2018 \ Nov 8 - 18
Cutting Ball Variety Pack
a festival of exploration and collaboration
The Cutting Ball Variety Pack – the organization’s signature festival – returns for its second year. An eleven-day festival dedicated to exploration and collaboration, The Cutting Ball Variety Pack features directorial shorts, new play workshops, and roundtable readings.
About the festival:
Before a production gets its polish, there's process: the vigorous, messy playground of the imagination. This November, Cutting Ball's signature festival – half shindig, half artistic salon – returns and invites you to revel in process with a small army of fired-up artists. This eleven-day festival delivers a sumptuous line-up that's sure to delight the creatively curious.
The Variety Pack All-Access Festival Pass
Our Variety Pack is all about sampling: for only $30, this V(I)P pass will grant you admission, with drink in hand, to any of the festival offerings.
Short
Cuts
The festival opens with Short Cuts, an exploratory evening of four short works helmed by four different directors. Short Cuts is divvied by three jovial mini-intermissions featuring the music of local bands, free snacks, and raffles.
Short Cuts will include:
The Spurt of Blood, Artaud's ‘impossible’ mini-play directed by Artistic Director Ariel Craft.
Valley of the Dead, a queer reimagining of the Eurydice and Persephone myth directed by Associate Artistic Director Maya Herbsman.
A selection from Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea directed by Susannah Martin.
Cyclops 2018, an experiment in audience engagement directed by Erik Pearson.
Thursday, November 8 / 7:00 pm
Friday, November 9 / 8:00 pm
Wednesday, November 14 / 7:00 pm
Friday, November 16 / 8:00 pm
Sunday, November 18 / 2:00 pm
Unproduced
Unpublished
Got a taste for in-progress plays? The Variety Pack invites you to partake of two staged readings of unproduced and unpublished plays.
Zoohouse is a dystopic, poetic, metatheatrical fable set in an "asylum for the black and criminally insane" by New York-based playwright Aurin Squire, writer for This is Us (NBC) and The Good Fight (CBS) and directed by Margo Hall.
Three Fat Sisters explores the identity politics of being a woman of size and the violence that women enact on one another and on their own bodies. Three Fat Sisters is written and directed by Morgan Gould, resident playwright at New Dramatists in New York City.
Zoohouse
Sunday, November 11 / 2:00 pm
Three Fat Sisters
Saturday, November 17 / 8:00 pm
Informal
Readings
Come as you are and gather around a communal table with artists for informal readings of lesser-known plays from the canon.
Sappho by Estelle Anna B. Lewis, a neglected verse play from 1876 about a lesbian romance.
As Five Years Pass by Federico García Lorca in translation by Caridad Svich, considered by many to be Lorca’s most experimental work.
The Physicists by Friedrich Dürrenmatt in translation by James Kirkup, about the culpability of scientific minds in nuclear threat.
Sappho
Saturday, November 10 / 2:00 pm
As Five Years Pass
Tuesday, November 13 / 7:00 pm
The Physicists
Thursday, November 15 / 7:00 pm