Nick Fracaro
Performer. Producer. Writer
About
Nick Fracaro was born and raised on an Illinois farm. He became a writer after his poem received accolades from his second-grade teacher Miss Weidense, a street performer upon becoming a juvenile delinquent inspired by Alfred E. Neuman, and he began his producing journey after playing Roger the revolutionary in a university production of Jean Genet’s The Balcony.
Inspired by Genet who “put his crime on stage,” in 1981 he co-founded and became artistic director of the cross-disciplinary Thieves Theater named in Genet’s honor. For Thieves he directed Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade at Toronto’s Theatre Centre, Heiner Mueller’s Despoiled Shore Medeamaterial Landscape with Argonauts and the world premiere of R.W. Fassbinder’s Trash, the City and Death in New York, among many other projects, including ICL’s Diva Divan.
He was a founding member of RAT (1994-2004), an international coalition of theater workers dedicated to sharing resources and ways of working, for which he organized conferences in New York, Philadelphia and Rosario, Argentina.
As dramaturg at Dallas’s Undermain Theater in 1999, he created one of the first theater blogs which he later continued at RatSass.
He holds a BA from Illinois Benedictine College and an MA in Literature and Creative Writing from The University of Illinois at Chicago.
In short, Nick has been making trouble writing, performing, and producing theatre most of his life — and he has the arrest record to prove it. 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.
Thieves Theatre (1981-2007) is known for its immersive, site-specific and experimental theater productions. Primarily examining the role of “the other” in contemporary society, it produced a series of controversial landmark productions — from its 1982 collaboration in Toronto on a production of Marat/Sade with a group of ex-mental patients called On Our Own; to its world premiere in 1987 of R.W. Fassbinder’s “unproducible” Trash, the City, and Death in NYC; to 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. New York University’s Fales Library is collecting and archiving all of Thieves Theatre’s documentation — the years spanning from the company’s inception in 1981 to 2007
After studying Butoh and focusing on physical theatre for several years, in 2007 the company renamed itself International Culture Lab to more accurately reflect the broadening of its mission: a focus on cross-cultural exchanges, bringing together artists from diverse backgrounds to explore global themes. ICL has collaborated with artists and theaters in Argentina, Canada, the Republic of Georgia, Germany and Turkey. From 2016 to 2025, its annual Ritual Cabaret festival brought together an array of international and local 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?
RAT Conference
Co-founder. 1994 – 2004
Soon after graduating from the Yale School of Drama, Erik Ehn joined fellow alum Gabriele Schafer and her partner Nick in conceiving Thieves Theatre’s New York incarnation. In 1987, he resigned as co-artistic director of Thieves to concentrate more fully on his work as playwright. In that pursuit, he discovered that there were numerous small, experimental theaters around the country producing writers like himself — “language playwrights” such as Mac Wellman, Len Jenkin, and Jeffrey Jones. In 1993, he wrote an article calling for these under-the-radar theaters across the country to organize and share resources. He termed his concept Big Cheap Theater or Art Workers Hostelry. The proposal was published in the Yale journal Theatre and drew responses from several theaters nationwide.
RAT was a marker for the beginning of the digital medium’s direct impact on relationships among theater peers. Throughout its 10-year history, the press cited RAT as the “regional alternative theatre revolution.” The Rat Conference website, created by Nick, dates back to the earliest days of the World Wide Web, launched during the browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft in 1995. At the site, Thieves digitized all the documentation from the conferences, thereby giving greater access and credence to the RAT revolution.
Along with also organizing three of RAT’s face-to-face conferences, over the years, Nick also created four artfully crafted zines, including their digital versions, which today are historical artifacts of the early days of the www. The old-media zines were part of Printed Matter’s artists book catalog; two of them were later collected by MoMA
Writing
Nick’s thesis for his MA at the University of Illinois at Chicago was titled An Autobiography of Jesus Christ. While not digitized, the life writings/meta-memoir that make up its essence are to this day the catalyst and inspiration for much of his writing. He has written one play, titled Travelling Light. The RAT Conference days, as well as the heady days of the so-called theatrosphere, inspired his Rat Sass blog. But the bulk of his writing — including his autofiction Tipi on the Hill, its concomitant life-writings section Meta-memoir, as well as current musings on various topics — can be found on Substack. Follow him there.
Contact
You can reach Nick via email at nick (at) nickfracaro.com