Danse Macabre Theatrics was founded in 1999 by writer/director Frank Cwiklik, with the purpose of attracting new and younger audiences to live theater, and to revitalize the medium by way of a common sense approach to storytelling -- no agenda, no pretension, no goal other than basic, old fashioned entertainment. In an age of increasingly polarized entertainment media, and a live theater community seemingly more interested in attracting casting agents, tourists, and academics than any real audiences, the most radical move one could make in theater is backwards -- back into the basic genres, back into vaudeville and burlesque, back into the audience-friendly, rough and tumble motifs that even Shakespeare and the Greek dramatists embraced and reinvented. Abstract, linear, commercial, experimental, funny, sad, good, bad, DMTheatrics covered the full range of performance expression, the only criteria being our interest in the story and our practical limitations and abilities to stage it. Good, bad, awful, or brilliant, it was never boring.

Since its inception, DMTheatrics directly, or in collaboration with other companies, produced over two dozen shows in the amount of time it takes some companies to produce three or four. On these pages are the record of the five-year lifespan of one of the most daring and exciting theater companies of the New York theater scene, DMTheatrics, and the nearly one hundred talented artists, actors, writers, directors, and producers who made it happen.  To all of them, we thank you.  To all those who came to see us work, we hope it moved and excited you as much as it did us.  To those who missed it... you missed a hell of a ride.