ARC Performs a Staged Reading Series at Marin Shakes

ACTORS’ READING COLLECTIVE (ARC)  is presenting a series of 3 play readings in June and July at Marin Shakespeare Company - 514 Fourth St., San Rafael, 94901. All readings begin at 7 pm.  ARC’s mission is to share the artistic, spiritual, and emotional passion uniquely inherent to theater and storytelling. ARC is moving out of its Zoom box origins and onto the Stage. 

https://www.arcstream.org/showtime

The Actors’ Reading Collective series begins on Juneteenth, June 19, with Pipeline by Dominique Morisseau in which a mother struggles to keep her son out of the school-to-prison pipeline. Pipeline is directed by Leontyne Mbele-Mbong and Emilie Talbot.

On July 10, the series continues with The Ferryman by Jez Butterworth. An Irish family is haunted by its past. The play reading is directed by Robert Parsons and Anthony Fusco.

The concluding July 30 play reading is The Children by Lucy Kirkwood, in which two scientists are forced into difficult decisions about the future. The Children is directed by Timothy Redmond.

Actors’ Reading Collective (ARC) is actor-inspired, -shaped and -driven: a collective molded by mutual efforts and member input. ARC is deeply committed to changing the way BIPOC members are cast, and practice gender and age inclusion in an attempt to move our mutual humanity forward, to listen to what is needed, and what is lacking. ARC challenges communities to change. 

 

Outside the Box Bay Area Premieres: Staged Reading Series 

PIPELINE by Dominique Morisseau

Directed by Leontyne Mbele-Mbong and Emilie Talbot

Monday, June 19, 2023 at 7pm A Bay Area premier reading on Juneteenth

Nya, an inner-city public high school teacher, is desperate to give her only son Omari opportunities her students may never have. When a controversial incident at his upstate private school threatens to get him expelled, Nya must confront his rage and her own parental choices. Will she be able to reach him before a world beyond her control pulls him away? Acclaimed playwright Dominique Morisseau (Skeleton Crew) pens a deeply moving story of a mother’s fight to give her son a future — without turning her back on the community that made him who he is.

Dominique Morisseau has won numerous awards and fellowships, including two OBIE awards and a TONY nomination, the Sky-Cooper Prize, and the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama, among many others. She is a recent Macarthur Genius Grant Fellow. While her work has been produced at major theaters throughout the nation, this particular play has never been produced in the Bay Area.
Cast includes: Michael J Asberry*, Ron Chapman*, Eddie Ewell*, Gianna DiGregorio Rivera*, Leontyne Mbele-Mbong*, Emilie Talbot*

THE FERRYMAN by Jez Butterworth

Directed by Robert Parsons and Anthony Fusco

Monday, July 10, 2023 at 7pm  A Bay Area premier reading

The Ferryman takes place in rural County Armagh, in Northern Ireland in 1981, during a rise of violence of the IRA, right in the middle of The Troubles, the decades-long fight for Irish independence from Great Britain. Butterworth brilliantly relates the tension, violence, and dread that rocked Ireland by focusing on a single, extended family, incisively using this domestic microcosm to illuminate the complexities of a society at war with itself.

Cast includes: Andre Amaratico*, Michael Asberry*, Mary Baird*, Sylvia Burboeck*, James Carpenter*, Eddie Ewell*, Anthony Fusco*, Kina Kantor, Julian Lopez-Morillas*, Susan Lynskey*, Leontyne Mbele-Mbong*, Timothy Roy Redmond*, Cathleen Ridley*

THE CHILDREN

By Lucy Kirkwood

Directed by Timothy Redmond

Monday, July 31, 2023 at 7pm

In a remote cottage two retired scientists, Robin and Hazel, live a quiet life in the wake of a catastrophe at a nearby nuclear plant. When Rose, a fellow nuclear physicist whom they haven’t seen for years, suddenly turns up, their precariously ordered existence is disrupted. As the shocking reason for Rose’s visit is gradually revealed, Robin and Hazel are forced to make a difficult choice about the future.

Critics have called Lucy Kirkwood “the most rewarding dramatist of her generation.” And her Tony nominated play The Children “…a richly suggestive and beautifully written piece of work… tantalizingly hard to define: …somewhat menacing, and often funny… What it is not is a polemic about the irresponsibility of baby boomers; instead it rather penetratingly asks what they owe younger generations, exactly.”

Cast includes: Mary Baird*, Luisa Sermol*

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