New Works by Amelia Roper, Aditi Brennan Kapil & Christopher Chen Set for Crowded Fire's 2014 Season

Crowded Fire Theater (CFT) announces three bold new plays in their 2014 Season by playwrights Amelia Roper, Aditi Brennan Kapil and Christopher Chen. "Our 2014 season brings a beautiful, sophisticated and at times humorous look at the intricacies around love and loss..." states CFT Artistic Director Marissa Wolf, "Each play views the world through a lens of intimate relationships. Filled with fresh humor and searing longing, the 2014 line up offers three distinct, startling new plays."

CFT's 2014 season begins with the World Premiere of Amelia Roper's She Rode Horses Like the Stock Exchange, (March 20 - April 12-opens March 24) an absurdly funny and terrifying ride through downsized, foreclosed America. The Australian playwright, Amelia Roper, is a bright new voice in the American theater, currently writing for Yale Rep and for the 2014 Humana Festival. This Premiere marks the first production of Roper's to appear in the Bay Area. In June, the season features Aditi Brennan Kapil with her West Coast Premiere of Brahman/i: A One-Hijra Stand-Up Comedy Show (June 5-28-opens June 9) that hilariously takes on history, mythology, and high school through the lens of an intersex boy/girl tethered by neither gender nor culture, wildly curious and inventive in his/her examination of both. The season concludes with the nationally recognized Christopher Chen, known for his use of structure and metatheatricality (The Hundred Flowers Project), he returns with a new CFT commissioned World Premiere, The Late Wedding (Sep. 18-October 11-opens Sept 22). Inspired by the writings of Italian fabulist novelist Italo Calvino, Chen and his unreliable narrators take us on a luminous journey of the soul.

The 2014 season follows a very successful 2013 season in CFT's new home the Thick House, which included music and art related to the season's productions. Nashville singer/songwriter Sarah Lou Richards performed a concert which included a song commissioned for The Taming and The New Yorker cartoonist Tom Toro presented a CFT sponsored exhibit at the Potrero Hill Farley's Gallery of The New Yorker cartoonist Tom Toro in conjunction with a display of his work in the Thick House lobby.

World premiere programming in Crowded Fire's 2014 Season is funded by generous support from the San Francisco Foundation (The Matchbox), and the San Francisco Arts Commission (The Matchbox). Crowded Fire gratefully acknowledges general operations funding from Grants for the Arts/SF Hotel Tax Fund and The Kenneth Rainin Foundation

The Matchbox: Commissioning and Developing New Plays Matchbox Readings: December 1, 2, 8, 9 The Matchbox: Commissioning and Developing New Plays grew out of CFT's need to bolster playwrights' revision processes in order to strengthen the scripts before rehearsals for the professional productions began. The Matchbox programming includes three different initiatives, including Commissions, in-house Workshops, and slots in the annual Matchbox Readings Series -- public staged readings of plays in development. Recent Crowded Fire Commissions through the Matchbox and first seen in the Matchbox Readings Series include The Hundred Flowers Project by Christopher Chen and The Taming by Lauren Gunderson. The 2014 Matchbox Reading Series will take on four surprising new plays, including a co-commission by Geetha Reddy with Playwrights Foundation.

THE PLAYS: Crowded Fire champions playwrights whose work offers a vital contribution to the American theater landscape. Committed to diversifying the canon of contemporary plays, CFT welcomes Amelia Roper and Aditi Brennan Kapil to San Francisco for premieres of their first fully staged Bay Area productions. Amelia Roper offers a wry, sharp approach to the global financial meltdown In She Rode Horses Like the Stock Exchange. She examines our complicity in the economic structures in which we are embedded, and how easily our creature comforts can be wrested away from us. In counterpoint to traditional theater, Aditi Brennan Kapil's Brahman/i: A One-Hijra Stand-Up Comedy Show offers an incredible night of stand-up comedy that keeps you laughing and gasping, as she explores questions around sexuality and gender in utterly surprising ways, exploring gender-fluidity through a South Asian lens. CFT has had a long and fruitful relationship with the award winning Bay Area playwright Christopher Chen. in 2011 CFT co-commissioned and produced Chen's wildly successful The Hundred Flowers Project with the Playwrights Foundation. He is the current recipient of the 2013 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and is playwright in residence at The Vineyard Theatre. In this new CFT commissioned World Premiere The Late Wedding, Chen takes us to a world of nuanced relationships that spiral out from the everyday inner workings of spouses to the very outermost depths of our solar system.

Tickets: Visit www.crowdedfire.org for more information and to purchase tickets.

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