THE CUTTING BALL THEATER NEWSLETTER
April 5, 2007 - Volume 3, Issue 8

Open Process

Mr. Fujiyama’s Electric Beach
by Kevin Oakes
directed by Rob Melrose
Saturday, April 7, 3pm
A Traveling Jewish Theater
470 Florida Street, between 17th and Mariposa
(click here for map)
Free to the Public (Suggested Donation  $10)

In a futuristic, media-swamped San Francisco, a small counter-culture emerges: people who desire a non-mediated animalistic connection with each other. Underground clubs spring up where people can take medications to turn off the human part of their brains and relate to each other in the primal state of their animal of choice.

Dear Friends,

I’d like to invite you to have a sneak peek at a project Cutting Ball has been working on since March of 2006: Mr. Fujiyama’s Electric Beach by Kevin Oakes (The Vomit Talk of Ghosts, Drowning Room).  This work-in-progress has been created in collaboration with The Playwrights Foundation and Magic Theatre / Z Space New Works Initiative.  Kevin and I have been developing this piece with six actors who have been studying animal movement, contact improvisation, and Viewpoints over the course of a year.   Mr. Fujiyama’s Electric Beach is literally being created in the rehearsal room and it is the most exciting creative processes I have ever experienced.   You will have another chance to see Mr. Fujiyama’s Electric Beach at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival this August.  Then, in January and February of 2008, Mr. Fujiyama’s Electric Beach will have its world premiere production as part of Cutting Ball’s full season.

I hope you can see the workshop and meet Kevin afterwards at a wine and cheese reception.

Sincerely,

Rob Melrose

P.S. Please take a look at our November workshops of Mr. Fujiyama¹s Electric Beach by clicking on the following photos:

This workshop was made possible in part by generous support from Grants for the Arts / San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, Mental Insight Foundation, and the Tournesol Project.

Critics are raving about Cutting Ball’s Woyzeck!
Only three more performances left!  April 5, 6, & 7

David Sinaiko and Chad Deverman

Georg Büchner’s still astonishingly modern and widely influential, unfinished 1837 drama is given a visually stunning and inventively conceived staging by Adriana Baer in Cutting Ball Theater’s premiere of Rob Melrose’s vital new translation.

-- Robert Hurwitt, SF Chronicle

If Georg Buchner's "Woyzeck" seems to be an explosion of dramatic ideas and imagery, well, that's exactly what it is....San Francisco theater company The Cutting Ball, specialists in experimental works and reinterpretations of classics, opened a sharp production of "Woyzeck" last week at The Exit on Taylor...Baer's production is always interesting to look at. Melpomene Katakalos' mostly white set is a collage of everyday items all neatly contained in shelves and compartments, and Melrose's lighting plays off the whiteness to give us washes of red or green to match the mood.

-- Chad Jones, Oakland Tribune

Jean Schiffman's feature in the SF Arts Monthly:

Cutting Ball Theater Tackles Buchner's Woyzeck
http://www.sfarts.org/top_stories.cfm?story_num=2

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