A.C.T. and Stanford Present First Look Reading Series
Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Open Workshops to Showcase New Play by Academy Award Nominee José Rivera. New A.C.T. Associate Artistic Director Pink Pasdar Oversees Series as Part of A.C.T.'s New Works Initiative.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, July 18, 2007—American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) and the National Center for New Plays at Stanford are proud to collaborate on the “first look” August reading series, an exploration of new works presented by A.C.T. and hosted by Stanford University. The series, now in its second year, is designed as an open forum for developing works-in-progress through staged readings. Plays read are set to include Brainpeople, by José Rivera, Higher, by Carey Perloff, and Dani Girl, a new musical from Pittsburgh-based team Christopher Dimond and Michael Kooman.

“The ‘first look’ readings are the first step towards a full production,” said Pink Pasdar, A.C.T.’s new associate artistic director. “Writing plays is not and cannot be an isolated artistic endeavor. Having an audience and other artists to collaborate with provides the element of immediacy that is necessary for the development of a piece.” The “first look” series is intended to further A.C.T.’s mission to forge relationships with artists and to develop new works for the stage.

The series begins August 17 with Brainpeople, a dark fantasy written by José Rivera, Academy Award nominee for his screenplay of The Motorcycle Diaries and OBIE Award winner for his critically acclaimed play Marisol. Brainpeople is scheduled for a world-première A.C.T. production, to run January 31 to February 16 at Zeum Theater in San Francisco. A sinister, deeply sensuous allegory, Brainpeople exposes the desperation of three women as they cope with isolation and violence in an apocalyptic future. As playwright Rivera describes his work, “Brainpeople is ultimately about love, death, and poverty, and how they contribute to madness.” The play opens provocatively, with three women seated around a bizarre banquet—the pièce-de-resistance of which is the exposed viscera of a tiger. We come to understand the banquet, says A.C.T. Dramaturg Michael Paller, as symbolizing “a perhaps inappropriate appetite to devour the dripping innards of a fellow creature—a theme that encompasses the characters as they probe into their own viscera, and those of the others—their desires, premonitions, and fears.”

Director Erica Gould (who will also helm A.C.T.’s full production of the play’s world premiere) intends to maximize rehearsal time to coordinate ideas for expressive movement with author Rivera, who will take part in the workshop. Although, as in all of the “first look” readings, the actors will primarily be seated during the performance, for Gould, setting powerful movement and choreography to Rivera’s poetic text is one of the most pressing goals of the August reading. Though casting for “first look” is not yet finalized, the cast of Brainpeople will include Rebecca Wisocky as Rosemary and Sona Tatoyan as Ani.

Higher, written by A.C.T. Artistic Director Carey Perloff, will be the second of the “first look” presentations. In Perloff’s fast-paced comedy of ideas, two ambitious architects, both competing for an historic commission in the Holy Land, struggle to make room for the emotional and the sacred in their lives. The characters in Higher are irrepressibly witty and hyperarticulate, facilitating an exhilarating exchange of ideas about history, memory, and loss. The characters of the architects themselves are meaningfully integrated with the designs they propose for the commission—a memorial on the banks of the Sea of Galilee—suggesting the profound kinship of identity to work and ideas. Perloff, who is now entering her 16th season as the artistic director of A.C.T., is not only a world-renowned stage director, but also an accomplished playwright. A.C.T. staged her play The Colossus of Rhodes in 2003, and her Luminescence Dating, produced in conjunction with the Magic Theatre, won the 2006 Bay Area Theatre Critics’ Circle Award for best original script. The reading features Dennis Boutsikaris as Michael Friedman; the remainder of the cast remains to be announced.

Dani Girl, a musical tragicomedy that follows a seven-year-old leukemia patient on a journey through her imagination, rounds out the “first look” readings. The work demonstrates a great deal of formal innovation: as a musical rich in humor, Dani Girl deals with loss in a genre that is unaccustomed to this kind of subject matter. The composer/playwright team, Christopher Dimond and Michael Kooman, met while students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and their youthful energy is ever-present in the play. As Michael Paller points out, Dimond “has conceived the child characters with profound respect: as persons with intelligence, courage, and imagination.” Adds Pasdar, “It’s a work of highly theatrical imagination, and it stands to benefit a great deal from attention at ‘first look.’ All theater is collaborative, and that’s especially true of musicals.” Veteran choreographer John Carrafa, who choreographed A.C.T.’s hit production of Happy End, as well as Urinetown on Broadway, will direct the reading, which features Cindy Goldfield as Dani’s mother and A.C.T. veteran and core acting company member Jack Willis as Raph, Dani’s guardian angel.

Contact:
(A.C.T.) Martin Schwartz, 415.439.2418, mschwartz@act-sf.org.
(Stanford) David Goldman, davidg1@stanford.edu.