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 various capacities in over 70 productions.  Defying classification, he is a theatre manager, set designer, artistic director, technical director, stage manager, actor, and clay-dragon maker. He and Eve Armstrong met during rehearsals for a show that never actually culminated in a performance - yet they forged ahead with other endeavours and began plans for Reality Aside in December 2006. Wayne's favorites include House Keeper, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: Abridged, Rock Horror Show, Owl and the Pussycat, and Inspecting Carol.  New York credits include The Eight: Reindeer Monologues, End Scene, Psyche in the Dark, and Murder Me Always. Reality Aside is not the first theatre company Wayne has founded.  Previously he established the Hearth Cricket Theatre Company in River Falls, Wisconsin, which he directed for three years and brought to the Minnesota Fringe Festival in 2002.  Wayne has managed The Producer’s Club theatres on West 44th Street, and currently works in various capacities at the Laugh Factory on 42nd and 8th.  He is one semester away from completing a bachelor’s degree in Theatre Arts from the University of Wisconsin.

 

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

Eve Armstrong began acting as a child and continued performing after arriving in New York to attend Columbia College. After receiving a bachelor's degree in astronomy and physics, she pursued graduate work in physics at UC San Diego. Upon receiving her Master's degree she moved back 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 Eight: Reindeer Monologues, Welcome to the Neighborhood, The Room, The Sandbox, and Eugene O’Neil’s astoundingly depressing Before Breakfast.  Recently she has devoted much of her energy toward playwriting. Her short dark one-act, Vacuum, was staged in the Wonderland One-Act Festival at Theatre Row in June 2007. Eve works with C.U.N.Y.'s Science & the Arts program, in public education at the Museum of Natural History, and heads out to Arizona every few months for 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 teaches astronomy to college 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.