Virtual World Premiere Of Charles Mee's UTOPIA Features Actors, Dancers, Disabled Artists

Cutting Ball Theater presents the virtual World Premiere of Utopia, a wildly inventive new work by Obie Award winning playwright Charles L. Mee.

Presented digitally, this multidisciplinary play incorporates vivid contemporary dance, a tableau of animated artworks, and fantastical costumes, to explore the question "how do you make a life?" A nine-year-old girl in a café observes the divergent paths of fellow diners and passers-by, while wrestling with the promise of her future. Mee's quirky work is inhabited by couples in varying stages of love and companionship, along with outlandishly dressed recurring bystanders, and a curious waiter with a bottomless ice cream menu, offering delightful commentary on life, love, and the absurdity of the every day. Performed by a cast of nine highly distinctive and diverse characters, plus a bevy of dancers, Utopia celebrates the power of community and a commitment to promoting hope and positivity in an environment of scarcity.

Commissioned by Cutting Ball Theater, this new production from Mee, lauded poet and sculpting pioneer of American experimental theater, will be directed by Cutting Ball Artistic Director Ariel Craft. The production features artistic partnerships with RAWdance, a contemporary dance company, and Creativity Explored, which supports artists with developmental disabilities, to create a work that harmonizes theater, dance, and animation in a genre-defying dreamscape audiences can stream from home.

Mee is renowned for his unique approach to writing plays, which often appropriate material from books, newspaper articles, lyrics from modern music, and dialogue from television programs and films. The results are thrilling multidisciplinary theatrical creations filled with music, dance, animation, and other surprises. He is the recipient of the gold medal for Lifetime Achievement in Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Obie Awards (Vienna: Lusthaus and Big Love), the PEN/Laura Pels Award, and the Richard B. Fisher Award.

Digital opening performance 8pm, October 16. Then available for streaming on demand through November 15. $20 - $50 per household (sliding scale). For information or to order tickets visit cuttingball.com or call (415) 525-1205. Individual tickets go on sale August 31; all-access season passes now on sale.

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