Nick Fracaro
Performer. Producer. Writer
About
Nick Fracaro began his writing journey after accolades from his elementary school teacher Miss Weidensee. He was seven years old, and he already knew two things: he would one day be old enough to marry her, and he would pursue the life of a writer that she saw in him. A stint of juvenile delinquency interrupted that pursuit — but also grounded and directed it. As his writer role model Jean Genet phrased it, “My ambition is to put my crime on stage.”
Nick has been making trouble writing, performing, and producing theatre since 1981 — and he has the arrest record to prove it. Co-founder of Thieves Theatre (later International Culture Lab), he has spent decades producing edgy, site-specific, and physically daring work, from Illinois prison yards to Lower East Side squats to international stages. When he’s not producing, he’s performing; when he’s not performing, he’s writing.
His serialized autofiction Tipi on the Hill— a memoir of living three years in a shantytown den of thieves in 1990s New York — is the latest dispatch from a life lived very much on purpose.
Work
Thieves Theatre / International Culture Lab
Co-founder. Producer. Performer. 1981 — present.
The company is known for its immersive, site-specific and experimental theater productions. As Thieves Theatre (1981-2007) it primarily examined the role of “the other” in contemporary society with a series of controversial landmark productions starting with its 1982 collaboration with a group of ex-mental patients called On Our Own in a production of Marat/Sade; to its world premiere in 1987 of Fassbinder’s “unproducible” Trash, the City, and Death; and perhaps its best known project, the 1990-1993 Nomad Monad: The Making of Thieves Theatre’s Last Stand for which Nick and his co-director Gabriele Schafer erected and lived in a full-sized Lakota tipi replica, handmade from 78 US#3 mailbags, in the then oldest Manhattan shantytown at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, presenting plays, art exhibits and other work inside it. [see Spring 2015 issue of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art]
In 2007 the company renamed itself International Culture Lab to more accurately reflect the broadening of it mission: a focus on cross-cultural exchanges, bringing together artists from diverse backgrounds to explore global themes, foster intercultural dialogue, and promote creativity that transcends national and cultural borders. ICL has collaborated with artists and theaters in Argentina, Canada, the Republic of Georgia, Germany and Turkey. Focusing on its annual Ritual Cabaret festival from 2016 to 2025, it brought together a diverse array of performers to explore the butoh-inspired theme of transformation. ICL challenged artists to deconstruct and reinvent their particular art form, whatever it might be. It asked: If the goal is TRANSFORMATION — of the self, of society, of politics — what will it take to bring this about? Is it possible to invent a new genre? What is Ritual Cabaret to you?
Thieves Theatre
