Mee's FULL CIRCLE To Premiere at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, 10/26

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company continues Season 30, the 2009-10 Season, with a creative staging of FULL CIRCLE by Charles L. Mee (Big Love, bobrauschenbergamerica) that will be performed throughout the Woolly facility, featuring Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz.

Directed by Michael Rohd, Artistic Director of Sojourn Theatre (Portland, OR), the cast features Woolly Mammoth Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz and a Company Member reunion of Jessica Frances Dukes, Daniel Escobar, Naomi Jacobson, Sarah Marshall, Kate Eastwood Norris, Michael Russotto, and Michael Willis, with an ensemble of eight including Wyckham Avery.

FULL CIRCLE runs October 26 - November 29, 2009, with Pay-What-You-Can performances on October 26 and 27 at 8pm. FULL CIRCLE is performed throughout Woolly's facility and the audience will move with it. Comfortable shoes are recommended for this unconventional experience.

"For Season 30, Woolly is focused on the broad theme of theatre and democracy," said Howard Shalwitz, "and Full Circle is unquestionably our centerpiece: a big, fun, meaty play that gives us a chance to re-unite much of our acting company with a favorite playwright, explore our beautiful space in new ways, honor the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and engage with our community in a timely conversation about economic justice and the role of the arts in an era of great transformation. It will be a thrill for me to be back onstage with so many good friends - and to be playing a fellow artistic director, Heiner Muller, one of the great theatre artists of the twentieth century. I'm especially pleased to welcome director Michael Rohd, one of our nation's leading thinkers on site-specific work and the role of theatre in civic dialogue. Under his guidance, Full Circle will be a truly revolutionary experience for both our artists and our audiences, ushering in Woolly's next phase of fearless theatre."

"When the Berlin Wall fell, people had to survive amidst a shifting world order; be it currency, bureaucracy, or re-drawn borders, one's experience of the world was anything but stable," stated Michael Rohd. "Chuck's provocative and often ridiculous reimagining of history is largely a travelogue that follows two women, a German student and an American socialite, across this uncertain landscape. Rather than sit in the theater and watch this voyage, we're staging the production throughout the Woolly building, inviting audiences to navigate the story with us and have their own experience of changing rules and shifting perspectives."

The ancient Chinese myth of the chalk circle re-emerges at the fall of the Berlin Wall: as the crotchety East German Chancellor Erich Honecker watches a play, students suddenly riot and the profiteers swoop in, including an investor named Warren Buffet. Amid the chaos, two women (an American socialite/tourist and a student rebel), launch a madcap chase to save an abandoned baby and outrun the vultures of both communism and capitalism. Their journey through Woolly's entire building comes full circle back to the stage.

FULL CIRCLE is inspired by The Chalk Circle, a Chinese zaju play written in the Yuan Dynasty, which inspired The Chalk Circle by the German poet Klabund, which inspired Bertolt Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle. Passages of the play were inspired by or taken from the writings of Warren Buffet, Katherine Graham, the biography of Pamela Harriman, Heiner Muller, George Bataille, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon.

Charles L. Mee has written Big Love, True Love, and First Love, bobrauschenbergamerica, Hotel Cassiopeia, Orestes 2.0, Trojan Women: A Love Story, Summertime, and Wintertime, among other plays - all available online at www.charlesmee.org. His plays have been performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, American Repertory Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, the Public Theatre, Lincoln Center, the Humana Festival, Steppenwolf, and other places in the United States, as well as in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Brussels, Vienna, Istanbul, and elsewhere. Chuck is the recipient of the Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Obies, a Laura Pels Award, and the Richard B. Fisher Award. He is the head of the graduate playwriting program at Columbia University's School of the Arts. He is the author of a number of books of history (Meeting at Potsdam, The Marshall Plan, The End of Order) that have been selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club and the History Book Club, and is the former editor-in-chief of Horizon magazine, a magazine of history, art, literature, and the fine arts. Chuck is a lifetime trustee of the Washington think tank The Urban Institute.

Director Michael Rohd is founding artistic director of Sojourn Theatre in Portland, Oregon, a 2005 recipient of Americans for the Arts'Animating Democracy Exemplar Award. His work there as writer/director includes Built (presented as part of Portland's TBA 2008 Festival), Good (2008 Portland Drammy, Outstanding Production of the Season), and 7 Great Loves (five 2003 Drammy Awards, including Best Production and Best Director). Michael has been a recipient of Theatre Communication Group's New Generations Grant, and their Extended Collaboration Grant. An associate artist with Cornerstone Theater Company (Los Angeles) and Ping Chong & Co (New York), he is on faculty at Northwestern University's Theater Department in Evanston, IL. His current projects include creating Oregon Shakespeare Festival's first company devised, site-specific work, a new Sojourn piece called On The Table, and a commission at Kansas City Rep. He is author of the book Theatre for Community, Conflict, and Dialogue.

The cast includes Jessica Frances Dukes (Eclipsed, Fever/Dream, Antebellum, Starving) as Dulle Griet, Daniel Escobar (She Stoops to Comedy: Helen Hayes Award, Goodnight Desdemona, African Touris) as Hermann/Krenz, Naomi Jacobson (The Unmentionables and Vigils: Helen Hayes nominations, Maria/Stuart, Dead Man's Cell Phone, The Clean House, Psychic Life of Savages, Kvetch) as Pamela, Sarah Marshall (Boom, Maria/Stuart, The Clean House and The Dead Monkey: Helen Hayes nominations, Dead Man's Cell Phone, In the Blood) as Helmut/Cook/Erich Honecker, Kate Eastwood Norris (She Stoops to Comedy: Helen Hayes Award, Big Love, Bug) as Christa/Ursula, Michael Russotto (She Stoops to Comedy: Helen Hayes nomination, The Velvet Sky, Lenny & Lou, Homebody/Kabul, Pitchfork Disney) as Werner/Modrow, Howard Shalwitz (The Gigli Concert, Lenny & Lou, Rocket to the Moon, The Fever, Savage in Limbo, Christmas on Mars) as Heiner Muller, and Michael Willis (After Ashley and Heaven: Helen Hayes nominations, Current Nobody, Grace, Strindberg in Hollywood) as Warren Buffet.

Making their Woolly debuts: Wyckham Avery (Student Leader/Concierge/Ensemble), and Michael Feldsher, Andrew Hawkins, Ariana Hodes, Liz McAuliffe, Kelsey Painter, Jay Saunders, and Clak Young (Guides).

The production & design team for FULL CIRCLE includes Shannon Scrofano (Set & Video Design), Ivania Stack (Costume Design), Colin K. Bills (Lighting Design), Veronika Vorel (Sound Design), Jennifer Sheetz (Properties), and Elizabeth Johnson (Choreographer).

Now in Season 30, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company continues to hold its place at theatre's leading edge. Acknowledged as "The hottest theatre company in town" (Washington Post), "known for its productions of innovative new plays" (The New York Times), Woolly Mammoth is a regional and national leader in the development of new plays, and one of the best known and most influential small theatres in America. The Company garnered this reputation by holding fast to its unique mission: ...to ignite an explosive engagement between theatre artists and the community by developing, producing and promoting new plays that explore the edges of theatrical style and human experience, and by implementing new ways to use the artistry of theatre to serve the people of Greater Washington, DC.

Currently under the leadership of Artistic Director/Co-Founder Howard Shalwitz and Managing Director Jeffrey Herrmann, Woolly Mammoth is a member of the National New Play Network, Theatre Communications Group, The League of Washington Theatres, and The Cultural Alliance of Greater Washington, and a participant in the A-ha! Program: Think it, Do it, funded by MetLife and administered by Theatre Communications Group, the national organization for the American theatre. The Theatre's programs are supported in part by The National Endowment for the Arts, the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs Program/United States Commission of Fine Arts, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

For more information, visit www.woollymammoth.net.

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