Nat Cassidy

Career

Cassidy has appeared as an actor in numerous Off- and Off-Off-Broadway productions. He has also appeared in film, television, and web projects, including the acclaimed webseries High Maintenance. In 2013, Cassidy starred in the independent horror-comedy film They Will Outlive Us All, which won numerous awards throughout the festival circuit, including winning Cassidy Best Actor in Chicago's Route 66 International Film Festival. Ain't It Cool News said of Cassidy's performance that he is "talented enough to carry this entire film." Also in 2013, he was nominated for a New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, for the one-man play Generic Magic Realism, by Edmond Malin. Cassidy was inducted into the Indie Theater Hall of Fame for his contributions to the NY independent theatre scene, and was described as "an actor, director, and playwright of surprising range and depth."

Writer

Cassidy has a reputation for writing "darkly comic plays with one foot in horror and the other in literary allusion," and often feature historical characters. NYTheatre.com called him "a seismic talent." His playscripts have been about, among other things, Shakespeare, Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb, H.P. Lovecraft, nuclear mutation, President Franklin Pierce, zombies, Dostoevsky, Nazi Germany, and genital warts.

In 2009, Cassidy's "metaphysical buddy comedy" about an imagined relationship between Christopher Marlowe and Caligula, The Reckoning of Kit & Little Boots, was nominated for three New York Innovative Theatre Awards and took home the award for Outstanding Full-Length Script. His play Any Day Now was also nominated for two NY IT Awards that same year, and took home Outstanding Actress in a Lead Role (Elyse Mirto). In 2011, his Lovecraft-inspired one-man show, I Am Providence or, All I Really Needed to Know about the Stygian Nightmare into Which Mankind Will Inevitably Be Devoured, Its Fruitless Screams of Agony Resounding in the Unending Chasm of Indifferent Space as It Is Digested by Squamous and Eldritch Horrors beyond Comprehension for All of Eternity, I Learned from Howard Phillips Lovecraft, won the NY IT Award for Outstanding Solo Performance. In 2014, his play Old Familiar Faces was nominated for four NYIT Awards, including Outstanding Full-Length Script, Outstanding Ensemble, Outstanding Lead Actor, and Outstanding Lead Actress. In 2015, his play The Temple, or, Lebensraum, another Lovecraft-inspired play, was nominated for seven NYIT Awards, including Outstanding Full-Length Script, Outstanding Production, Outstanding Actor in a Lead Role (which Matthew Trumbull, the play's lead, won), Outstanding Sound Design (which its sound designer, Jeanne Travis, won), Outstanding Lighting Design, Outstanding Costume Design, and Outstanding Scenic Design.

In 2012, Cassidy was one of four librettists commissioned by The Kennedy Center/Washington National Opera in the first-ever American Opera Initiative. With composer Scott Perkins, he wrote the short opera "Charon," a loose adaptation of a story fragment by Lord Dunsany, which the Washington Times called "remarkable," "brilliant," and that "Mr. Cassidy’s libretto is what any composer could want." His work has been produced mainly in New York City, but has also seen productions across the country, including Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Chicago His plays have been published by New York Theater Experience, Smith & Kraus, Applause Books, and Indie Theater Now.

Off-Broadway and independent theatre

Full-length

Short plays