Avant GardARAMA!
An Evening of Short Experimental Plays
July 18 - August 16, 2008
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.
Accents in Alsace
by Gertrude Stein
Included in her extraordinary 1922 publication, Geography and Plays, Accents in Alsace is a kind of cubist portrait of World War I. Don’t let the formalism throw you. Stein’s play is as human and touching as any artistic work treating the subject of war.
Betting on the Dust Commander
by Suzan-Lori Parks
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.
Bone to Pick
by Eugenie Chan
World PremiereCommissioned by The Cutting Ball Theater and Magic Theatre / Z Space New Works InitiativeBone 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.