Samuel Beckett’s only film project, starring Buster Keaton. It’s called, “Film.” Heh.
What a gem.
Aug 8th: The Chef of Romagical Realism received a standing ovation at the National Black Theatre Festival. Many people described the play as being Shakespearean or a modern day Beauty and the Beast. The play was given the prestigious Friday Night Midnight Reading Slot—the best slot of the Festival and is normally reserved for an outstanding play. The cast was amazing. Of all the characters, Morris really stood out. Imagine a Chris Rock playing Morris. Some say it was the most talked about play of the play reading series. A few theatres and directors have requested to read the script. Garland Lee Thompson, co-founder of the Frank Silvera Writers Workshop in NY, said the play needs to be workshopped in NY and mounted on Broadway.
July 12th: The National Black Theatre Festival has selected The Chef of Romagical Realism and The Obama Effect for its prestigious Play Reading Series. The Festival receives over a thousand scripts and narrows the selection to about 30 plays. It’s rare that they select two scripts by the same playwright. Larry Americ Allen had a staged reading at The Garage by Performers Under Stress in San Francisco June 26th.
Performers Under Stress opens its seventh season of acclaimed staging with the World Premiere of How To Love. Inspired by Plato’s Symposium, How To Love, by Megan Cohen, takes the audience on a whirlwind tour of high-stakes philosophy, slapstick, tenderness, and ferociously acrobatic language.
Cohen is currently San Francisco’s most-produced female playwright: eight bay area theater companies have performed 19 readings and productions of Cohen’s short plays in the past 24 months. Performers Under Stress will be the first to realize a fully-staged full-length production of her work.
How To Love riffs playfully on its classical source material, placing its debate about the nature and meaning of affection and devotion in the mouths of three archetypal characters (the Sexy One, the Stern One, and the Young One) trapped in an underground bunker, where they have just seven days to solve the titular question, or else face certain doom. In their breathless quest for knowledge, as they seek to love themselves and others, they undertake everything from a kidnapping to a food fight in a journey that is by turns absurd, witty, disturbing, and above all else, surprising, with revelations like “I want to live in your heart, die in your lap, and go camping in your butthole.”
A 2010 finalist for the Playwrights’ Foundation Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Megan Cohen’s most recent project was a 25-minute adaptation of the entirety of James Joyce’s Ulysses, for S.F. Theater Pub. Cohen currently has two full-length plays under commission, for No Nude Men’s Olympians Festival and for Threshold Theater. She collaborates extensively with S. F. Theater Pub, recently cited in the Guardian’s Best of the Bay editor’s picks, and Pianofight Productions, named 2011’s best up and coming theater company by S.F. Weekly. Cohen has provided dramaturgical support at A.C.T. and for OBIE-winning ensemble The Builders’ Association, and served as Literary Manager at SF’s Cutting Ball Theater. (Full production history available at www.megancohen.com)
Performers Under Stress has developed this piece through a unique physical theatre workshop-into-rehearsal process that forges a new way for the audience to experience the intersection of language and the human body, promising an evening of joyous, high-energy, intensely kinetic ensemble work. Artistic Director Scott Baker helms this ambitious new venture.
Performers Under Stress has been alive for 20 years. Founded by Scott Baker and Charles Pike, recipients of Joseph Jefferson citations for their theater work in Chicago, with Valerie Fachman, Rick Razo, and a growing ensemble of artistic associates, it continues to be highly praised for bare-bones productions of Samuel Beckett plays and original works. Previous Bay Area PUS productions include such critically lauded plays as Cancer Cells, Failure 2 Communicate, An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Sam I Am and Son of Sam I Am, Ghost Train Coming, tempestuous(ness), or HIStory Is Told by the Victor, and The Farmington Armada.
SCHEDULE:
October 28 – November 20, 2011
(Press opening October 28)
All performances are Friday-Saturday at 8:00 pm and Sunday at 2:00 pm
WHERE:
The Garage
975 Howard St., San Francisco
TICKETS:
$15.00
Tickets for all performances are available at http://howtolove.eventbrite.com. More information available at http://pustheatre.com .
(Source: pustheatre.org)
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Vertumnus, a portrait of Rudolf II, 1591, Skokloster Castle, Sweden.
June 26 • 5-8pm
Performers Under Stress in association with SAFEhouse presents
Staged reading of a new play
The Chefof Romagical Realism
by L. Americ Allen • directed by Valerie Fachman$5-15 donation requested
We continue with Cancer Cells: short plays and poems by Harold Pinter at The Garage by San Francisco’s Performers Under Stress continues to May 22.
We had a great performance this afternoon, May 15, with Geoff Bangs understudying for Turk Muller. A random audience survey from Saturday: “PUS brought the ugly and grotesque, I try to hide from, in the news and put it right in my face, holding me accountable and causing my stomach to turn. What they are doing is not easy, not fast food, not escapism or entertainment but the gut wrenching truth.”
The plays, New World Order, Mountain Language, Press Conference, and One for the Road, have never been performed together before. Called “vibrantly performed” by San Francisco Bay Guardian. Come see it at 975 Howard Street.
