Theatre.  Favorite productions include House Keeper, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: Abridged, The Rock Horror Show, Owl and the Pussycat, and Inspecting Carol.  New York credits include The Eight: Reindeer Monologues and interactive plays: Funeral! and Murder Me Always. Currently Wayne works with the Times Square Arts Center (TSAC) in NYC as a graphic and web designer, marketer, and producer.  He also offers freelance services in technical production (currently for the Drama Desk Awards) and graphic design.

 

Eve Armstrong (co-artistic director and resident gamma-ray astronomer)

While Eve Armstrong has been active onstage since childhood, her academic background is in science (B.A. astrophysics: Columbia College; M.S. physics: University of CA at San Diego.) In 2006 she returned to New York to work in theatre and science education. A week later she met Wayne Yeager and worked with him on The Eight: Reindeer Monologues and End Scene before the idea for Reality Aside was born. Favorite performances include The Room, The Sandbox, The Raven, and Eugene O’Neil’s astoundingly depressing Before Breakfast.  Recently Eve has devoted much of her energy to playwriting, specifically science-themed and interactive works. Reality Aside staged her dark one-act, Vacuum, at the Wonderland One-Act Festival at Theatre Row in June 2007. Her interactive educational scripts are the basis of our touring children's show. Eve is a lecturer and educator at the Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium, a private tutor, and heads out to Arizona every few months for astronomy research at Kitt Peak National Observatory.

 

Adam Edward Orin (treasurer, secretary, and resident physicist)

Adam Orin met Eve Armstrong in the bowels of a physics graduate program in sunny San Diego, California. He spent a year learning about the unavoidably disastrous effects that quantum mechanics has on his everyday life, and how to cope with them. Then he set off to bounce a laser beam off the moon to measure perturbations in spacetime curvature, testing whether Albert Einstein really knew more than peanuts. It was exciting for a while, especially when the local townspeople mistook his research group for aliens. But Adam's real passion is making these crazy ideas come alive for an audience. So now he is pursuing a Master's degree in education from UC San Diego, while teaching science to middle and high school students. In his free time he breeds giant man-eating puffer fish and hones his pirating skills. Most recently he pillaged and plundered his way down the Nile, vowing blood upon the head of anyone who stood in his watery path. Alligators still tremble to hear his name.

 

Jack* the Dragon (resident dragon)

Jack the Dragon was born upside-down in a miniature granite villa perched precariously on the mossier side of the westernmost branch of an ancient carrot tree, under the light of a new moon. His love for theatrics blossomed at an early age. Trampling roses one morning, he happened upon a troupe of traveling orangutans enacting a play alluding to a play referring to a play within a play within a play fraught with jealousy, betrayal, and insatiable lust. The impressionable young lizard watched with rapt attention and then fled home, suddenly dead-certain that his father's best friend's sister had conspired with the sister's attorney's mother-in-law to brutally murder the family auto mechanic in order to run away with his yellow hummer. And he relayed this theory to his mother - in flawless iambic pentameter, no less.

Convinced that her son's energy was forever doomed to funnel pointlessly away into a nonexistent world of corny melodrama, the wise woman lost no time in sending Jack to New York City to become an actor. Happy Jack now spends his days practicing monologues and sewing elaborate Elisabethan costumes that he can't fit into. He has yet to be cast in anything, but patience! He's got at least a couple thousand more years to hone his craft. All that matters is, he's found his niche. He loves neon lights and black-and-white cookies. On a drizzly grey day you may well find him in the cheese aisle at Zabar's or up a tree in Riverside Park, belting Annie to the better half of New Jersey.

*The "c" is silent.