American Thymele Theatre

Overview

American Thymele Theatre is a New York-based nonprofit touring theatre company founded in 1993 by actor and director Stephen Diacrussi, who serves as its producing artistic director (Playbill). Its stated mission is to preserve and promote Hellenic culture in America by staging plays with Greek themes free of charge to the public, and it is chartered by the State of New York as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (American Thymele Theatre). Before it became known for its Euripides project, the company spent its first fifteen years as a repertory touring company specializing in rarely staged Greek comedies — a chapter of its history that competing reference results barely mention (American Thymele Theatre).

The repertory years: comedy festivals and touring

The company’s initial production was George Kelly’s The Show-Off, presented as a bilingual adaptation at the Kraine Theater in New York (American Thymele Theatre). In 1995 it inaugurated the Angelos Vlachos Comedy Festival, a ten-year series devoted to the 19th-century Athenian playwright, opening with Vlachos’s The Grocer’s Daughter at the Frederick Loewe Theatre (American Thymele Theatre). That production toured to Boston and Philadelphia in 1996 and to New Jersey and Connecticut in 1997, and the company later returned to Philadelphia to premiere two more Vlachos comedies, My Sober Husband and Mr. Floret’s Wife, which prompted further touring (American Thymele Theatre). The Grocer’s Daughter received its English-language premiere in Baltimore in 1999, followed by extended New York tours that included a dinner-theatre engagement in 2000 (American Thymele Theatre).

In 2001 the company mounted a revival of Maxwell Anderson’s Barefoot in Athens at the Olympic Theatre, marking the play’s 50th anniversary since its Broadway debut, as part of the “2001: Year of Socrates” festivities; the run was extended into the following season with daytime performances for New York City public schools (American Thymele Theatre). The company says the Cultural Olympiad Committee chose its production of The Grocer’s Daughter for presentation as part of the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens (American Thymele Theatre). It premiered The Needy Barrister in St. Louis, Missouri, paired with The Grocer’s Daughter — by then a touring favorite — took that repertory to Phoenix, Arizona, and, back in New York, staged daytime performances of Nikos Kazantzakis’s Kouros for city public schools (American Thymele Theatre).

The New York Euripides Summer Festival (2009-2023)

In 2009 the company launched the New York Euripides Summer Festival, an annual free series with the goal of staging all of Euripides’ extant plays in chronological order (TornosNews.gr). Early documented productions include Rhesus (2009) and Alcestis (2010), followed by Medea (2011), directed by Nichole Hamilton with Danijela Popovic in the title role, playing the East River Park Amphitheatre on July 12-13, the Naumburg Bandshell on July 14 and the Chernuchin Theatre on July 17 (Playbill). Children of Hercules (2012) was directed by Diacrussi with a 25-person cast at the East River Park Amphitheatre, the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park and Theatre 500 in the Times Square Arts Center (Playbill). Hippolytus (2013), the festival’s fifth year, was directed by Diacrussi with a 22-person cast across the East River Park Amphitheatre, the Naumburg Bandshell and Theatre 777 (BroadwayWorld). The chronology continued with Andromache (2014), Hecuba (2015), the satyr play Cyclops (2016), The Madness of Hercules (2017) — the first presented in a contemporary staging — Suppliants (2018), and Iphigenia among the Taurians and Daughters of Troy (2019) (American Thymele Theatre).

During the COVID-19 pandemic the festival moved to digital productions: Helen (screened at Columbia University) and Electra in 2020, Phoenician Maidens and Iphigenia at Aulis in 2021, and Ion and Orestes in 2022 (American Thymele Theatre; TornosNews.gr). The festival returned to live performance in 2023 with Bacchae, directed by Lorca Peress with a cast of 16 headed by Diacrussi, playing the Actors’ Temple Theatre, the AMT Theater and the Marilyn Monroe Theatre from June 26 to 30 — the closing production of the festival’s 14-year run, coinciding with the company’s 30th anniversary year (TornosNews.gr; BroadwayWorld).

Before the pandemic, festival productions premiered each summer at the East River Park Amphitheatre — a venue whose open-air classics tradition stretched back to the 1950s before its demolition in late 2021 — and extended to the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park, the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater, the Jackie Robinson Bandshell, the Almira Kennedy Coursey Amphitheater, and off-Broadway houses including Theatre 500, the 777 Theatre and the Stage II Theatre (American Thymele Theatre). The productions were fully staged with ancient-style costumes, scenery and music (BroadwayWorld).

Beyond Euripides: readings, grants and institutional afterlife

Alongside the festival, the company kept up parallel programming strands. It revived its 19th-century Athenian one-act comedy series, with the Federation of Hellenic Societies sponsoring staged readings of Not Qualified and A Servant Is Sought in 2016 and of Mourning Does Not Become Her at the Bridge Theatre in 2018 (American Thymele Theatre). Its Spring Readings series workshopped new classical-themed plays: Emory Wilson’s The Father of Comedy (2020), A Season in Sparta (2021) and Hit-List: Cicero (2022) (American Thymele Theatre). It presented The Petrakis Universe for the New York Public Library under a grant from the Stavros S. Niarchos Foundation, which led to an encore staging at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center (American Thymele Theatre). In 2021 it joined Leadership 100 as an honorary member of the sponsoring organizations for the bicentennial of the 1821 Greek Revolution (American Thymele Theatre).

The work has found an institutional afterlife beyond the stage: Brown University purchased the company’s filmed 2013 Hippolytus for curricular use in 2022, and the digital Helen was screened at Columbia University (American Thymele Theatre). According to the company’s biography carried by BroadwayWorld, Diacrussi is a character actor whose stage credits include The Marriage Proposal, The Clouds and The General’s Daughter as well as the long-running off-Broadway Socrates, Socrates at the Actors’ Playhouse; his film credits include In the Name of the Father and Meet the Parents, and his television credits include Law & Order: SVU and The Sopranos (BroadwayWorld).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not claim independent confirmation of the 2004 Cultural Olympiad selection: that account comes from the company itself and its press materials, and no independent contemporaneous report of the Athens presentation was verified in this research pass. It does not adjudicate whether Euripides’ surviving corpus numbers 18 or 19 plays — the authorship of Rhesus is disputed among scholars — and instead follows the company’s own 19-title festival chronology, which includes the satyr play Cyclops. It does not treat the National Herald’s 30th-anniversary retrospective or Time Out New York’s Children of Hercules listing as sources: both were cited in an earlier version of this profile but were unreachable during the October 2026 rewrite pass, so they were dropped and every fact they supported is covered by the sources cited below. Finally, it does not present Stephen Diacrussi’s acting credits as independently reviewed work; they come from a company-supplied biography published by BroadwayWorld.