CAP UCLA Presents THE WHITE ALBUM By Joan Didion

UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA) in association with Center Theatre Group presents Los Angeles-based director and visual artist Lars Jan's The White Album- Joan Didion's seminal essay about California's shifting cultural landscape of the late 1960s. Jan's production is only the second of Didion's works to be adapted for the stage running from Friday, April 5, at 8 p.m., Saturday, April 6, at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m., and Sunday, April 7, at 7 p.m. at the Freud Playhouse, UCLA. Tickets for $29-$59 are available now at cap.ucla.edu, 310-825-2101, Ticketmaster and the UCLA Central Ticket Office.

A California native with an unmistakably cool and always illuminating style, Didion is often described as epitomizing the voice of Los Angeles. Published in 1979, The White Album is a compilation of flashes into the author's memories of iconic figures and events of the late 1960s from the Manson murders to the Black Panthers to student protests. By incisively expressing the impossibility of any narrative to make sense of her time, Didion creates one of the defining and enduring stories of all time.

Jan's multidisciplinary performance work juxtaposes Didion's searing, highly theatrical text- delivered in its entirety by Obie Award-winning actress Mia Barron-with a glassed-in microcosm of social unraveling featuring the participation of twenty-five young audience members nightly. The work underscores stark similarities between 1968 and the present-racial injustice, generations of inequities, and the brutality of institutional and individual violence-challenging us to look critically at the past and incubating real-time conversation around new paths forward.

In Jan's genre-bending adaptation, Barron performs the text's fifteen vignettes while a parallel performance unfolds behind her. The low-slung set evokes a mid-century home with sliding glass doors that release and contain the action on stage. Two separate audiences-a traditional one seated in the theater and a smaller inner audience of emerging storytellers-(including young artists, activists, and students onstage) - experience the work simultaneously from different vantage points. The inner audience morphs from spectatorship to participation over the course of the work connecting their experience of the contemporary moment with the radical forces at play in Didion's work. As the action builds, a tense climax forces audience member to consider the double-edged meaning of the essay's famous opening line: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

The performance culminates with an open forum conversation involving both audiences and the creative team, responding to a prompt created by the inner audience during the performance.

The White Album is developed in association with Center Theatre Group with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in partnership with Brooklyn Academy Of Music (BAM). Additional commissioning support came from the Wexner Center for the Arts and CalArts Center for New Performance. With thanks to Joan Didion and ICM Partners.

Funds for this production provided by Deborah Irmas, Kathleen Quisenberry, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation multi-year grant for Collaborative Intersections in the Visual and Performing Arts. A component of the creative development of The White Albumprovided through CAP UCLA's annual artist residency partnership with the Ucross Foundation.

This multi-run performance of The White Album concludes CAP UCLA's 2018-19 season theater series. For more information on the remaining season please visit cap.ucla.edu.

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