San Francisco's cutting-edge Cutting Ball Theater continues its 2008 season of critically acclaimed stage-work with Avant GardARAMA! Like Cutting Ball's 2004 edition of Avant GardARAMA!, this second installation of the series offers an evening of short experimental plays that radically experiment with theatrical form - in this case, plays from three American women: Pulitzer Prize-winner Suzan-Lori Parks, Bay Area playwright Eugenie Chan, and Gertrude Stein. Cutting Ball Artistic Director Rob Melrose helms Avant GardARAMA!, featuring Felicia Benefield, Paige Rogers, and David Westley Skillman, July 18 through August 16 (press opening: July 24) at Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor Street in San Francisco. For tickets ($15-30) and more information, the public may visit cuttingball.com or call 800-838-3006.
The line up for this year is as follows:
Bone to Pick by Eugenie Chan
This World Premiere, commissioned by Cutting Ball Theater and Magic Theatre/Z Space New Works Initiative, re-tells the myth of Ariadne in a dizzyingly postmodern look at the costs of love and war. Young Prince Theseus promises to marry Ariadne if she will help him through an intricate labyrinth so that he can kill her half brother, the Minotaur. Once his task is complete, instead of marriage, he dumps her on a deserted island, in a diner at the end of the war-torn world.
Betting on the Dust Commander by Suzan-Lori Parks
Cutting Ball's fourth production of a Suzan-Lori Parks play, this playful look at marriage depicts a young couple on their hope-filled wedding night, and then years later as the husband habitually steals away to the race track. For those who enjoyed the jazz-like language of Cutting Ball's production of Parks' The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, this portrait of a marriage offers a musical logic that is all its own.
Accents in Alsace by Gertrude Stein
Included in the extraordinary 1922 publication Geography and Plays, this memorable cubist portrait of World War I remarkably fuses Stein's legendary experimental style with an unforgettably human depiction of war.
Eugenie Chan's plays have been produced and workshopped across the country at venues including The Public Theatre, Magic Theatre, Thick Description, Brava! For Women in the Arts, Mixed Blood, PlayLabs, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and others. Her work for the stage includes Kitchen Table; B'umblebee; Pilgrim; Daphne Does Dim Sum; Rancho Grande; Emil, A Chinese Play, Novell-aah! ; Tour Sino; Conset; and Willy Gee!. Her opera libretto Snakewoman was part of the February 2004 Risk Is This Festival of New Experimental Plays at Cutting Ball Theater. She has written political satire for the Tony Award-winning San Francisco Mme Troupe, is a resident playwright at the Playwrights Foundation, and a member of New Dramatists.
Suzan-Lori Parks is the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama (for the Broadway hit Topdog/Underdog). She was named one of TIME magazine's "100 Innovators for the Next New Wave" and is a MacArthur "Genius" Award recipient. Other works for the stage include In the Blood (2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist); Venus (1996 OBIE Award); The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World; Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990 OBIE Award); and The America Play. In 2007, her project 365 Plays/365 Days was produced in over 700 theaters. Parks will direct the Broadway revival of
August Wilson's Fences in 2009.
A self-styled genius whose Paris home was a salon for leading early 20th century artists and writers, Gertrude Stein became a catalyst in the development of modern art and literature. Her works include Three Lives; The Making of Americans; Tender Buttons; Geography and Plays; Composition as Explanation; How To Write; Operas and Plays; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Lectures in America; Picasso; The World is Round; Ida, A Novel; Wars I Have Seen; and Brewsie and Willie, among others.
Artistic Director and co-founder of Cutting Ball Theater, Rob Melrose has directed several productions for the company, including Suzan Lori-Parks' The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World; My Head Was a Sledgehammer; Mayakovsky: A Tragedy; Drowning Room; As You Like It; Macbeth; and The Taming of the Shrew, among others. Additional directing credits include
David Marshall Grant's Pen at The Guthrie Theater, Liz Duffy Adams' The Train Play at Crowded Fire Theater, and assistant directing credits for
Tom Stoppard's Indian Ink, (directed by
Carey Perloff at ACT), as well as
Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman (directed by Les Waters at Berkeley Rep). Melrose is currently assistant directing
Oskar Eustis's production of Hamlet at the New York Shakespeare Festival and is also shadowing Artistic Director Bill Rauch at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival during the 2008 and 2009 season as a part of the NEA / TCG Career Development Program for Directors; he will direct Samuel Beckett's
Happy Days at the Guthrie in February of 2009. Following Avant GardARAMA!, Cutting Ball Theater presents Victims of Duty by Eugene Ionesco October 24 – November 23, beginning the company's residence at EXIT on Taylor.
Co-founded in 1999 by husband and wife team 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, Magic Theatre, and Z Space New Plays Initiative to commission new experimental works, including Bone to Pick by Eugenie Chan. The company has produced a number of World Premieres and West Coast Premieres, and re-imagined various classics. Cutting Ball Theater earned the Best of SF Award in 2006 for Theater from SF Weekly, and was selected by San Francisco Magazine as Best Classic Theater in 2007.
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