The Vertical Company was founded in 2006 to create new works of theater. The company has an abiding interest in lyrical writing, physical storytelling and live, musical scoring. Each show is radically different from the last, our passions leading us in unpredictable directions.

Elena Zucker, Artistic Director Elena is a director, playwright and performer. For The Vertical Company she has authored and directed two productions, A Dybbuk in Crown Heights and My Funny Valentine. Prior to founding The Vertical Company, she wrote and directed Concentric Circles with Alexandra Harbold in Chicago. This play explored the life and music of the 12th century abbess and composer Hildegard Von Bingen. Zach Brock composed/played music for this project, which also featured choreography by Erin Harper. In 2006 she directed a movement/poetry piece in the Ontological Hysteric’s “Play On Words” Festival. Prior to that she had the pleasure of directing Duo Delizioso’s early-music cabaret, Amor In Egypt: A Baroque Panoply of Operatic Passions, which played in Brooklyn, Venice and Zurich. In Europe, Elena’s adaptation/direction of contemporary poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s version of Sleeping Beauty, Imaginary Prisons, garnered a Fringe First Nomination at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The piece was the premiere collaborative creation of Angel Exit Theatre. She is a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab. As a performer, Elena has worked Off-Broadway and abroad. Highlights include: - the leading woman in the Julian Chagrin Show. Julian Chagrin is the actor from the famous mimed tennis match in Antonioni’s Blow-Up. - a Gregorian-chanting Death Maiden in Journey. This was a movement-theater piece in Glasgow, Scotland, featuring a 100-strong choir from Namibia. Elena received her B.A. as a Theater and Philosophy major from Middlebury College and completed the two-year actor-training program at the Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. She has taught Lecoq-based theater classes for NYU, SUNY Purchase, Marymount Manhattan College, Brooklyn College, Stella Adler and The Monarch Theater.