Randy Weiner is an American playwright, producer and theater/nightclub owner. Weiner co-wrote the Off-Broadway musical The Donkey Show and, as one-third of EMURSIVE, produced the Drama Desk Award winning New York premiere of Punchdrunk's Sleep No More. He is co-owner of NYC "theater of varieties" The Box and The Box Soho.
Weiner was born Edward Randall Weiner, the son of a New York banker and lawyer. He graduated cum laude from Harvard University. On October 1, 1995, he married fellow theater arts graduate Diane Paulus.[1]
Weiner and Paulus along with a few other theater school graduates established a small theater troupe in New York City called Project 400 Theatre Group.[2][3] With Project 400, Weiner and Paulus specialized in creating avante-garde musical productions which married classic theater and modern music.[4] These included a rock version of The Tempest, an R&B Phaedra and a hip-hop Lohengrin.[4]
In collaboration with Paulus, Weiner co-created The Donkey Show, a disco adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which ran off-Broadway from 1999 to 2005 and was revived in 2009 for Paulus' first production as director of the American Repertory Theater.[5] Critics cited the production as an exemplary of a trend in which edgy avante-garde theater had become fashionably mainstream.[6]
In February 2007, Weiner cofounded (with partners Richard Kimmel and Simon Hammerstein) the Box theater on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.[7] The cabaret theater has drawn attention for its risque burlesque acts.[8] In September 2009, Weiner and Hammerstein announced the opening of Purgatorio, a temporary Halloween-season nightclub with a macabre sex-based theme.[9]
Weiner has served on the Advisory Committee on the Arts at Harvard University.[10] He has guest lectured on theater arts at Columbia University, Barnard College, New York University, and Yale.