SOCIAL CREATURES and TODAY WE ESCAPE Set for Tympanic Theatre's Eighth Season

Tympanic dares you to brave The Den and explore several dystopias with us for our eighth season: TEAR IT DOWN. Hole up in a theater with seven strangers while the outside world gets ravaged. Enter a sterilized future inspired by one of the most haunting - and touching - albums ever recorded. Filled with subterranean aliens, paranoid androids, and a horrific force more terrifying than any zombie outbreak, our eighth year begins at the same place as so many other great, unsettling stories: the end of the world.

Join us this Halloween for the Midwest premiere of...

SOCIAL CREATURES
by Jackie Sibblies Drury
directed by Nathan Robbel (Artistic Director of The Right Brain Project)
October 31st through November 16th
(With possible extension the weekend of Nov. 21st) Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m.
and Sundays at 3 p.m.
The Den Theatre (1333 N. Milwaukee Ave.) Tickets $15 general, $12 students/industry/seniors

Barricaded inside a theater, seven people desperately try to survive while the outside world falls apart. But the unnamed danger might come from a place that's much scarier than any zombie or horror film. With tempers high and resources dwindling, these survivors are forced to confront a force within themselves that may have led to our end- times.

About the Playwright - Jackie Sibblies Drury is a Brooklyn-based playwright. Her Edgerton New Play Award- winning play, We Are Proud to Present a Presentation, was presented at PRELUDE.11, and had its world premiere at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theater in the Spring of 2012. Her work has been featured at Victory Gardens' 2010 Ignition Festival, The Magic Theatre, and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. She is a graduate of Brown's MFA playwriting program, where she received a Weston Award as well as the David Wickham Prize in Playwriting. Jackie is a member of the 2011-12 Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, a 2010-12 New York Theater Workshop playwriting fellow, a member of The Civilians' R&D group, and The Lark's Playground group. Jackie is a MacDowell colony fellow, and a committee member of The Public School New York.

About the Director - Nathan Robbel is the Artistic Director of the Right Brain Project. Directing credits for the RBP include Marat/Sade, Salome, Hesperia, And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers, Pretty Penny, Franz Kafka's The Castle, and The Bacchae Revisited, among others. Other directing credits include Wayward Productions' Burn the Black Dog, as well as various projects with the Bailiwick, the Side Project, Around the Coyote, Chicago Sable Ensemble, Dream Theatre Company, and New World Center for the Arts in Goshen, IN.

Cast: Bryan Bosque, Elizabeth Ellis, Charlotte Long, Martel Manning, Dennis Newport, Kelly Parker, Tricia Rogers, Neal Starbird

Stage Manager: Autumn McGarr
Production Manager: Dan Caffrey*
Set Designer: Dustin Pettegrew*
Lighting Designer: Karen Thompson
Sound Designer/Original Music: Maxwell Shults*
Costume Designers: Brenda Scott Wlazlo*
Props Designer: Casey Bentley*
Video Director: Chris Waldron*
Makeup/Blood Effects: Chrissy Weisenburger*

Artistic Director: Dan Caffrey*
Managing Director: Paul E. Martinez*
Literary Manager/Marketing Director: Chris Acevedo*
Co-director of Development: Ali Delianides*

*denotes Tympanic Company Member or Artistic Associate

And in the Spring, the World premiere of...

TODAY WE ESCAPE: Plays Inspired by OK COMPUTER
March 13th through April 4th
Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m
and Sundays at 3 p.m.
Special pay-what-you-can industry performance on Wednesday, March 25, at 7:30 p.m. The Den Theatre (1333 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Tickets $15 general, $12 students/industry/seniors

A companion piece to Tympanic's critically-acclaimed 2012 play festival, Deliver Us From Nowhere - itself drawn from Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska - Today We Escape pairs twelve Chicago playwrights and directors to create an evening of theatre inspired by Radiohead's experimental album, OK Computer. Each writer will use a song on the record as the springboard for a short play before an ensemble of musicians composes original music based on the plays themselves. Like Deliver Us..., Today We Escape is a meditation on how art reflects art; a live album in the most unique sense of the word, and a celebration of music that is at times detached, yet strangely comforting.

About Tympanic Theatre Company - After moving to Chicago in the Fall of 2006, a handful of fellow alumni from Florida State University founded The Tympanic Theatre Company. Producing seven seasons thus far of thrilling new work, the collective has since expanded to 31 members and associates, and is helmed by Artistic Director Dan Caffrey and Managing Director Paul E. Martinez.

Besides being a resident company at the side project from 2007 to 2011, Tympanic has participated in the Department of Cultural Affairs' Incubator Series, extensively workshopping Randall Colburn's Verse Chorus Verse (directed by Kyra Lewandowski) before mounting the full world premiere, as well as Mary Arrchie's Abbie Hoffman Festival and Curious Theatre Branch's Rhino Fest. Recent productions include Deliver Us From Nowhere-a collection of short plays each based on a song from Bruce Springsteen's album Nebraska-the world premiere of Dan Caffrey's Sandalwood (directed by Aaron Henrickson and co-produced with the side project), the world premiere of Scott T. Barsotti's Brewed, (directed by Anna C. Bahow and co-produced with The Ruckus), and the Midwest Premiere of Shaun Prendergast's The True History Of The Tragic Life And Triumphant Death Of Julia Pastrana, The Ugliest Woman In The World (directed by Joshua Ellison), which was performed entirely in the dark.

The Tympanic Theatre Company is dedicated to producing new and developed work with fantastical, frightening, or absurd subject matter that provokes, inspires, and entertains. Through our use of vibrant storytelling, dynamic language, and colorful characters, we invite our audience to plunge headfirst with us into theatrical worlds that are fresh, energetic, and visceral.

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