Custom Made Stages World Premiere Adaptation of Vonnegut's MOTHER NIGHT

Once again, Custom Made Theatre brings a Kurt Vonnegut novel to the stage with the world premiere of Brian Katz's adaptation of Vonnegut's third and highly celebrated novel, Mother Night. It's a meta-theatrical tale of duplicitous spies, bumbling white supremacists, and an anti-hero that served "evil too well and good too secretly, the crime of our times," writes author Vonnegut. Mother Night is also a love story, which fantasizes an idyllic "nation of two" as the only way to survive when the world has gone mad. Mother Night runs May 25-June 24 at Custom Made Theatre, 533 Sutter Street in San Francisco.

Mother Night tells the story of Howard W. Campbell, whom audiences may remember as the American-born, Nazi propagandist from "Slaughterhouse-Five".

In Mother Night, we learn that Campbell's story is much more complicated - that he was actually a double agent for the Allies, and was passing along secrets coded in his anti-Semitic radio broadcasts heard throughout the Third Reich. But at the same time, these broadcasts inspired and entertained Germans, helping them to believe the racist, totalitarian lies of Hitler and Goebbels.

Years later, Campbell has been living quietly in New York City, mourning the loss of his wife, when his solace is shattered by one betrayal after another. Eventually, he finds himself in a jail cell in Jerusalem, awaiting his fate, revisiting his past, and wondering if evil was served too well, and good too little.

In true Vonnegut fashion, Mother Night uses non-linear storytelling to piece together Campbell's history, and expertly fills in the jigsaw puzzle of a life that mirrors the great events of the last century.

Brian Katz directs a cast of seven who assume multiple roles in this epic, existentialist story.

CAST

Chris Morrell* - Howard W. Campbell, Jr.

David Boyll - O'Hare, ensemble

Megan Briggs - Helga, ensemble

AJ Davenport* - Witeren, ensemble

Catz Forsman - Jones, ensemble

Adam Niemann - Epstein, ensemble

Dave Sikula* - Kraft, ensemble

* Custom Made company member

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Mother Night, and the Danger of Impersonation

The New York Times has called Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. "the novelist of the counterculture." His works like Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. As a citizen he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical pacifist intellectual. He was born in Indianapolis, in 1922, served in the U.S. Army in Europe, and died in New York City in 2007.

Central to his later writing were his war experiences. He was assigned to the European front after Normandy and was captured during the Battle of the Bulge. Imprisoned in Dresden, he was chosen as a leader of the POWs because he spoke some German. After telling some German guards "what [he] was going to do to them when the Russians came," he was beaten and had his position as leader revoked. He witnessed the Allied firebombing of Dresden in February 1945, which destroyed most of the historic city. The firebombing of Dresden was the largest massacre of civilians in World War II. More civilians died than in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It was a "safe city" bombed by the Allies, then covered up after the war

Mother Night, published in 1961, received little attention at the time of its publicatioN. Howard W. Campbell Jr., Vonnegut's protagonist, is an American who goes to Nazi Germany during the war as a double agent for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, and rises to the regime's highest ranks as a radio propagandist. After the war, the spy agency refuses to clear his name and he is eventually imprisoned by the Israelis in the same cell block as Adolf Eichmann. Vonnegut wrote in a foreword, "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Literary critic Lawrence Berkove considered the novel, like Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to illustrate the tendency for "impersonators to get carried away by their impersonations, to become what they impersonate and therefore to live in a world of illusion."

BRIAN KATZ is the Founding Artistic Director of the award-winning Custom Made Theatre Co. This is the second Kurt Vonnegut project he has directed, the first being the 2014 critically acclaimed Bay Area premiere of Eric Simonson's adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five. For the company, he has directed over thirty-five productions including the recent revival of Chess, which won the Bay Area Critics Circle Best Overall Production of 2016, along with 12 other nominations including best director. He also helmed the Critic's Circle Best Overall Play of 2012: Edward Albee's The Play About the Baby, and produced the 2015 winner, In Love and Warcraft. Regional premieres helmed include: Middletown, Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Red Light Winter. His adaptation of Voltaire, Candide, of California, has been presented in both San Francisco and New York. Brian has worked at Cal Shakes, Berkeley Rep, the Goodman Theatre, Killing My Lobster among other institutions, and is an alumnus of Clark University (Distinguished Young Alumni Award, 2006).

Show Times and Tickets

Previews: May 24-26, 8:00 pm

Press Opening: Sunday, May 28 at 7:00 pm

Runs: May 28-June 24; Thurs-Sat 8:00 pm, Saturday Matinees, June 3 & 17 2:00 pm; Wednesdays, June 7 & 21 7:30 pm

Tickets: $20-42

Learn more & buy tickets at (415) 798-CMTC (2682), http://www.custommade.org.

To post a comment, you must register and login.