Max Pinsky—artistic director of Whiskey Theatre Factory, an innovative collective that he joined in 2023—is passionate about breathing new life into classical antiquity and pioneering multilingual storytelling in Central Florida.
A native of Winter Park, Pinsky discovered his love of theater through Greek mythology and has been directing since his high school days. “I think there’s room to bring back those classics, but in a new context,” he says. “Everything that the Greeks dealt with—war, loss and the entire gamut of sociopolitical issues—none of it’s new, yet it’s all still relevant.”
With his own La Medéa, a bilingual modernization of Euripides’s Medea, Pinsky—a graduate of UCF with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in rhetoric and composition—relocated the tragedy to contemporary New York and reimagines its central character as an immigrant from the Dominican Republic. That work was staged at the Renaissance Theatre Company in 2022.
Pinsky’s forthcoming sequel, Teseos Volvido, will continue the story and ventures even further into converging cultures—incorporating English, Spanish and Haitian Creole. A workshop production of the trilingual play will run from February 5 to February 13, 2027, at the Imagine Performing Arts Center located inside the Oviedo Mall.
Notes Pinsky, who is currently pursuing a dramatic writing MFA from the University of Idaho: “Our community is not just one culture or one language. We’re in a very multicultural place, and I think our theater should reflect that.”
In 2015, while he was still an undergraduate, Pinsky founded Project No. 19 Performance Company to stage self-written plays influenced by antiquity. Most debuted at the Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival while others drew curious crowds at the Breakthrough Theatre Company and the Marshall Ellis Theater.
The most recent Project No. 19 production, staged at this year’s Fringe, was Odyssea’s Family Tree, which blended contemporary storytelling, spoken-word poetry and even acrobatic and athletic pole dancing.
Neither Whiskey Theatre Factory (where the slogan is “excellent stories, pour choices”) nor Project No. 19 Performance Company has a permanent venue. Visit whiskeytheatrefactory.com or theatrebyproject19-shop.square.site for more information.
