SkyPilot Theatre Company to Present Double Bill by Local Playwrights

SkyPilot Theatre Company, long an incubator of new plays in the Los Angeles area, Jason Weiss and Theatre of Arts will present the Los Angeles premiere of a double bill of two new works by Los Angeles playwrights-ABSENCE MAKES THE HEART... by Sean Abley and COMB YOUR HAIR (OR YOU'LL LOOK LIKE A SLAVE) by LeeLee Jackson, each a national finalist (of four total) for the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival 2017 John Cauble Short Play Award.

ABSENCE MAKES THE HEART... by Sean Abley is a modern take on the Hans Christian Andersen fable "The Red Shoes." In the original tale a ballet dancer is driven to her death by an uncontrollable urge to dance. In this adaptation, the aftermath of the story is told in monologues by twenty different characters affected by her death, near and far.

The production is directed by Chrisanne Blankenship-Billings, and the cast includes: Catherine Davis Cox, Easton Schirra, Marie-Francoise Theodore, Maggie Manyan, Ian Stanley, MJ Brown, Javier Melgar Santovena, Ian Salazar, Natalie Nicole Dressel, Sarah Lilly, Andrea Ma Gee, Thomas Colby, Francoise Tiadem, Carlyle Coash, Keith Wheeler, Sarah Marcum, Morry Schorr, Kasey Millar.

COMB YOUR HAIR (OR YOU'LL LOOK LIKE A SLAVE) by LeeLee Jackson is a beautiful yet painful collection of testimonies from young Black women navigating American society. Through scenes and monologues, COMB YOUR HAIR (OR YOU'LL LOOK LIKE A SLAVE) explores how Black women, regardless of their curl pattern, hair length or texture, contend with the tension between ownership of the self and others' sense of entitlement to their bodies.

Boasting a cast and production team made up almost entirely of Black women, the production is directed by Kumi James. The cast includes Skye Ellis, Mia Boykin, MJ Brown, Alexa Crismon, Carene Rose Mekertichyan, and Shereen Macklin.

IF YOU GO:

ABSENCE MAKES THE HEART... / COMB YOUR HAIR (OR YOU'LL LOOK LIKE A SLAVE) - A Double Bill of New Plays by Los Angeles

Presented by SkyPilot Theatre Company, Jason Weiss and Theatre of Arts

Opening night - October 6, 2017, runs thru October 29, 2017
Fridays and Saturdays 8pm, Sundays 2pm

At Arena Stage, 1625 N Las Palmas Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90028

Tickets: $25 available online at www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3085800

ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHTS:

SEAN ABLEY is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter, journalist, and the current dramaturg for SkyPilot Theatre Company. He has over thirty plays published by Playscripts, Brooklyn Publishers, Heuer Publishing, Next Stage Press, and Eldridge Plays and Musicals with titles like End of the World (With Prom to Follow), The Adventures of Rose Red (Snow White's Less-Famous Sister), Horror High: The Musical and Attack of the Killer B's. His play Popcorn Girl was the 2nd place winner of the National Partners of the American Theatre Award as part of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival 2017, and his play Absence Makes the Heart... was a national finalist for the John Cauble Short Play Award at KCACTF the same year.

His recent Los Angeles theatrical endeavors include the world premieres of Dr. Frankincense and the Christmas Monster (Write/Act Repertory), L.A. Tool & Die: Live! (Celebration Theatre), Larva! (SkyPilot Theatre Company), the L.A. premieres of Bitches! (Magnum Players) and Attack of the Killer B's (Factory Theater West, BackStage West Garland Award winner-Best Adaptation). His television writing includes multiple episodes of So Weird (Disney Channel), Sabrina, the Animated Series (Disney/UPN), Digimon (Fox Family), as well as several pilots including Bench Pressly, The World's Strongest Private Dick with Ahmet Zappa. His produced screenplays include the B-movies Socket, Witchcraft 15: Blood Rose and Witchcraft 16: Hollywood Coven. He was one on the founders of Chicago's prolific Factory Theater in 1992 (still going strong as of this writing), the creator of the "Gay of the Dead" blog on Fangoria.com, and just has that pesky thesis left to complete for his MFA in Playwriting from The Playwrights Lab at Hollins University.

JALISA LEELEE JACKSON is a Black playwright who is committed to writing a modern narrative for womxn and femmes of the African diaspora. While pursuing her undergraduate degree, Jackson collected a number of testimonies from Black womxn. After asking them about their hair experience, she compiled them into a play titled, Comb Your Hair (Or You'll Look Like a Slave). In 2017, Jackson's play was honored as a finalist in the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. Jackson is currently pursuing her Master In Fine Arts at the University of California, Riverside. She has won a number of awards for her work in theatre as well as her passion for Sociology.

ABOUT THE DIRECTORS:

CHRISANNE BLANKENSHIP-BILLINGS is a director and producer of live theatre. She has taught Viewpoints in Chicago and Los Angeles and uses this methodology in all of her directing projects. She believes the study of Viewpoints begins by emphasizing body awareness. It transforms a character's motivation and objective into a vocabulary that actors and directors use when creating natural actions in a theatrical environment.

She has spent a lifetime studying the Shakespeare canon as well as Elizabethan theatre in general. She as participated as Production Manager, Actor or Director for several of Shakespeare's plays.

Directing credits include (in Chicago) 1776 at The Apollo Theatre; Shadowlands at Putzch Studios; Ancient History, Sure Thing and Gertrude Stein and a Companion at Strawdog Theatre; Amanda and Eve at Bailiwick Theatre; and Dracula-A Musical at The Theatre Building; (in Los Angeles) Catching the Butcher at Long Beach Playhouse; Antigone at The Lyric Theatre; Queen Christina goes Roman at The Complex Theatre; A Midsummer Night's Dream at Hollywood Forever Cemetery; Vampire Lesbians of Sodom at The Bootleg Theatre; and Golden Watch Chain at The Globe Playhouse.

She was a co-producer of Borealis Productions located in Aurora IL. Producer credits include Children Of Cain at The Playwrights Center; Not For Your Mothers Basement at The Halsted Theatre Center; Artistic License at The Bailiwick Theatre; and I'm Not Rappaport, I Do! I Do!, and Hallelujah Hopscotch all at Temple Hill Dinner Theatre.

KUMI JAMES is a multidisciplinary artist, scholar, and activist currently based in Los Angeles, CA. Her work focuses on contending with the many levels of violence that black people experience. Her work is guided by questions such as "what is anti-black violence?" "can black people heal from the violence they experience?" and "what does it mean to create black community in an anti-black world?" James' short film savage (2014) was an official selection at the GLITCH Film Festival in Scotland in 2015 and recently was exhibited as part of the exhibit The Exposed Suture (Second Cycle) at Rond-Point Projects in Marseilles, France in March 2017.

Her artistic work and graduate research has garnered her several awards, including the Florence French Arts Scholarship, Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship, Cabot-Wellington Foundation Grant, Hispanic Scholarship Fund McNamara Family Creative Arts Grant, National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts Filmmaker Scholarship, Fulbright Research Fellowship, and UCLA Gene Reynolds Award for Directing. Kumi James earned her MFA in Film from Columbia University in 2013.

ABOUT SKYPILOT THEATRE COMPANY:

Founded in 2004, SKYPILOT THEATRE COMPANY is a non-profit ensemble of resident playwrights, actors, directors and designers producing provocative, compelling and challenging new works for the Los Angeles theatre-going audience. 2010 saw SkyPilot shift gears away from producing revivals and towards writing and producing only original plays. Notable productions include Samathan Macher's To The New Girl and War Bride, Adam Hahn's Kong: A Goddamn Thirty-Foot Gorilla, Nathan Wellman's Inhale Harmonica, Liz Shannon Miller's Light's Off, Eyes Closed, Jeff Goode's The Emancipation Of Alabaster Mcgill, Greg Machlin's Keith Haring: Pieces of a Life, and Earthbound: An Electronica Musical by Adam Hahn (book), JoNathan Price (music), and Chana Wise (lyrics). In 2017 SkyPilot launched its SkyPilot Runway development track, beginning with Daniel Rover Singer's (The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)) newest work, The Cave.

ABOUT Jason Weiss:

Jason Weiss is a highly regarded actor, director and educator with over 20 years of professional experience. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in performance and pedagogy from the University of Florida and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in performance from the University of Miami. He came to Theatre of Arts in November of 2011 as a faculty member, and between then and September 2015, taught Acting, Theatre History, Industry Preparation, and directed the Summer Film Intensive. He was appointed Executive Director of Theatre of Arts in October of 2015.

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