Convergence-Continuum Closes BRAINPEOPLE 11/13

convergence-continuum, continues its 2010 Season at the Liminis theatre with the Ohio premiere of Brainpeople, a surreal psychological drama, by Jose Rivera. Brainpeople opens Friday, Oct. 15 and runs at 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays through Nov. 13 at the Liminis, 2438 Scranton Rd., Cleveland, OH 44113. Tickets are $15 general admission, $12 for students and seniors (65+). For reservations and information call 216-687-0074 or visit www.convergence-continuum.org on the web.

Jose Rivera's most recently published play is a surreal drama in which a genial, lonely heiress invites two strangers to her once opulent penthouse for a strange feast commemorating the death of her parents. Taking place in a not-so-distant future, the sounds of a war-torn Los Angeles fill the air. She has done this every year, and the two troubled women she has invited stand to take home $20,000 each if they can make it through dessert. Over the course of the evening her dark purpose is revealed to be much more than a mere commemoration, as tensions rise, identities transform, and the main dish proves not to be the only thing with claws.

Brainpeople is directed by convergence-continuum's Artistic Director Clyde Simon and features Laurel Johnson, Kristi Little and Laura Starnik.

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The Playwright: Jose Rivera

Award-winning playwright Jose Rivera was born in 1955 in Puerto Rico. At the age of four he migrated with his parents to New York City. He wrote his first play at age 12. Upon graduating from high school, he pursued an acting career and apprenticed with Cleveland Shakespeare Festival, where he observed the superior talents of another apprentice actor, Tom Hanks, and decided to pursue a writing career instead. Later Hanks would voluntarily perform in Rivera's professional playwriting debut in Manhattan. In 1989 Rivera enrolled in a Sundance Institute writing workshop to hone his playwriting skills by studying under legendary South American novelist Gabriel García Márquez. That so-called godfather of magic realism represented the peak of what Rivera struggled to achieve in his own work.

Rivera's plays include The House of Ramon Iglesia (1983), The Promise (1988), Each Day Dies With Sleep (1990), Marisol (1992), Giants Have Us In Their Books (1997), Cloud Tectonics (1995), Maricela De La Luz Lights The World, Godstuff, Adoration of the Old Woman, The Street of the Sun (1996), Sueno (1998), Lovers of Long Red Hair (2000), References To Salvidor Dali Make Me Hot (2000), Sonnets for an Old Century (2000), School of the Americas (2006), Massacre (Sing To Your Children) (2007) and Brainpeople (2009). They have been performed across the country and internationally. He has won two Obie Awards for playwriting (Marisol and References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot), a Kennedy Center Fund for New American plays Grant, a Fulbright Arts Fellowship in playwriting, the Whiting Writers' Award, a McKnight Fellowship, the 2005 Norman Lear Writing Award, a 2005 Impact Award and a Berilla Kerr Playwriting Award. Rivera is also a screenwriter and was nominated for an Oscar for his filmscript for The Motorcycle Diaries.

The Play: Brainpeople

Brainpeople received its world premiere at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, opening January 30, 2008. Reviewer Robert Hurwitt of the San Francisco Chronicle said of it:

Rivera's teasingly engrossing stage reality...is a return to the postapocalyptic landscape this most magical-realist of major American Playwrights has explored in such compelling works as Marisol and References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, among his many plays. ... Rivera eschews external surreal symbols this time to delve directly into the chaos of his characters' disordered minds. The result is both an engrossing descent into the traumatized inner realms of three very different, isolated women. ... Each flight of concentrated poetry is vividly written. ... Rivera has created an intriguing and evocative drama with the social and psychological terrors that have leapt from the grottoes of the women's minds.

The convergence-continuum production of Brainpeople is its Ohio premiere and is produced by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. Brainpeople is the third of Rivera's plays to be produced by convergence-continuum, following its well-received productions of Each Day Dies With Sleep (in 2003) and References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot (in 2007).

The Company: convergence-continuum

convergence-continuum was founded in 2001 by Clyde Simon (Artistic Director) and Brian Breth. After completion of the renovations of the Liminis, the company's artistic home in the Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland, into an intimate, versatile, storefront performance space, the company then transformed it into an 18th century French asylum for its first production, Quills by Doug Wright, in August 2002. For the company's second production (Oct. 2002), the Liminis was converted into a junkyard outside the city of Azusa for a four-weekend run of Sam Shepard's The Unseen Hand. Since then, the company has continued to produce alternative/experimental theatre work, and to completely transform the Liminis for each show, immersing audiences in the world of the play in up-close productions. (Maximum seating is 40-50 depending on the set-up for each show.)

Brainpeople, the company's 37th production, is the fifth of six in the 2010 Season (our ninth). The company's season runs March - December, with a hiatus over the Winter. Many of the cast and crew of Brainpeople have been involved in previous convergence-continuum productions in many and various capacities. The company seeks to create a core ensemble that continues to work together over the long term in exploring and developing its artistic voice, and performance and production practices to create up-close, environmentally staged productions that challenge the status quo and extend the boundaries of theatre.

 

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