Christopher Chen's THE LATE WEDDING Opens 9/22 at Crowded Fire Theater

The Crowded Fire Theater (CFT) concludes its 2014 season with the World Premiere of THE LATE WEDDING by Christopher Chen opening with a press night on September 22 (Previews Sept. 18, 19, 20) running through October 11 at the Thick House in San Francisco's Potrero Hill. THE LATE WEDDING is both inspired by and a homage to Italian fabulist novelist Italo Calvino whose stories "Invisible Cities" and "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" have become Chen's launching pad into a shadowy exploration into themes of distance, dislocation, and transience in internet-age relationships. A Crowded Fire Theater commission, in THE LATE WEDDING "Chen channels our society's collective unconscious with dizzying urgency..." remarks director Marissa Wolf. "He is peeling back layer after layer of cultural practices and rituals, revealing a raw, pulsing interior of longing and hope." Directed by Marissa Wolf THE LATE WEDDING features Michele Leavy*+, Lawrence Radecker+, Lauren Spencer, Michael Anthony Torres*, Kathryn Zdan*, Ogie Zulueta*. (*Actors Equity, +CFT company member)

Christopher Chen enlists his own unreliable narrators to take us on a kaleidoscopic, mind-bending, and ultimately luminous journey of the soul. In the spirit of Calvino The Late Wedding is designed as a "fluid play." There can be anywhere from 3-16 actors playing a host of characters and couples. Gender, sexuality, and race can (and should) be endlessly interpreted and reinterpreted, from production to production or even within a single production- several different actors might cycle through a single character. "Implicit in Chen's examination of structure and human consciousness is the very real portrait of a world in which all people, gay or straight, have the right to marry..." states Wolf "featuring a spectrum of various marriages on stage, with a diverse cast of actors, offers subtle and powerful images around a key issue of equality that we currently face as a nation."

Tickets: Prices range from $15-$35 progressively during the course of the run.
We offer Pay-What-You-Can Preview performances and student/senior/group rates.
Tickets: Visit www.crowdedfire.org for more information and to purchase tickets.
Box Office by phone (415) 746-9238

Playwright Christopher Chen (The Hundred Flowers Project, MUTT) is the 2013/2014 recipient of the Paul Vogel Playwriting Award and is currently playwright-in-residence at the Vineyard Theatre in New York. In early July Chen was selected for theSundance Institute's 2014 Theatre Lab where he worked his new stage play CAUGHT with director Mark Brokaw and theSundance associated artists. In October two of Christopher Chen's plays go up, the world premiere of CAUGHT at InterAct in Philadelphia, and MidWest premiere of HUNDRED FLOWERS at Silk Road Rising in Chicago.