The Actors' Reading Collective Will Present West Coast Premiere of THE ANTIPODES

The Actors’ Reading Collective, in residence at Marin Shakespeare Company, has announced the West Coast premiere of Annie Baker’s The Antipodes. Directed by Alyson Schacherer, The Antipodes will run November 8 through December 1, 2024. Featuring an all-star cast of Bay Area talent, The Antipodes is a play about people telling stories about telling stories, with Baker’s fearless candor and her unparalleled ear for unfiltered speech.  

This production marks an exciting milestone for the Actors’ Reading Collective. Born of the pandemic lockdown, a group of actors gathered to read scripts together online. As theaters began to re-open, the collective realized they had created something special, and continued to present staged readings in person: script-in-hand, minimal production values, one-night-only performances. Following a smashingly successful fundraising campaign, The Antipodes will be the collective’s first full production! Fully staged, with a four-week run at Marin Shakes’ new state-of-the-art indoor theater in San Rafael. Says founding collective member James Carpenter, “I couldn’t be more proud of this ensemble, and what has been achieved, coming out of Covid—a time of extreme hardship and adversity for the Arts. To see this play brought to life by this amazing group of Bay Area All Stars, speaks to their prodigious talent and drive and to the belief that there is always a way through misfortune. It is a group of incredible heart and mind and underscores my faith in the power of storytelling to bring us together.  They inspire me, they lift me up—we collectively, are mighty.”

Renowned American playwright Annie Baker is a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant. Baker won the Pulitzer prize in 2014 for her play The Flick. She has been awarded the Susan Smith Blackburn prize, the Steinberg Playwright Award, Critics’ Circle Theatre Award, and multiple Obie awards. New York-based director and former San Rafael resident Alyson Schacherer says, “It is such an honor to work with this talented company, to bring Annie’s play to the Bay Area. Annie Baker is so well-loved because she breaks rules. She breaks conventions, successfully and unpredictably and unexpectedly. Why we get so obsessed with stories, ultimately pulls back the curtain on the creative process, and the mass consumption of media right now. In her work, there is an insistence about the difficulty of communicating, the time it takes, that reinforces our own humanity.”

The Actors’ Reading Collective’s (ARC) mission is to share the artistic, spiritual, and emotional passion uniquely inherent to theater and storytelling.
When the Pandemic began in 2020 and theaters shuttered around the world, artists lost voices, identities, and jobs overnight with no hope of potential stage work for the foreseeable future. ARC was born out of a reaction to that sudden silencing and the need to tell stories through our mutual love of words, of theater and our need to gather and celebrate. As the world has gradually reopened, ARC moves out of its Zoom box origins and once again onto the stage. In the deft hands of ARC actors, who hail from across the country, these stories have blossomed to life in unexpected ways, and have captivated audiences with their beauty and simplicity.

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