About LIVE Theater Co.

Melanie S. Armer
Chance D. Muehleck
Co-founders

Melanie S. Armer is the Co-founder of The Nerve Tank, where she developed and directed Chance D. Muehleck’s In The Heart of a Chinese Curse at Dixon Place as a part of their “Under Construction” series in 2008. She also developed and directed Mr. Muehleck’s The Attendants at chashama in the fall of 2007. Past collaborations with Muehleck include directing the 10-minute version of A Gathering, created for Open Stage's Play-In-A-Day and remounted by Dog&Pony in Pittsburgh, and Tagging April for FLUX and in Valdez, Alaska. She is the Co-founder and Artistic Director of LIVE Theater Company, where she has produced and directed the world premieres of Muehleck's The Honeypot Redux and Jane Shepard's Eating the Dead. Work with other NYC theatre companies includes The Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Women's Project & Productions, New Georges, Theater for the New City, the 2002, 2005 & 2007 NYC Fringe Festivals, and over 25 plays for Circle East. In Pittsburgh her work includes As Bees In Honey Drown and Sympathetic Magic at The Open Stage Theatre (where she also served as Managing Director), and The Cay at Prime Stage. Ms. Armer assisted Leonard Foglia on the Broadway revival of Wait Until Dark and director Michael Warren Powell on Lanford Wilson's A Sense of Place. Ms. Armer is a member of SSDC, a proud alumnus of The Lincoln Center Directors Lab, and has taught at Marymount Manhattan College and Point Park University in Pittsburgh. Her current focus is on developing non-traditional theater in collaborative environments.

Chance D. Muehleck is a creator of play texts, theatre assemblies, and concepts for performance. His work has been developed or produced at Theatre Artists of Marin in California, and at Circle Repertory Theatre, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and The Present Company in New York. Primary Stages commissioned him to write a short play on the American experience, which was then presented Off-Broadway. He is the recipient of the John Golden Award for Excellence in Playwriting and was a finalist for the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Heideman Award. His multimedia performance installation The Attendants was developed while in residence at chashama, and will travel to Basel, Switzerland in 2009. He is Co-founder of The Nerve Tank, an independent theatre based in New York that produces collaborative art for the twenty-first century. His physical theatre piece In the Heart of a Chinese Curse was workshopped at Dixon Place. Chance has taught playwriting at Hampshire College and Point Park University, has written reviews for The New York Theatre Experience, and served as an adjudicator for the New York International Fringe Festival. As a dramaturg he assisted Tammy Ryan with her play Baby’s Blues at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. Two of his monologues appear in the Audition Arsenal series published by Smith & Kraus. His memberships include The Dramatists Guild, Inc. and Circle East.