We Are

Our Story

Founded in 1998 by Lois Kagan Mingus and Joanie Fritz Zosike, Action Racket Theatre is a small company with big hopes to excite you about the power and importance of theatre.

Lois and Joanie believe theatre is like a family. From the moment you walk in the door where an Action Racket Theatre workshop is held, you become a lifetime member of an “instant theatre company,” and are free to express your dreams, hopes, and sense of humor in a safe environment.

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Action Racket Theatre performs and presents workshop and programs for a diverse group of organizations. Performances include your participation because an audience is the most important ingredient of a show. Lois and Joanie want to share their love of theatre with aspiring actors and curious audiences from 3 to 103. No experience necessary!

In May 2002, the New York Public Library published True Stories of Everyday Life, a play created by young adults from the Francis Martin Library Action Racket Theatre company. In 2006, Joanie and Lois collaborated with The Museum Team in its collective creation of It’s About Me at Brooklyn Children’s Museum, as part of the Cultural Explorers Saturday Program at Brooklyn Children’s Museum. In 2010, Action Racket Theatre received a grant from Bronx Council on the Arts for its collaboration with CenterLight (formerly Beth Abraham Adult Day Healthcare) in its Bronx tour of Words From the Melting Pot…a saga about immigration, culture and heritage. Action Racket Theatre also performed a special Halloween edition of The Magical Castle of Now at the Monster Mash at Brooklyn Children’s Museum.

Action Racket Theatre makes frequent appearances at New York Public Library, Westchester Public Library, Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Manhattan Children’s Museum, Head Start, 6th Street Avenue B Garden, PS131, United Adult Ministries, CenterLight and Lenox Hill Neighborhood House Second Sunday Series.

Meet the Directors

Lois Kagan Mingus

Lois Kagan Mingus, co-founder of Action Racket Theatre, has been a member of The Living Theatre since 1988, appearing in dozens of productions in New York, Europe and Latin America. She is also an Artistic Associate and Board Member with the company.

Lois works in film and TV and performs regularly with DADAnewyork and The Wycherly Systers. In Boston, she performed in the celebrated Boston Children’s Museum theatre company and was a member of the visionary Craft Experimental Theatre.

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Her work, Refugee Camp Shtima, received Honorable Mention in the Lamia Ink! International One-Page Play Festival and her writings and poetry have been published in Evergreen Review, Maintenant and Western States Theater Review.

Lois has been seen in such diverse productions as Fiddler on the Roof and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She appeared on the Rosie O’Donnell Show as Angelika Rugrat and performed as Tweety Bird for Warner Brothers. She is co-founder of The Living Theatre Workshops, presenting nationally as well as outside the U.S. Lois was a guest artist at the Nobel Peace Prize Forum’s meeting in Minnesota, speaking on using theatre as a tool for social change. In addition to being an Irene Ryan Judge at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, Lois is listed in Who’s Who in Entertainment in America.

Joanie Fritz Zosike

Joanie Fritz Zosike is a solo performer, veteran member of The Living Theatre in several productions in the U.S. and abroad, and guest performer with Teatro Alfieri di Asti, The Wycherley Systers, Alchemical Theatre, Co-Op Theatre East and in a recent production of Days of the Commune, directed by multimedia artist Zoe Beloff.

In New York she has held theatre residencies at Bellevue Hospital and Grand Street Settlement, and has been a workshop presenter in universities from Stuttgart to Sofia and Sarajevo to Quito. Composer/lyricist of the children’s musical, Lily Frog and Friends, produced at the Las Palmas Theatre in Los Angeles, she also co-authored And Then the Heavens Closed at The Jewish Museum in New York City, funded in part by a grant from the National Foundation of Jewish Culture.

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Her writing has appeared in such publications as At the Edge, clockwise.wordpress.com, Have a NYC Anthology, Heresies, Levure Literraire, Maintenant and Silver Birch Anthology. Zosike has written, composed and performed solo works including Harpies Complex (U.S., Germany, Bulgaria), Soph and the Limitless Light (Germany, New York and Washington, DC) and Ereshkigal’s Peg (Franklin Furnace and La MaMa La Galleria), and co-authored a multimedia theatre scenario, Séance to Raise the Spirit of Cabaret Voltaire with filmmaker Olga Mazurkiewicz, performed at Anthology Film Archive, Theater for the New City and AC/DC Space in Washington, DC.

Joanie served as Managing Director of The Living Theatre. As well as being an actor in the DADA/surrealist theatre company, DADAnewyork, she also serves as its co-director. She is on the board of New York City People’s Life Fund, a member of Theaters Against War (THAW) and NYC War Resisters League.