This July, EXIT Theatre is proud to present A Life On The Ocean Wave, a collaboratively-constructed multi-disciplinary original play with a jaunty subtitle: Being a Merrie Evening of Genuine Sea Chanty Sing-Along, and Also a Historically and Scientifically Accurate Account of a Sailor's Life at Sea, in Which Ghosts Appear and Have Something to Say. A Life On The Ocean Wave runs July 6 - July 22 in the EXIT Stage Left, the EXIT's 49-seat venue.
A Life On The Ocean Wave tells the story of Shantywoman (Christina Augello), a singer of songs and a teller of tales who may be a goddess no less than Brizo, the famed protector of sailors...or just an actress struggling to find her feet again after the end of a romantic relationship. She is joined in her journey by a pair of dead sailors (
Charlie Gray and Kyle McReddie) who tell her the story of a pirate captain looking for his lost love (Carl Lucania), a blind pilot (Shirley Smallwood), and a dog that thinks she's a cat (Kitty Torres).
A combination of song, poetry, storytelling, and theatre, this anthology of original works by four local playwrights - Nancy Au, Nara Dahlbacka, and Conrad A. Panganiban under the leadership of head writer Carson Beker - was developed from pieces that premiered at the San Francisco Olympians Festival and is directed by festival creator and EXIT Theatre Resident Artist Stuart Bousel.
A Life On The Ocean Wave features scenic design by Mary Naughton, lighting design by Curtis Overacre, sound design by
Ryan Lee Short, and fight choreography by Kyle McReddie.
MEET THE LEAD ARTISTS
Carson Beker (Playwright / Head Writer) is a sailor-hearted writer and teller-of-tales. Their other full-length plays include The Sorrows: Or Deirdre From The Legend Kills Herself In Every Version But That Doesn't Mean You Always Have To (in development through Custom Made's Undiscovered Works Series 2016) and Sunflower Suicide Moon (Greenhouse Festival 2015). She co-founded The Escapery: A Writing Unschool with Nancy Au and has an MFA and MA in Fiction and Playwriting from San Francisco State University. His stories have appeared in Foglifter (Pushcart nomination 2016), Gigantic Sequins, and Radar Literary Series. Ze was a Lambda Fellow in Fiction, a Tin House Workshop Scholar, and a San Francisco Olympians Festival 2015 writer.
Nancy Au (Playwright) is a writer and artist living in Oakland. Her stories appear or are forthcoming in FRiGG, Tahoma Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, Pithead Chapel, The Pinch, Beloit Fiction Journal, Hermeneutic Chaos Journal, Smokelong Quarterly, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Liminal Stories, Foglifter, Forge Literary Magazine, Midnight Breakfast, Flapperhouse, Word Riot, Fiction Southeast, Necessary Fiction, Prick of the Spindle, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Identity Theory, among others. With Carson Beker, she was awarded the Spring Creek Project collaborative residency at Oregon State University which is dedicated to artists and writers inspired by nature and science. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University where she taught creative writing. She teaches creative and science writing at California State University Stanislaus and is co-founder of The Escapery. Smokelong Quarterly and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts nominated her flash fiction for The Best Small Fictions 2017 anthology.
Nara Dahlbacka (Playwright) is a local playwright and director, born and raised in Oakland. She discovered her love for playwriting as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara where she won the first ever Dilling Yang Fellowship in Dramatic Art and where her first two plays (Dayenu and Becky & Dog) were produced, both earning Corwin Metropolitan Theatre Awards. She received an MFA in Playwriting from San Francisco State University where she was one of the first recipients of the Yeah, I Said Feminist Theatre Fellowships and her play Blood under the Bridge was chosen for the Greenhouse Festival and was a runner up for the Jim Highsmith Award. She directed new works her entire time at San Francisco State University on the mainstage and as part of the Fringe and Greenhouse Festivals. She has also directed for the last three years at the KCACTF Region 7 Festival and last year her play Twinkle Twinkle Little Lamb was a semi-finalist for the John Cauble One-Act Award.
Conrad A. Panganiban (Playwright) is a San Francisco Bay Area based playwright. His work has been performed at San Francisco Playhouse, Bindlestiff Studio, San Francisco State University, A-Squared Theatre Workshop, and CIRCA Pintig in Chicago as well as in Edinburgh, Scotland. He's one of the co-writers (with Drew Stephens and Emmanuel Romero) of the award-winning short film Prinsesa. Conrad earned his MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis on Playwriting from San Francisco State University. He's a member of The
Dramatists Guild of America and Theatre Bay Area.
Stuart Bousel (Director) is a writer and director who recently did both for his latest, Twins, at PianoFight. The Director of New Work Development at Custom Made Theatre Company, he has directed their productions of M. Butterfly, The Merchant of Venice, Prelude To A Kiss, The Crucible, Grey Gardens: The Musical, Six Degrees of Separation, and The House of Yes, as well as dramturging Chess in which he also played Walter. He is a resident artist at EXIT Theatre where he directed The Desk Set, the American premiere of Clive Barker's Paradise Street, adapted Kristin Hersh's memoire Rat Girl into a stage play, and played the Pope in Confessions of a Catholic Child. His play Everybody Here Says Hello! was the recipient of the 2014 Theatre Bay Area Award for Outstanding World Premiere and his play Pastorella was nominated for the same award in 2015. His other plays include Gone Dark, Briankill, Polyxena In Orbit, The Exiled, The Edenites, Housebroken, Speak Roughly, The Age of Beauty, Juno En Victoria and Ceres En Victoria. He co-wrote the Cosgrove-winning short film Insomnia, the Hostelling International mocu-mercial Wish U Were Here, and the novella Dry Country.
EXIT Theatre presents
A Life On The Ocean Wave
Being a Merrie Evening of Genuine Sea Chanty Sing-Along, and Also a Historically and Scientifically Accurate Account of a Sailor's Life at Sea, in Which Ghosts Appear and Have Something to Say.
July 6 - July 22, 2017 Press Opening: Friday, July 7
Tickets are $20 and on sale through
Brown Paper Tickets
Thursday, July 6 is a discounted preview performance EXIT Theatre has been presenting indie theatre since 1983 and operates five storefront performance spaces in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. With a focused mission, the EXIT provides opportunities for artists to create and showcase their work and develop their audiences. In addition to housing the productions of 100 independent theatre companies each year, the EXIT is the home of the annual San Francisco Fringe Festival, the largest grass roots theatre festival in the Bay Area.
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