CAMINO REAL Plays Cutting Ball Theater 12/4

Cutting Ball Theater presents the second installation of this season's Hidden Classics Reading Series, Tennessee Williams' CAMINO REAL. CAMINO REAL is Williams' dream play that borrows heavily from August Strindberg's A Dream Play and The Great Highway. Peopled with characters from literature and pop culture, including Casanova, Camille, Don Quixote, and Kilroy, CAMINO REAL, one of William's most imaginative and touching plays, takes place in a bizarre afterworld where the royal road of the unconscious empties out onto a real road littered with life's misfits. M. Graham Smith directs this reading, featuring Lauren Bloom*, Brian Herndon*, Lori Holt*, Louis Parnell*, Kevin Rolston*, and Jomar Tagatac*.

This season, Cutting Ball's Hidden Classics Reading Series explores and celebrates the works of, and inspired by, August Strindberg. The series offers a profound look at one of the greatest authors ever to write for the stage in a program that continues to be one of San Francisco's best-kept secrets.

The company will produce all five of Strindberg's Chamber Plays, in new translations by Paul Walsh, in a festival entitled Strindberg Cycle: The Chamber Plays in Rep in fall of 2012, the first time all five of Strindberg's Chamber Plays will be performed together in repertory in any language.

Co-founded in 1999 by theater artists Rob Melrose and Paige Rogers, Cutting Ball Theater presents avant-garde works of the past, present, and future by re-envisioning classics, exploring seminal avant-garde texts, and developing new experimental plays. Cutting Ball Theater has partnered with Playwrights Foundation, and the Magic Theatre/Z Space New Plays Initiative to commission new experimental works. The company has produced a number of World Premieres, West Coast Premieres, and re-imagined various classics. Voted "Best Theater Company" in the 2010 San Francisco Bay Guardian Best of the Bay issue, Cutting Ball Theater also earned the Best of SF award in 2006 from SF Weekly, was selected by San Francisco Magazine as Best Classic Theater in 2007, and received the 2008 San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie award for outstanding talent in the performing arts. Cutting Ball Theater was featured in the February 2010 issue of American Theatre Magazine.

WHEN: Sunday, December 4, 1pm

WHERE: The Cutting Ball Theater in Residence at EXIT on Taylor, 277 Taylor St., San Francisco

TICKETS: Free and open to the public. For more information, visit cuttingball.com or call

(415) 419-3584