About
Sweet Pea Chamber Theater
Our Mission
Sweet Pea Chamber Theater is an actor-driven company offering a repertoire of short theater pieces. Through sacred play, we cultivate intimacy and beauty to tease out the core questions that underlie our personal and civic identities, bringing them to communities grappling with the same concerns.
We seek to create space free from the grips of compulsion, addiction to technology, and rigid judgments to seek common ground rooted in the poetry of human, spiritual experience.
Our training is rooted in the work of Michael Chekhov, Declan Donellan, Uta Hagen, Moises Kaufman, and Moshe
Feldenkrais.
Artistic Director
Jonah Scott Mendelsohn
Jonah Scott Mendelsohn is an actor, singer, and writer based in New York City. He grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and studied at Vassar College and the O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford Connecticut.
The first production of Sweet Pea Chamber Theater is Jonah's solo performance of Love Alone: Elegies for Rog, adapted from the poetry of Paul Monette, was described as a "profoundly moving performance that explores the boundaries of grief and loss, life and death... as it moves toward its paradoxically life-affirming climax." Love Alone is currrently in development for touring.
Jonah's stage work spans new plays in New York City, and lead roles in regional theaters. Favorite roles include Stuart Gellman in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change (Astoria Performing Arts Center, AUDELCO winning production for Best Revival of a Musical); Pete, a pregnant man, in Tumor by Sheila Callaghan; Paul in Company by Sondheim and Furth at the Philipstown Depot Theatre, and the killers in Shakespeare's Richard II with Walking the dog Theater in Hudson, NY.
His writing includes a variety of poetry, and two pieces for the stage: Jonah - a choreopoem, based on the biblical story, first presented at West End Synagogue; and A Mostly Perfect Education: Things They Don't Talk about at Commencement, a one-man show about his experiences as a Women's Study minor at Vassar College, which began development in Martin Moran's personal narrative workshop at the Barrow Group.
Jonah is currently training to become a Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner.
