Collaborative Artists Ensemble to Stage West Coast Premiere of LOST GENERATION, 5/8-31

In the West Coast premiere of "Lost Generation" the complex and dangerous friendship of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald with Ernest Hemingway is traced in this funny, surreal and dark play which presents their evolving attractions, entanglements, jealousies, conflicts, and madness.

Collaborative Artists Ensemble will present LOST GENERATION by Don Nigro at the Sherry Theater starting May 8. Steve Jarrard, a director-in-residence with Collaborative Artists, helms a cast that includes (alphabetically) Nicolas Forbes, Leif Steinert and Meg Wallace. Stage Manager is Michelle Prudente.

Scott worships Ernest and wishes he could be as strong a man and pure an artist as he imagines Ernest to be, but also tries to justify his sense that he has prostituted his talent to cheap popular magazines so he can finance the expensive life style Zelda needs. Ernest has some grudging respect for Scott's talent, but only contempt for the way Scott conducts his career and his life, and tries to convince Scott that Zelda is jealous of Scott's talent and secretly is trying to destroy him. Zelda loves Scott but thinks he behaves like a fool, and sees Ernest as a fake who is himself trying to destroy Scott. There is repressed sexual tension flying around in all directions, as the three of them work their way through an increasingly disturbing series of triangular struggles. Zelda's French lover keeps buzzing the house in his airplane. Ernest tries to convince Scott that Zelda should be put in a madhouse. Zelda makes fun of Ernest's exaggeratedly masculine pose, his passions for guns and bullfights, and his desperate ambition. They are strong and weak in turn, liars and truth tellers, mad and brilliant, each in their own way, and each is moving towards an inevitable self destruction that the others both facilitate and try to prevent. The play moves like an intense dream, a struggle over art, sex, fame, power and madness and walks the fine line between realism and surrealism with Don Nigro's characteristic flair.

Performances play The Sherry Theater, located at 11052 Magnolia Blvd, North Hollywood, CA. 91601 (between Lankershim & Vineland). Schedule: May 8 - 31, Fri/Sat @ 8:00pm, Sun @ 7pm (12 total performances). Run time: 120 minutes (including one intermission). Admission: $20 general admission, $15 students/seniors. For reservations, call (323) 860-6569. Produced through special arrangement with Samuel French, Inc.

Don Nigro (playwright) is among the most frequently published and widely produced playwrights in the world and has continued to build a deeply interrelated and diverse body of dramatic literature, employing a wide variety of dramatic conventions and styles of presentation. He has written monologues and epics, spare realistic dramas and surreal homicidal puppet farces, plays with music and verse plays. He continues to build the long cycle of Pendragon County plays, which traces the history of America through the lives of several related east Ohio families from the eighteenth century to the present, and features many characters whose lives are traced from youth through middle age to old age in a number of plays that may be presented in a variety of combinations. Mr. Nigro has won a Playwriting Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (for Fisher King), twice been a finalist for the National Repertory Theatre Foundation's National Play Award (for Anima Mundi and for The Dark Sonnets of the Lady), has won grants from the Mary Roberts Reinhart Foundation (for Terre Haute) and the Ohio Arts Council, and twice been James Thurber Writer in Residence at the Thurber House in Columbus. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Polish, Greek, Russian, and Chinese. Grotesque Lovesongs was commissioned by producer Saint Subber, and first produced at the WPA Theatre in New York. Martian Gothic was commissioned by Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York. Cincinnati, directed by John Clancy and featuring Nancy Walsh, won Fringe First and Spirit of the Fringe awards at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Best of Fringe at the Adelaide Fringe Festival. Seascape With Sharks And Dancer has been produced by Teatr Syrena in Warsaw, Lucia Mad by Teatr Julius Slowakie in Krakow, and Grotesque Lovesongs for Polish television's theatre series. The Teatro del Fantasma has produced The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines in Mexico City and elsewhere, and his plays have also been produced in London, Vienna, Tehran, Hong Kong, and Beijing, and in Belgium, Italy, Ireland, Wales, Slovenia and South Africa, and toured in India. The German experimental company SpielArt, based in Munich, has translated and toured two productions of his work in Germany. His plays have been produced in countless experimental venues in New York, and have been done at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the McCarter Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Capital Repertory Company, the Hypothetical Theatre, the Berkeley Stage Company, Manhattan Class Company, the People's Light and Theatre Company, the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Theatre X, Shadowbox Cabaret, the Hudson Guild Theatre, Inertia Productions, Gravity & Glass, Renaissance Theatreworks, Look At The Fish Theatre Company, the Apothecary Theatre Company, the Strain Theatre Company, and many others. In November of 2012, a Spanish version of Seascape With Sharks And Dancer, translated by Tato Alexander, and featuring her and Bruno Bichir, was produced at Teatro El Granero in Mexico City. This production was revived in Mexico City in 2013 and then toured in Mexico. In June of 2013, Marina and Mata Hari were produced in New York by Nylon Fusion Theatre Company, both plays featuring actress Tatyana Kot and directed by Ivette Dumeng. A graduate of the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa, Mr. Nigro has also taught there, as well as at Ohio State, Kent State, Indiana State, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The film The Manor, with Peter O'Toole, is based on his play Ravenscroft. Samuel French has published 155 of his plays in 50 volumes, and now his entire collected works, published and unpublished, is available on the Samuel French web site. Labyrinth: The Plays of Don Nigro, and Labyrinth II, Plays of Don Nigro 2001-2011, both by Jim McGhee, provide a road map and review of Nigro's collected works.