Los Angeles Premiere of Nassim Soleimanpour's WHITE RABBIT RED RABBIT Set for Next Week

Los Angeles Performance Practice and The Bootleg Theater, in association with Aurora Nova Productions, presents the Los Angeles premiere of Nassim Soleimanpour's slyly inventive White Rabbit Red Rabbit as part of the 2016 LAX (Live Arts Exchange) Festival.

Performances take place August 29-September 3 (pre-festival performances) and September 23-October 2, 2016 at the Bootleg Theater, 2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90057. Tickets are $25, and curtain times and performers vary. For tickets and detailed schedule visit http://liveartsexchange.org/white-rabbit-red-rabbit/. Also available as part of the LAX Festival Pass, which includes admission to all eight ticketed festival events, plus bonus events and priority seating, for $100. To purchase an LAX Festival Pass, visit LAX Festival Pass storefront.

Described by Entertainment Weekly as "a dazzling, transcendent piece of alive-and-kicking avant-garde theater," White Rabbit Red Rabbit is a play for one actor-an actor who has never seen the script (or the production). Encountering Soleimanpour's words for the first time, a new performer takes the stage each night to helm a genuinely experimental work, one that bring us face to face with a writer unable to transport himself beyond his nation's borders.

A line-up of celebrated Los Angeles actors dive in, unrehearsed and undirected, including Jessica Hanna, Diane Rodriguez, Lauren Weedman, Jesse Saler, Roger Guenveur Smith, Kristina Wong, Scott Turner Schofield, Marissa Chibas, Doug Kearney, Stefanie Black, Annie Saunders, and Karen Anzoategui.

The work was created while Soleimanpour was unable to obtain a passport for travel outside his homeland, the Islamic Republic of Iran, for refusing military service. Soleimanpour has noted the play operates on a metaphoric level and expressly avoids overt political comment [and requests the press to be judicious in their reportage]. What White Rabbit Red Rabbit achieves is a highly intimate and distinctly engaging relationship between author, performer and audience-a startling act of theatrical teleportation. He playfully questions the powers of control and revels in the possibility of resistance in a work that has resonated across the globe.

We invite audiences to take a leap, skip the google searches and join our intrepid performers for an audacious theatrical experiment-and a potent reminder of the transgressive and transformative power of theater. Will you participate? Will you be manipulated? Will you listen? Will you really listen?

PERFORMANCE / PERFORMER SCHEDULE

Monday, August 29, 8:00pm / Jessica Hanna
Jessica Hanna is a Los Angeles-based theatre artist. She is Co-Founder, Producing & Managing Director of Bootleg Theater. Since 2006 she has produced over 100 productions and events at Bootleg, and directed on works at Abundant Sugar at the Brewery, and at Occidental College.

Tuesday, August 30, 8:00pm / Diane Rodriguez
Diane Rodriguez is a nationally recognized theatre artist who began her career with one of the most politically explosive theatre companies of its era and now is a regional theatre director, actor and writer as well as Associate Artistic Director for the country's largest west coast theatre company, Center Theatre Group. Her career spans over twenty-five years of award winning theatre work.

Friday, September 2, 7:30pm / Lauren Weedman
Lauren Weedman is best known for her regular role on the HBO series Looking (2014-15). She is also known for her roles in films such as Date Night (2010) and The Five-Year Engagement (2012) and for appearing as a guest star on various series such as Hung, New Girl and 2 Broke Girls. She was also a correspondent on The Daily Show from 2001 to 2002. Weedman has also written and performed several one-woman/spoken word shows, including Homecoming, BUST, and The People's Republic of Portland.

Saturday, Septebmer 3, 7:30pm / Jesse Saler
Jesse Saler is a Los Angeles-based actor and performance artist. He is a founding member of Poor Dog Group, a contemporary theater collective whose work has been seen around the world since 2008. Jesse was last seen earlier this year at REDCAT in The Murder Ballad (1938). He has performed with LA Opera, Blank-The-Dog, Boston Court, Pappas and Dancers, The Series, Kirk Douglas Theater, UCLA LIVE, and Ulysses Theater in Croatia. TV credits include: Scandal, Bad Judge, Bold and The Beautiful, and HBO's upcoming Videosyncrasy.

Friday, September 23, 7:00pm / Roger Guenveur Smith
Roger Guenveur Smith is an actor, director and writer. His work can be seen in Deep Cover, All About the Benjamins, American Gangster, HBO series Oz, Do The Right Thing, and Malcolm X. He starred in the self-written and -produced A Huey P. Newton Story, a one-man theatre performance based on the life of Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton, for which Smith received an Obie Award, as well as a solo performance examining the life of Rodney King. In 2003, Smith read in the HBO documentary, Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives.

Sunday, September 25, 2:00pm / Kristina Wong
Kristina Wong is a performance artist, comedian and writer who has created five solo shows and one ensemble play that have toured throughout the United States and UK. Her most notable touring show, Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, looked at the high rates of depression and suicide among Asian American women and toured to over 40 venues since 2006. She's been a commentator for American Public Media's Marketplace, PBS, Jezebel, xoJane, Playgirl Magazine, Huffington Post and a guest on Comedy Central's The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, FXX's Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, Al Jazeera's The Stream and A.M. Tonight on Fusion TV. On television, she's been on General Hospital, Nickelodeon's Nicky Ricky Dicky and Dawn, and Myx TV's I'm Asian American and Want Reparations for Yellow Fever.

Monday, September 26, 7:00pm / Scott Turner Schofield
Scott Turner Schofield is the first openly transgender actor on daytime television, and the first female-to-male person in a major recurring role on broadcast TV, on CBS' The Bold and The Beautiful, as well as having appeared on American Heroes Channel's Codes and Conspiracies and VH1's I'm Married To A.... Schofield has toured internationally with his original solo performances Underground Transit, Debutante Balls and Becoming a Man in 127 EASY Steps (which was commissioned by the National Performance Network.

Tuesday, September 27, 7:00pm / Marissa Chibas
Marissa Chibas is a writer and performer. Her solo performance, Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary, produced by the CalArts Center for New Performance (CNP), has toured the U.S., Europe, and Mexico. Marissa has acted in over 50 productions and two dozen American premieres including The Keening by Umberto Dorado at the ART in Cambridge, Two Sisters and a Piano by Nilo Cruz at the McCarter, and The Mark Taper Forum productions of The House of Bernarda Alba and Eduardo Machado's The Floating Island Plays. On Broadway she performed in Abe Lincoln in Illinois and Brighton Beach Memoirs, as well as off-Broadway and in many prominent resident theaters, including Arena Stage, Alley Theater, and the Yale Repertory Theatre. Her silent film/performance piece, Clara's Los Angeles, was presented at REDCAT's NOW FEST and the San Diego Latino Film Festival. She also conceived and wrote performance piece Shelter, which premiered in April 2016 in Los Angeles and was subsequently performed at the Kennedy Center.

Wednesday, September 28, 7:00pm / Doug Kearney
Doug Kearney is a poet, performer and librettist. He has had multiple collections of poetry and libretti ("Sucktion") published, as well as having received a Whiting Writer's Award and residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others.

Thursday, September 29, 7:00pm / Stefanie Black
Stefanie Black is an actor, writer, director, and a founding member and co-artistic director of Ovation Award-winning IAMA Theatre Company in L.A.. She has been seen on House of Lies, Scandal, How I Met Your Mother, The Goodwin Games, Grey's Anatomy, Bones, E.R., Private Practice and Rizzoli and Isles.

Saturday, October 1, 2:00pm / Annie Saunders
Annie Saunders is a director, performer and the founder of experimental theatre company Wilderness. She conceived The Day Shall Declare It, for which she co-directs and performs. She is also a core creative performer and collaborator with Lars Jan's Early Morning Opera, and appears in Holoscenes, a public performance installation in a large free-standing aquarium which examines long term empathy and climate change. She has devised and performed original work in the UK with Neil Bettles (Frantic Assembly, Thickskin) and Gemma Fairlie (RSC). She has also worked for over ten years as a creative activist with Eve Ensler's V-Day, a global creative movement to end violence against women through creative activism.

Sunday, October 2, 2:00pm / Karen Anzoategui
Karen Anzoategui is an actor and writer, who plays Daysi Cantu on East Los High. Anzoategui has gone on to have credits in the CW's Crazy Ex Girlfriend and other upcoming shows. Their theatre solo show ¡Ser! was selected as a finalist for the Downtown Urban Theatre Festival and was an honorable mention in the 2015 The List by The Kilroys as one of the best plays by women and trans writers. Karen's second solo show, Catholic School Daze is featured in an upcoming documentary with the same title.

Presented by Los Angeles Performance Practice & The Bootleg Theater, in association with Aurora Nova Productions, and by arrangement with Boat Rocker Entertainment LLC.

LAX Festival partners include Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles, Automata, Bootleg Theater, Center for the Art of Performance, UCLA, Metro Arts Presents and The Springs.

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