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Join us for our fourth edition of Risk is This. From over 200 submissions, we select three bold new experimental plays and workshop them each for one week. At the end of each week, we present two public readings of the plays accompanied by conceptual designs of the sets and costumes. We then invite the audience to imagine with us the form and landscape of each play. It is a unique chance to be involved with finding a new play’s performance and design vocabulary along with the artists creating the production.
And Jesus moonwalks the Mississippi is poetic retelling of the Demeter myth set during the civil war and narrated by the Mississippi River. Having run away from a plantation in North Carolina, Demeter travels South in search of her daughter Po'em. En route, she is almost murdered and receives a mission from God to free the children of the middle passage in three days. Hell-bent on finding her daughter instead, Demeter arrives on a plantation in the rich fertile landscape of Louisiana, (a modern day Elysian field) where her daughter was a nursemaid. Although her child is not there, what Demeter finds changes her course entirely. In this epic bricolage, myth, spirituality, gods and mortals are all woven together to examine the complex and profound fabric that is the American quilt.
Trojan Barbie
by Christine Evans
Dec. 7 & 8 - 8pm
EXIT Theatre – 156 Eddy St.
Free Admission
Trojan Barbie is a car-crash encounter with Euripides' Trojan Women. Past and present violently collide as the dreams of women and their fierce hunger for life are played out in the larger context of war. Lotte, a modern-day English tourist who repairs dolls, is on a Cultural Tour for Singles in Troy when she is captured by American soldiers and flung back into the ancient camp of the Trojan Women. Cassandra dreams of horses and revenge; Hecuba dreams of her murdered children; Helen dreams up a garden party fit for Hollywood. But as the bodies pile up, Lotte just wants to get home safely. When the camp is torched and the Trojan women enslaved, the British Embassy rescues Lotte. Her life returns to normal — until Hecuba claws her way up through the centuries in search of her murdered children's bodies.
by Samuel Beckett
directed by Rob Melrose
February 22 – March 16
Thursdays – Saturdays at 8pm
Sundays at 5pm
Traveling Jewish Theatre
470 Florida Street (between 17th and Mariposa) (Click for Map)
Beckett fans and Beckett himself consider Endgame to be his best play. Even sharper and more satirical than Waiting for Godot, Endgame takes place in a little room at the end of civilization. Based on the last moves of a chess game, the play follows the attacks and parries of its four remaining inhabitants as they cut each other with wickedly funny and withering insults. Two of these inhabitants are in garbage cans. Yes, this is the play that inspired Oscar the Grouch.
Our production features David Sinaiko and Avery Monsen as the comedic pair Hamm and Clov. Last seen in Cutting Ball’s production of The Taming of the Shrew in the master / servant relationship of Petruchio and Grumio, David and Avery are looking forward to bringing the commedia work they developed with Shakespeare and applying it to Beckett.
Produced by special arrangement with Samuel French, Inc.
The Cutting Ball’s production of Endgame is made possible in part by grants from Grants for the Arts / San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, Mental Insight Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Like our 2004 edition of Avant GardARAMA! which featured plays by Mac Wellman, Richard Foreman, and Suzan-Lori Parks, our 2008 offering showcases plays that radically experiment with theatrical form. In this case, our three playwrights are American women: Gertrude Stein, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Eugenie Chan. Parks and Chan both acknowledge Stein as an influence and have taken some of her experiments from the twenties and have made them their own.
Our fourth Suzan-Lori Parks play in as many years, Betting on the Dust Commander depicts a couple on their wedding night and then years later as the husband steals away to the race track. For Cutting Ball audiences who enjoyed the jazz-like language of The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, this portrait of a marriage offers a musical logic that is all its own.
Commissioned by The Cutting Ball Theater and Magic Theatre / Z Space New Works Initiative
Bone to Pick sets the story of Ariadne in a diner at the end of the war-torn world. Here, Ariadne, now reconfigured as Ria the Waitress, has been stranded in a military base diner for three-thousand years. Depleted by millennia of foreign occupation, Ria enters the labyrinth and confronts her part in the murder of her brother, Steer #576. A dizzyingly postmodern and playful look at the costs of love and war.
Cutting Ball Theater’s production of Avant GardARAMA! is made possible in part by grants from Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Mental Insight Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation the Zellerbach Family Foundation.
Bone to Pick was commissioned by The Cutting Ball Theater and Magic Theatre / Z Space New Works Initiative and its production is made possible in part by Theatre Bay Area’s New Works Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts.
at Modern Times Bookstore
Now in its third year, The Hidden Classics Reading Series is a great way to get to know fascinating classic plays just on the edge of regional theater offerings. It is a rare opportunity to hear them read and to have a chance to discuss these plays with directors, dramaturgs and actors from The Cutting Ball company.
All readings are at 7pm in Modern Times Bookstore's reading room at 888 Valencia St. They are free to the public and no reservations are necessary. Click here for map.
Burned House is one of Strindberg’s chamber plays written at the end of his life when he experimented wildly with form. When a man returns to his hometown after years abroad, he finds his childhood home burned to the ground. As he sifts through the ashes, he finds clues to not only the origins of the fire but to the mysteries of his life as well.
Before Goethe’s Faust, before Damn Yankees and countless other tales of a man selling his soul to the devil, Christopher Marlowe wrote his astonishing play. This is the original tale told in some of the most bold and exciting passages in the English language. Upon seeing Helen of Troy, Dr. Faustus says, “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships / and burnt the topless towers of Illium.”
This is Stein’s playful, surreal treatment of the Faust legend. Here Stein not only uses her delightful repetitions and rhymes, she gives the story a modern perspective by emphasizing the woman’s point of view and by having Faustus’ deal with devil be a quest for electric light.
In this mysterious, fairytale-like play, a beautiful young woman is found in the woods by a hunter who also happens to be a prince. He takes her to his castle and marries her. Soon after, she falls in love with his younger brother. When the love triangle explodes, she wants to return to her own world, but can she?
Play titles and dates subject to change.
The Cutting Ball Theater’s 2007 – 2008 Season is made possible in part by production by grants from Grants for the Arts / San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, Mental Insight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, and the generous support of our individual donors.
Hear what critics are saying about The Cutting Ball Theater:
“Deliciously Brainy” – The SF Weekly
“Intense, Funny and Provocative” – The San Francisco Chronicle
“Easily one of the most satisfying theatrical evenings around” – The SF Bay Guardian
“The Cutting Ball Theater is at the outer edge of Bay Area experimental theater offering plays that are poetic, risky, and visually exciting.” – The Marin Independent Journal
© 2008 The Cutting Ball Theater |