Biography

Early Life

Joshua Crone was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma on March 25, 1975 to artist and homemaker Barbara Crone, née Fusco (1951-) and musician and computer scientist Michael Crone (1945-). He was the second of four children, after actress and attorney Audra Alexander, née Crone (1971-2024) and before opera singer and homemaker Lydia Howery, née Crone (1977-) and engineer, guitarist and producer Jonathan Crone (1983-).

As an infant he developed life-threatening encephalitis after receiving a DTP vaccine. The doctor recommended trepanation as the only means of relieving pressure on the baby’s skull, at the cost of permanent disability. His devoutly Christian parents chose prayer instead, and the child experienced a recovery sudden and unexpected enough to make the church bulletin as “miraculous.” The miracle was not without consequences, however, as the neurological effects would take years to overcome.

Crone’s early years were spent in Upstate New York and Central Pennsylvania. An introverted child, he wrote poems and drew pictures and read a great deal, especially the Bible, Tolkien, Hans Christian Andersen, and the English romantics. Taught that God had saved him for a reason, he brought friends to church and sang hymns on the school bus, earning him the nickname “The Singing Priest.” With no television in the house for much of his childhood, he and his sisters would put on plays for their parents. The family often sang together, and his mother would read aloud from the Bible and classics like Tolstoy and Defoe. From his father he learned to program computers and work with tools, while his mother encouraged his artistic and literary pursuits.

The family moved to Florida’s Space Coast in the late 80s. While visiting Disney World for the first time, Crone developed a fascination with Walt Disney. He read books about his life and work, drew cartoons and flip books, developed a cast of animated characters, and enlisted friends to help animate a series of pipe dream projects. In the 8th grade he made his first and only animated short by filming individual drawings with the school’s video camera and editing out frames in a process that took longer than the drawings themselves.

With puberty he “put away childish things” and joined the wrestling team. He spent his sophomore year getting thrown on his head, his junior year fighting off his back, and his senior year winning match after match until a low GPA disqualified him. His first encounter with the power of playwriting came in an English class, when he read aloud the part of Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman” and was reduced to tears in front of his classmates. Summers were spent working as a carpenter and roofer for a fellow church member, and on Sundays he was a drummer in a church band led by his father.

Military Service

A few days after graduating from Melbourne High School, he left home and abandoned plans to study computer science at Florida State. During a lunch break from his job at Office Depot, he walked into the recruiting station next door and signed an enlistment contract with a Marine Corps recruiter for guaranteed infantry and overseas duty. Before boot camp, he took the first of several cross-country motorcycle trips to work as a gravedigger for his uncle Joe Fusco in Rome, NY. A lifelong role model, Uncle Joe helped him prepare mentally and physically for Parris Island.

“Overseas” ended up being Guantanamo Bay, a closed naval station. His job was to guard the fenceline and, with the outbreak of the 1994 Cuban Rafter Crisis, the base itself. He spent his free time taking calculus courses with City Colleges of Chicago, training for a shot at special forces, and corresponding with his girlfriend back home. When she ended their relationship midway through his deployment, his focus shifted from math to literature. Given a choice between orders to the East or West Coast, he chose California at the urging of Gunny Coehlo, a recon Marine who had helped him prepare for an endurance test known as the “recon indoc.”

He rode from Florida to California and passed the indoc with flying colors, but his new unit refused to release him. They trained him instead as a scout swimmer on Coronado Island and an assault climber in Joshua Tree National Park. After receiving a battery of shots for deployment to Japan, he fell ill with a lung condition that nearly suffocated him and scarred his lungs for life. He declined the offer of a medical discharge and completed his training.

With his plans for special forces dashed, he turned his full attention to literature, reading constantly and spending much of his free time at bookstores up and down the California coast. At a Borders in Mission Viejo he read a few pages of “The Elements of Playwriting” by Luis E. Catron and decided on the spot to become a playwright.

His first play was “Shadowboxing,” a one-act about an unlikely friendship between a baker and a homeless man. Following advice in Catron’s book, he gave the script to a high school drama teacher in nearby San Clemente. She organized a reading and his mother flew out to attend. The thrill of seeing his work brought to life by actors strengthened his resolve.

He deployed to Okinawa later that year. While in Japan, he developed a lifelong interest in noh theater and spent weekends sculpting Shisa lions, after a master craftsman in Naha’s pottery district agreed to train him in exchange for cases of American beer from Camp Hansen. He also wrote his first full-length work “Nebuchadnezzar,” a play in verse inspired by William Blake and the Book of Daniel, much of it written in a ship’s library in the Sea of Japan.

His last year of service after returning from deployment was split between managing the base gym at San Onofre and taking acting and writing classes at nearby Saddleback College. He wrote and performed several one-acts with scene partners and had his stage debut as a servant in a school production of She Stoops to Conquer directed by Phyllis Gitlin.

Backpacking

Honorably discharged after four years of service, Crone stopped in Philadelphia to see the birthplace of the Marine Corps. He visited the Rodin Museum and the Duchamp Room, attended a modern dance exhibition and befriended a group of art students. His brief experience as a newly free man in the City of Brotherly Love was so positive that he would think of Philly ever after as a place to settle down.

But first he would see the world. He continued on to his parent’s home in Erie, Pennsylvania to work for a few months as a security guard at a nursing home and prepare for a backpacking tour of Europe and the Near East. That winter he wrote his second full-length play “Rules of Ownership, a farce set in the art world. Inspired in part by his visit to Philadelphia, the play was dedicated to his mother.

In January he visited New York for the first time and boarded a plane for Milan. He visited Italian cousins near Rome and Naples and Polish family in Lublin and Warsaw. He studied both languages, taught English, got rescued by Turkish fishermen while trying to swim the Hellespont, and worked briefly for King Eli Avivi of Akhzivland, a micronation in northwest Israel.

Struck by the all-too-human scale of Biblical sites while cycling around the Sea of Galilee and touring the ruins of Jericho, he began the long and ultimately unfinished process of becoming an atheist. Throughout his travels, he journaled, wrote poetry, drew extensively, and completed his next two plays, “The Last King of Naples” and “Playing God,” the former on Crete and the latter in London.

London and New York

While waiting tables at “Cafe K” in London’s Soho district, he approached an established theater director with “Rules of Ownership.” The director told him something that would stay with him forever: “You have to do it yourself. No one will do it for you.” And so, with lumber supplied by the cafe’s owner, Crone converted the basement into a small venue and put out a casting call.

Three of the four actors dropped out in the first week of rehearsals over lack of confidence in the fledgling director, but Welsh actor Zach Lee stayed on. He recast two of the parts with friends and advised Crone to play the fourth himself. The show ran for two weeks, and the basement became a stand-up venue when Crone returned to the States after closing night.

A few weeks later, he was walking the docks in Seattle’s Ballard district in search of a fishing job. He quickly found one as a cook and deck hand on the F/V Mystic, a five-man seiner. He lived and worked on the boat for several months before setting sail for Southeast Alaska, where he earned enough to move to Krakow and write his first novel “Guantanamo,” loosely based on his service during the Cuban Rafter Crisis.

Intent on finding an agent and becoming a working writer, he moved to New York in early 2001 with a Polish economics student he had met in Krakow. The two were married in Brooklyn City Hall in August 2001, one month before 9/11. Although Crone was not directly affected by the tragedy, his nearness to the events cast a shadow over his life and marriage. Unable to write or find fulfillment in a well-paid job as a database designer at a healthcare union, he left New York and separated from his wife a year later to study philosophy on the GI Bill in Krakow. Their divorce was finalized in 2003.

Poland

In his sophomore year at the Jagiellonian University, Crone found a mentor in American playwright and screenwriter John Steppling, who agreed to direct Crone’s first attempt at a 9/11 play, “Warsaw Rebuilds.” The English-language production ran to packed houses in Krakow’s Loch Camelot alongside “Above & Below,” an opening one-act written by Steppling for the occasion. Steppling also invited him to write a screenplay for the “Death Penalty Project” at the Lodz Film School. Although the project was never realized, the script would later serve as the basis for “Solitaire,” a play about prison abuse at Abu Ghraib.

The success of “Warsaw Rebuilds” encouraged him to launch the theater group Axis Mundi with the help of Polish photographers Edyta Zwolinska and Adrian Spula and graphic designer Jacek Mrowczyk. The group produced “Four Views of Golgotha,” a bilingual showcase with plays by Steppling, Crone, Soren Gauger, and Zenon Fajfer, whose “Pietà” went on to become an annual event in Krakow. Crone also wrote and performed in “The Recruiter,” based on his conversation in the recruiter’s office, and “Spleen & Will,” a solo show about Artur Schopenhauer. His most ambitious project was “Godhead,” a modern reworking of Euripides’ “Bacchae” translated into Polish by Marta Orczykowska and starring a young Rafal Zawierucha. And in a final burst of dark energy before starting his master’s thesis, he wrote his second 9/11 play, “Squatters.”

Crone’s thesis was prompted by questions about the nature of spacetime and the possibility of axiomatic certainty on any subject. His thesis advisor was philosopher and physicist Dr. Jan Czerniawski. Focusing on early works by Hans Reichenbach and other neo-Kantians, Crone prepared by taking an intensive course in German at the Goethe Institute in Berlin and by researching the paper in the philosophy library of the Humboldt University. To deepen his insights, he also tried mushrooms for the first time on a trip to Amsterdam.

He wrote the thesis in English and defended it successfully in Polish in the summer of 2008. Endearingly titled “Realizing Space: Geometry, Relativity and the Transcendental Aesthetic,” the paper was dedicated to his father.

In the meantime, he was accepted for a film directing internship in Lodz. His heart was still in the theater, however. He left the storied film school on orientation day and moved to Warsaw to apply for an internship at the Warsaw Theater Academy. When that failed to materialize, he began working full-time as a Polish translator, attending plays and operas regularly with opera director Ewelina Pietrowiak, but writing little besides “Boom!”, a solo show about real estate speculation in Poland, and “Flatland,” a children’s play based on the novella by Edwin A. Abbott.

Berlin

Eager to return to Berlin and philosophy, he applied for a doctoral program in ancient philosophy at the Humboldt University and was accepted into a pre-doc year. While studying Ancient Greek in German to prepare for the program and translating Polish into English to pay the bills, he wrote a short play about language barriers for a ten-minute play contest at The English Theatre Berlin. “In Other Words” was selected, and the experience of seeing it produced, combined with emotions brought on by news of the Smolensk air disaster, led him to abandon philosophy and return to playwriting, and ultimately, Poland.

He immediately set to work on “Solitaire,” his first full-length play to draw heavily on his experiences as a Marine. At the same time, Lydia Ziemke, the playwriting contest’s German director, approached him with an offer to split a one-week rental of London’s Southwark Playhouse. With Ziemke signed on as dramaturg, he agreed to produce and direct “Squatters” at the English Theatre Berlin and take it to the Southwark alongside her production of Dea Loher’s Land Without Words.

London actors Alexander Hulme and Leah Harounoff were cast via Skype. They traveled to Berlin for rehearsals and the play premiered in Berlin and London that fall. In the time between shows at the Southwark, Crone organized a reading of “Solitaire” and filmed coverage of “Squatters” for editing into a theater TV version, a popular format in Poland.

When the show closed, he returned to Krakow and began working as a German academic translator for the Humboldt University and writing his second novel “Pergamon,” a fictional account of a translator’s psychic disintegration, with echoes of Strindberg’s Inferno and a climactic vision of an impending conflict with Russia. He also won the English Theatre Berlin’s second ten-minute play competition with “The Connection,” a sci-fi comedy about a near future where children’s emotions are ruled by handheld devices.

Film School

Heavily influenced by Jung’s newly published “Red Book” and badly in need of insight, Crone traveled to Jordan, where he rented a room from a Bedouin family on Mt. Nebo and wrote and illustrated an unfinished illuminated manuscript called “The Book of Nebo.” The work gave him so much satisfaction that he decided to return to the Lodz Film School and pursue his childhood dream of becoming an animator.

He moved to Lodz directly from Jordan and took the entrance exam for the animation program, a daylong drawing marathon in a room full of desks built for children. He didn’t make the cut. Determined to find a way in regardless, he submitted the theater TV version of “Squatters” and was readmitted as a directing intern.

His time at the film school was brief but formative. He learned the basics of visual storytelling, editing and cinematography, wrote several screenplays, crewed on a variety of film sets, and was exposed to the Polish style of fly-on-the-wall documentary filmmaking typified by the Black Series. Most importantly, he met and befriended a young cinematography student named Michal Dymek. Dymek taught him how to shoot with a digital camera and agreed to DP his first attempt at a feature film on the strength of a five-page treatment full of uncanny parallels to the coming lockdowns.

With Dymek signed on and the cast of “Squatters” offering Harounoff’s Kensington flat as a set, Crone left the film school for London to write and direct “Adam and Eve Mews.” The project got as far as a table read with the London cast and a scouting trip with Dymek before Crone pulled the plug over budgetary concerns. The script was eventually accepted into a screenplay development program at the New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw, but was never produced.

In the two years that followed, Crone divided his time between Lodz and Berlin, translating German and Polish, studying the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, acting and crewing in student films, and writing and directing his first short film, The Goods. Inspired by the train trip from Amsterdam and shot without permits in a single day with Dymek behind the camera, The Goods convinced Crone to focus on filmmaking and move to Los Angeles. And so, on January 1, 2014, he boarded a plane for the States with plans to find a day job and apply for an MFA in directing at the American Film Institute.

Los Angeles

His first attempt at L.A. lasted all of a month. He started out in Little Tokyo, where he met Naoki “Jayson” Yamaguchi, an elderly tour guide and practicing Buddhist who would prove an important influence. Then he rented a room near AFI in the home of Karen de la Carriere, the self-proclaimed former Queen of Scientology. In the free time between translation jobs, he volunteered on AFI student films as an art PA, swing grip & electric, assistant camera and assistant director. He applied for all kinds of day jobs, but quickly found that his resume didn’t fit the algorithm.

Concluding that steady work for German translation agencies was the only way to afford L.A., he returned to Europe to earn a C2 certificate, build a client list, and save enough money to try again. Along the way, he wrote his second screenplay “Rainshadow,” inspired by assault climber training in Joshua Tree. A few months after passing his C2 exam and signing on with several translation agencies, he received word that his grandfather Wesley Crone had passed away in Tulsa, leaving him enough in his will to return to the States.

Determined to hit the ground running, he decided to spend the money on a multimedia production of “Solitaire,” with the goal of inviting AFI professors ahead of the entrance exam. For stage design he approached Daniel Frank, an art director whose student film he had worked on. Frank agreed, and the two built a surreal prison cell on wheels in AFI’s backlot with the help of Gabriel Schwalenstocker, the play’s lead actor.

Found-footage videos were shot guerrilla-style in the basement of Crone’s Hollywood apartment building and at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego during an actual graduation. They were projected onto the window of the prison cell along with green screen footage filmed at the studio of Schwalenstocker’s friend Troy Murray. A yellow bicycle made its first appearance in his life at this time, a vintage Schwinn rescued from a junkyard. He would park it outside his apartment and tell actors to “look for the yellow bicycle.”

“Solitaire” opened at the now defunct Underground Theater to largely positive reviews. But despite efforts to picket the LA Times in uniform for much-needed coverage, a six-week run proved wildly optimistic for a fringe play by an unknown playwright.

Manifesto and Joshua Tree

The loss was offset by months of translation. Realizing he would never be able to afford AFI, he decided instead to write a no-budget film for Sundance featuring the cast of “Solitaire” and whatever he could get for share: cars, apartments, a house, and a Joshua Tree commune he had discovered while scouting for “Rainshadow.”

Murray agreed to coproduce and cofinance the production and contribute his camera gear. Actress Varda Appleton and her husband opened their Brentwood home for a table read and days of intense shooting. And his brother Jonathan scored the film and did the sound edit. In a Skype call from Poland, Dymek advised Crone to DP his first feature himself, using carefully framed tripod shots to simplify the workflow. The result was Manifesto, a tragicomic mind-trip on PTSD and the War on Terror. He completed a rough cut on the eve of the Sundance deadline and submitted the film as planned.

When it failed to make the cut, Crone turned his sights back on the theater, enrolling in an acting class with the late Chick Vennera at the now-defunct Renegade Theater. News of the shooting at Umpqua Community College compelled him to write “Washed in the Blood,” a tightly wound multimedia play about a school shooting. Vennera hosted a reading with his student Billy Malone as the interrogator, and Crone produced the play with original music by Karolina Naziemiec at the now-defunct Complex Theatres for the Hollywood Fringe Festival, where it won an Encore! Producers Award.

Encouraged by the award and thriving as a translator, he made plans to move to New York and premiere the play off-off-Broadway. His plans were cut short when his motorcycle was cut off on the 101 freeway, fracturing his wrist, breaking his leg in three places, and requiring surgery and a titanium rod. He healed quickly in his Hollywood studio while continuing to translate and write. “The Goods” premiered at the Polish Film Festival in Los Angeles that summer, and he finished his third screenplay “The Revolutions,” a bilingual comedy about an American Copernicus scholar in Poland.

Fully recovered, he made a brief trip to Poland to shop the screenplay, then bought a house in Joshua Tree with a VA loan. The next year was spent translating, writing, exploring the desert and participating in ceremonies with psychedelic therapists and later the Oklevueha Native American Church. He wrote “A Farewell Tour” during this period, a noh-themed screenplay written after sitting vigil at Yamaguchi’s deathbed at a hospital in Flagstaff. The screenplay went into preproduction with the help of Japanese actress Kazumi Aihara. She found a noh actor in Tokyo willing to play the lead for share, but lacking investors, the project was put on hold.

Astoria and the Adirondacks

The real estate boom in Joshua Tree had gained steam in the meantime. Crone sold the house at a profit and moved back to New York by motorcycle. Once there, he threw himself into his work. Still translating full-time, he produced three shows, wrote four plays, and reviewed dozens of productions under pseudonyms for Reviews from Underground, a blog named for his basement apartment in Astoria.

First came a reboot of Squatters at The Nubox, timed to coincide with 9/11. Months of research and writing followed for “Ashes Ashes” and “The Journey.” The former was inspired by conversations with Yamaguchi and explored the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima. The latter drew on his experiences with psychedelic therapy in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree and study of the Torah at Young Israel in New York. In April he produced Washed in the Blood with a New York cast. And in May his “Squatters” costar Dori Levit produced and directed his short play “The Jail at Philippi” at The Tank as part of You Are Not Alone, an evening of one-acts about mental illness.

That summer he reached agreements with The Tank and Theatre for the New City for co-productions of “The Journey” and “Ashes Ashes.” One was realized in February 2020 as the launch of Yellow Bicycle Collective with a host of tongue-in-cheek ads in the first and only print edition of “Reviews from Underground.” The other, set to open on the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, was canceled due to COVID.

The day before theaters closed in New York, Crone assembled a group of actors at Theatre for the New City to shoot an improvised TV pilot called Canceled. Plans for subsequent episodes were canceled when the city locked down. Originally published on YouTube in March 2020 before censorship became commonplace, the pilot was nevertheless censored on several platforms for showing both sides of an argument about masking.

Crone spent the next few months shifting his focus to filmmaking, with a camera and sound gear financed by a long-awaited settlement from the motorcycle accident. When BLM protests erupted in Manhattan and a curfew was imposed, he captured the historic moment in his first documentary short A City Under Protest.

Intent on making a film version of “Ashes Ashes” for the 75th anniversary, he moved out of the basement and rented a newly vacated loft space in Long Island City. With the help of “Journey” cast member Jessica Van Niel he built walls and a backstage for the short-lived Fallout Shelter. Filming began with actor James C. Gavin as the pilot of the Enola Gay and butoh artist Yokko as an atom bomb survivor, but the project was canceled and the space abandoned when conditions in the building made further work impossible.

He left the city that fall for the foothills of the Adirondacks, where he rented a cabin that had belonged to his late grandfather Joe Fusco. Over the next six months, he translated, filmed a music video for Naziemiec and an interview with his father, caught and recovered from COVID, explored the mountains of his childhood, and wrote his sixth screenplay “The Whirlwind,” a horror movie set in the Adirondacks during the French and Indian War.

The Commune

In search of an animator for an Iroquois flying head, he contacted Tobias Stretch, a Philly-based artist whose stop-motion video for Radiohead’s Weird Fishes he had long admired. The two spoke for hours over the phone, Stretch regaling him with tales of Philly as a refuge for struggling artists. Intrigued and recalling his first impression of the city, Crone drove down to meet the artist and revisit Philly, bringing along his yellow bicycle.

It was while getting the bike repaired at Via Bicycle that he met Fergus Carey, an Irish pub owner with a South Philly rowhome for rent. Crone realized he could start a theater commune in the house so that work could continue if the city locked down again. Carey rented him “The Bicycle House,” donated a yellow bike rack from his pub, and let him convert the living room into a tiny black box affectionately dubbed “The Fire Place.”

An ad on Backstage brought three actors from out of town. Crone began teaching a scene-study and on-camera class and writing “Black Box,” a post-9/11 ensemble drama he had been planning since Krakow. It would premiere at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival on September 11, 2021, the twentieth anniversary of the attacks.

With the show already registered and the premiere a month away, the festival rolled out a policy mandating masks for audiences and requiring theaters to either check proof of vaccination or mask all performers. Crone withdrew from the festival in protest, arguing that if masks and vaccines work, the people who use them are protected. The decision is therefore up to the individual. Given his history of adverse reactions, he saw no reason to take a shot whose sole proven benefit was a milder case of an illness he had already recovered from. And several cast members felt the same.

Instead, they would make “Black Box” into a feature film. Richard Roddy from the original “Washed in the Blood” flew out from L.A. to costar and coproduce. Stephanie Roseman and Thoeger Hansen from “The Journey” and Veronika Vozniak, Alec Stephens III, and Tim Palmer from “Canceled” commuted from New York to complete the ensemble. They filmed at The Bicycle House, Fergie’s Pub, Hansen’s East Harlem apartment, and Ground Zero on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. And despite two hurricanes and historic flooding that left cars abandoned on the highway, they finished the rough cut just hours before the Sundance deadline.

The Convoy

Again the film failed to make the cut. And with the house empty and the mandate now in effect throughout Philly, Crone could neither make theater nor attend it. He abandoned the idea of a commune, sublet the rooms, and went back to translating. Then two days before Christmas his Uncle Joe passed away from kidney failure while being treated with the approved, on-patent COVID drug Remdesivir. That same winter, an aunt in the highest-risk category recovered from the virus by following a much-maligned protocol based on repurposed, off-patent drugs.

For the first time, Crone looked deeply into the origins of the pandemic and the subsequent policies, drawing on his training in the philosophy of science and his experience as a database designer at a healthcare union and as a translator for BioNTech and other pharmaceutical companies. He downloaded U.S. death statistics from the CDC’s website for 2020 and 2021, crunched the numbers and found that the oft-repeated claims of safety and efficacy were based on a drop in reported COVID deaths after the rollout, despite an overall increase in all-cause deaths. He realized that, to quote Francis Bacon, “The remedy is worse than the disease.

The trucker protests in Ottawa were in full swing by this time, but without proof of vaccination he could not leave the country to join them. Searching online he found a small group calling itself The People’s Convoy with plans to set off from the California desert for Washington D.C. He packed up his filmmaking gear and flew to LAX with no contacts other than Roddy, who drove him out to Adelanto and saw him off. The result was Salt of the Earth, an oral history of blue-collar America in a time of crisis, culminating in a clandestine tour of D.C. with his Aunt Mary and convoy leader Brian Brase. The film premiered and ran for two weeks at the historic Sierra Theatre in the hometown of organic farmers and convoy truckers Tom and Andrea Traphagan.

Yellow Bicycle, Year One

The next step was to build a free theater, one that would oppose censorship and promote open debate. As if to belabor the point, Zoetropolis Theatre in the hometown of convoy organizers Brase and Mike Landis canceled a scheduled screening of “Salt of the Earth” on the grounds that “our principles are not aligned.” Meanwhile, Frigid Festival in New York sent a press release to Reviews from Underground proudly announcing the cancellation of Poems on Gender by leftist poet David Lee Morgan for containing the scientifically accurate phrase “there are two sexes.” The theater world was in rapid decline; of the three venues he had worked at in L.A., not one remained. It was a massive risk to open a theater at such a time, but for him the alternative was no theater at all.

And so, with little more than a business loan, credit cards, tools and a yellow bicycle, Crone signed a lease on an abandoned escape room in Center City and set to work on Yellow Bicycle Theater. He obtained a contractor’s license and did everything but the electrical work himself, building walls and risers and converting four TVs into an outdoor display called The Cycletron. Permitting, construction and fire alarm installation took 14 months, with repeated delays nearly killing the theater before the doors ever opened.

Yellow Bicycle, Year Two

But open they did, on July 11, 2023. Rehearsals began immediately for “Washed in the Blood,” with English actor Tim Palmer traveling from New York to play the lead. Three days before opening, Palmer received word that the O-1 Visa Crone had sponsored since 2019 had been denied an extension due to lack of theater work at a time when theaters were closed. Palmer left immediately for New York, and his costar Jonathan Power took the lead, with Temple student Jack Piccioni stepping into Power’s role. They rehearsed and ran lines for two days straight, and the play opened as scheduled on August 3, 2023.

And on September 7, “Ashes Ashes” had its long-awaited premiere as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, with Gavin as Paul Tibbets, Crone as copilot Robert Lewis, Mayo Kinoshita as the atom bomb survivor, Kassidy Kimata as her daughter, and John Crann running tech. The Bike’s festival lineup also included several outside productions and the first edition of Bicycle Shorts Film Festival, originally planned for 2021.

A third production of Squatters and a highly popular reboot of “The Journey” followed in October, with Hansen traveling from New York to reprise the role of family dog Tom Petty. Hansen returned a month later to play Baron von Steuben in Crone’s “Voices in the Valley,” an evening of short plays about Valley Forge written pseudonymously the previous winter at a time when defeat seemed certain.

Hansen would return again the following spring to appear in a new adaptation of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People for Philly Theatre Week alongside Gavin, Power, “Journey” cast members Patricia Casperson, Tiffany Ray, Sylvette Mikell, and Seth Hammerman, and newcomer Robert Guajardo.

May saw the second edition of Bicycle Shorts, this time with a clear focus on bike-themed films. And in June, Crone responded to the sudden closure of University of the Arts by offering free use of the theater to students and faculty. The result was UArts @ The Bike and a wall covered in cartoons by former animation students.

Yellow Bicycle, Year Three

In the meantime, Crone continued to translate and began working as a painter and handyman to bankroll the theater and cover debt payments from the buildout. Eager to grow the venue into a viable business, he began taking online courses through Warrior Rising and VetToCEO. The programs motivated him to convert the space into a “smart” theater with an online booking platform and a DIY tech setup, inspired in part by his experience as a frequent UHaul renter.

The work paid off in the fall when the theater hosted Philly Fringe @ The Bike, featuring 11 outside productions and coproductions, including “No Exit,” Hansen’s highly successful first effort as founder of the NY-based Night Cook Studio. The festival lineup also included a workshop for renters and a rescreening of award-winning films from Bicycle Shorts combined with open-captioned monologues by YBC actors, including Crone’s account of the history of Yellow Bicycle.

The day before the monologues, his sister Audra passed away from cancer. Remembering how they had put on holiday plays as children, he dealt with the loss by writing and directing a Thanksgiving play. Dedicated to her memory, “A House Divided” opened shortly after the 2024 election and ran for two weeks. The closing performance took place during the funeral, with Crann and Casperson running the show in his absence. It depicted a family torn apart by politics and presented both sides of several hot-button issues circa 2021.

The production was funded in part by an Illuminate the Arts grant awarded in early November, the first grant Crone had ever received. Hansen attended the premiere and offered to produce a New York run. Crone agreed, on condition that Hansen direct the play himself with a New York cast. The production is scheduled for March 20-30 at The Nubox.

For the holidays, Crone released DVDs of Salt of the Earth and Mummer Time, a documentary shot during the 2023 Mummers Parade. He also produced “Manger Scene,” a family-friendly Christmas play featuring singalongs, audience interaction and a crash course in Yiddish. And between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, he took his first trucking job, hauling the set of The Secret Comedy of Women from Philly to Phoenix for producer Phillip Roger Roy.

In the time between day jobs, Crone is currently managing Yellow Bicycle Theater, advising Hansen on the NY run of “A House Divided” and organizing Unicycle, a festival of solo shows set to premiere April 3-13 as part of Philly Theatre Week. His first book of collected plays is scheduled for release on March 25th. He remains an agnostic and a seeker after truth.

 

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Playwright & Screenwriter