Don Reed's THE KIPLING HOTEL: THE 80S Extends at The Marsh

The Marsh Berkeley announces, due to popular demand, the extension of Don Reed's acclaimed autobiographical hit The Kipling Hotel: The 80s.

The Kipling Hotel invites audiences to 1980s Los Angeles, as Reed recounts the awkward adventures of the son of an Oakland pimp, awarded a partial scholarship to UCLA. The under-funded Reed scrambles to stay afloat with a variety of schemes, from serial party-hopping to stripping, before finally earning room and board by serving breakfast at an unforgettable retirement home on the rough side of town. This riotous show follows Reed's hair-raising misadventures, and brings to vivid life the hotel's exotic elderly denizens who impart their own brand of wisdom, as well as the earnest students, aspiring actors, and drug dealers, who are recruited to wait on them.

Named a Theatre Bay Area recommended production, The Kipling Hotel will perform 5:00pm Saturdays, 5:30pm Sundays, now through September 30. Performances times will then change to 8:30pm Saturdays, 5:30pm Sundays for the remainder of the run (October 7-22). The Marsh Berkeley is located at 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley. For tickets ($20-$35 sliding scale, $55-$100 reserved), the public may visit www.themarsh.org or call 415-282-3055 (between 1:00pm and 4:00pm, Monday through Friday).

Don Reed has created a trio of solo shows that recount his formative years in a 1960s Oakland grammar school (Can You Dig It?), and his irregular teens in the 1970s shuttling between his father the pimp, and his mother and Jehovah's Witness stepfather, on opposite sides of the street (East 14th). In The Kipling Hotel, which offers a look at making his way in the "electric pink 80s" of Los Angeles.

Don Reed is a San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle nominee, and NAACP triple nominee for Best Actor and Best Playwright. He is presently co-starring in the recently released movie Unleashed starring Kate Micucci (The LEGO Batman Movie), Justin Chatwin (Doctor Who), and Steve Howey (Shameless), and will be seen in the one of the crown jewels for this year's New York Television Festival Bartlett, where Reed plays the boss in a struggling ad agency alongside Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton) and Utkarsh Ambudkar (The Mindy Project). Reed has performed, written, and directed for film, television, and theater. As a producer and writer, he has also been working on transforming Charlotte Burley and Lyah Beth LeFlore's best-selling book Cosmopolitan Girls into a television series. Reed was the opening act/warm-up comedian for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno for more than 1,000 episodes and is presently the warm-up comedian for Snoop Dogg's game show The Joker's Wild. His voice can be heard on: Spiderman, Johnny Quest, Captain Planet, The Voice, Law & Order, SNL and as the voice of the cat on 2 Broke Girls. He has created promos for The Voice, The Golden Globes, The Academy Awards, MLB, Chappelle's Show, Tyler Perry Films, and the Olympics. Additionally, he has written, directed, produced, and starred in the HBO shorts: Lucky: The Irish Pimp and Pookie Watson: Hood Detective. Reed has written and starred in work for Oprah Winfrey's OWN. He is also a board member of the thriving 51Oakland foundation which aims to keep music and the arts alive in Oakland Public Schools.

The Marsh is known as "a breeding ground for new performance." It was launched in 1989 by Founder and Artistic Director Stephanie Weisman, and now annually hosts more than 600 performances of 175 shows across the company's two venues in San Francisco and Berkeley. A leading outlet for solo performers, The Marsh's specialty has been hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as "solo performances that celebrate the power of storytelling at its simplest and purest." The East Bay Times named The Marsh one of Bay Area's best intimate theaters, calling it "one of the most thriving solo theaters in the nation. The live theatrical energy is simply irresistible."

Photo Credit: Ric Omphroy

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