The Dog Poop Attack

Sam is the founding Artistic and Executive Director of The Cherry Arts, as well as an award-winning theater translator and one of the US’s preeminent directors of new international plays.

Founded in 2014, the Cherry is a multi-arts hub in Ithaca New York. The company programs a studio, an art gallery, and a performance space, with a central creative focus on new works of theater that are “radically local | radically global”. On the “global” front, the Cherry has produced over a dozen English-language premières of contemporary plays from Argentina, Belgium, El Salvador, France, Germany, Mexico, Québec, Serbia, and more. On the “local” front, the Cherry has commissioned many new works from Ithaca-based creators, including plays with video, site-specific installations, and three headphone walking-plays. Works the Cherry has premiered have gone on to further productions in NYC, LA, Toronto, and London, including at the National Theater.

Over a decade as a freelance director in NYC, Sam regularly developed new plays at the Lark, and was a long-time Artistic Associate with the Obie-winning New/Ohio Theatre. Productions at the Ohio include Cressida Among the Greeks (Drama Desk nomination); and original adaptations of novels by Duras and Queneau. Hater, his unconventional translation of Le Misanthrope, starred Zoe Winters and Merritt Wever and has gone on to multiple productions around the US.

Other new works developed and directed in New York include Bedbugs!!!, a sci-fi musical starring Tony Award winner Lena Hall (recipient of five NYMF jury awards) and Go-Go Kitty, GO! (Best Play FringeFirst among 200 shows). Other NYC work has appeared at the Atlantic, Rattlestick, Hypothetical, New York Theatre Workshop, Theater for the New City, HERE, Charas/El Bohio, Expanded Arts, and Clubbed Thumb.

Regional directing includes more than twenty full productions at companies including the Hangar and Kitchen theaters (Ithaca), Capital Rep (Albany), Mason Street Warehouse (Michigan), StageWorks (Hudson), and numerous productions at Portland Stage in Maine, for whom he also served as Casting Director for a decade.

Sam’s translation of the French play George Kaplan was produced by the Bridge Project in NYC, and his translations of Molière and Marivaux have been published in The Mercurian, as was his co-translation of Rafael Spregelburd’s Todo. His co-translations of five plays by Argentine playwright Santiago Loza were published by Seagull Books in a volume that received the Honorable Mention for books of theater translation from ASTR. One of these plays (Winter Animals) also appeared in the Global Queer Plays festival at London’s Arcola Theater, and was published in the Oberon Books anthology of the same name. As a director, Sam has developed translations of new Bulgarian plays both in NYC (HotINK at the Lark) and in Sofia (Red Room). His community adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, created for a co-production with the Hangar Theatre, is published by YouthPLAYS.

Buggeln is a regular director at the Mousson d’été festival in France, and has received grants from the Peg Sandtvoord Foundation, the Dramatists’ Guild, Community Arts Partnership, and NYSCA. He is an alumnus of the Lincoln Center Directors’ Lab, and was a guest artist with New York Theatre Workshop’s Dartmouth summer residency. He has been a faculty guest director and instructor at Cornell University, Ithaca College, SUNY Albany, Hunter College, and NYU-Tisch. He is a member of the international artists’ network The Fence, and chair of the English Language Committee of the European new play exchange network Eurodram.

His name is pronounced like bugELLen.

Stephen St. Francis Decky is a multimedia artist and writer whose work has appeared in an array of festivals, collections, and museums, including The New Britain Museum of American Art and The Museum of Fine Arts, Nagoya, Japan. As a projection and video designer, he has worked on operas, musicals, and video installations with Mountain Time Arts in Bozeman, Montana, IlluminArts Miami, and Beth Morrison Projects, along with many other arts organizations. Stephen has taught Animation and Film classes at several schools, including Ithaca College and Tufts University, and his films have screened at festivals internationally, including the Camden International Film Festival and the VOID International Animation Film Festival in Copenhagen, Denmark. His first novel—Werewolf Movie —will be published this Fall by Frayed Edge Press.