Brava Presents The Kitchen Series: Four Intimate, Savory, One-Night Only Theatrical Readings

Good theatre should be like good food, the more you know about where it came from and how it was made, the better it tastes. Brava, in association with Precarious Theatre present staged readings just like Mom would make dinner- with the best ingredients and an experienced hand. This reading will bring our audiences and actors into the kitchen where they can see us roll up our sleeves and create compelling performance. The concept of this innovative approach to the staged reading is to create an interactive stage reading experience for the audience.

In our Kitchen Series, audiences will be joining the actor ensemble by participating in the play, while enjoying wine and small plates of home-cooked snacks, inclusive in the ticket price. The audience and the ensemble sit together on the Brava Main Stage for a uniquely theatrical reading. Audience members can expect delicious wine and food to be served throughout the night, which begins in the Brava Theatre lobby and proceeds inside the theatre for a special theatrical reading. So please, come to the kitchen, get to know us, pull up a chair, and let the feast begin!

Artistic Director Graham Smith comments, "I saw the economic recession as an opportunity to explore how we understand ‘value' in our work. How can we bring the best value to an evening in the theatre, and make it the most direct, intimate, and imaginative communion with our audience without paying for a lot of decorations and hyped up extras? What is the theatre experience at its best and most basic? People coming together to share stories and their own point of view."

Brava Artistic Director, Raelle Myrick-Hodges first collaborated with Smith on the Global Age Project at Aurora Theatre last season. Precarious had already begun working on the Kitchen Series idea when Graham brought it up with Myick-Hodges. "Graham came to me and told me about this idea he was working on. He mentioned that due to financial circumstances, his company was struggling to survive and thought maybe Brava could host one of these readings. I decided that instead of hosting one event, I would instead invite the group to spend the entire season at Brava, hoping to transform a vagabond series into a year-long institution that people could easily return to for each reading," says Myrick-Hodges.

"Since coming onboard as Producer, Myrick-Hodges has been instrumental in re-imagining the shape and impact of the series," says Smith. "Since we are a young company known for performing full productions of new plays, she suggested we instead explore some classics and some contemporary plays that stretch Precarious' acting ensemble with different styles and tell stories about women in extreme circumstances. We are extremely excited about the choices for the season and I really think audiences are in for a truly great experience."

Each staged reading will call on audience members to read some small parts as they enjoy their snacks and drinks. The idea is to create an environment where the audience is part of the experience, participating in the creative process and having the ability to have conversations with the ensemble before and after the reading.

"I also thought this would be a great series for our apprentices from our new apprentice program," says Myrick-Hodges. "Each apprentice will have a crucial role in each of these readings. One will be stage managing, while another will be the lighting designer, while the other works on the set, and the final one working on the marketing. The intention is that they understand that theater is a collaborative process where no one part can succeed without the other." The mission of the Brava Apprenticeship Program is to cultivate well rounded theatre artists in artistic, production and arts administration. The intention is to have the apprentices be given the opportunity to comprehensively understand the theatre arts in its entirety - to understand that one department only works in correlation with other departments.

The first reading, The Visit, will take place on October 12, 2009.
The play centers on the fictional Central-European town of Güllen which was always formerly a humdrum center of culture but has in the past few decades decayed into bankruptcy. When the play opens, the town is preparing a celebration of the arrival of Claire Zachanassian, a former resident who has since attained an incredibly great fortune and is coming back to visit.
She arrives with her fiancé, and after some general festivities on the part of the townspeople she announces the true reason she has come to visit: when she was young she was impregnated by her boyfriend, who, at the paternity suit, denied the charges and bribed two drunks to testify that they had slept with Claire, so that she was shamed out of the town and eventually forced into prostitution. Now that she has become rich, she will give the town one billion 'marks' if they kill him, who over the years has become one of Güllen's most popular townspeople.

The townspeople initially unanimously refuse Claire's offer, but soon they start to buy things on credit, expensive things, as if they expect some new source of income in the future. The townspeople's rhetoric of support behind him slowly but surely changes, and they ultimately speak of the "justice" Claire seeks.

The town holds a public ceremony in celebration of Claire's endowment. They kill him during a ceremony. The dark tone suddenly gives way to a seemingly prosperous, cheerful ending for the townspeople. But this façade falls away and we see a glimpse of a fear felt by the townspeople about the future. Ironically, the only person who truly grieves is Claire Zachanassian herself. The revenge she sought for years was finally fulfilled, but she is left unsatisfied.

Matthew Graham Smith is the founder and Artistic Director of Precarious Theatre, San Francisco's critically acclaimed ensemble theatre company. He is a core member of the Dell'arte company, a group focusing on classical and emerging physical theater forms. He has directed at the Walnut Theater in Philadelphia and the HERE American Living Room series in New York City. In San Francisco he has directed at the Yerba Buena Garden's Festival, Bay Area Playwright's Festival, the A.C.T.'s Masters program, Aurora Theatre, The EXIT Theatre, Playground, and New Conservatory Theatre, where his Kiss of the Spiderwoman was nominated for Best Overall Drama 2006 by the Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle. This September he is directing the world premiere of Philip Kan Gotanda's #5 Angry Red Drum for Asian American Theatre Company. In November he will direct part of the Me, Myself and I series at Brava, where he is also directing 4 staged readings paired with food and wine for Precarious Theatre's Kitchen Series. An accomplished educator, Graham has taught at A.C.T.'s Master of Fine Arts program & Summer Training Congress & Studio ACT in San Francisco, Assumption University in Bangkok, and the Barcelona Meisner Program in Barcelona, Spain (www.meisner.es).

Precarious Theatre, formed in 2005, is an ensemble of 12 artists from different performing arts disciplines and trainings who are committed to developing a new aesthetic for theatrical performance and for developing new audiences for theatre in San Francisco. Precarious is attracted to character-driven stories that have relevance to our communities here and now and that allow us to explore new physical and theatrical realms. The Company seek to create theatre that attracts newcomers to the form, and to create a performance experience that challenges expectations of what is known as theatre. Precarious won praise for its comedy of horrors, Chemical Imbalance and its original musical I'm Yours! or Deranged By Love based on stories from Don Quixote with original songs by H.P. Mendoza. The members include Matthew Graham Smith, Javier Galito-Cava, Erin Carter, Hannah Knapp, Elizabeth Bullard, Andrew Calabrese, Ben Dziuba, Nicole Lungerhausen, Emilio Eracinez, Sarah Meyeroff, and Christian Cagigal, and Lanie Wieland.

Brava! for Women in the Arts is a professional arts organization committed to producing, presenting and cultivating live art celebrating the intersection of feminism and multiculturalism that ignites social changes and builds community. Located in the beautiful Brava Theater Center located in the heart of San Francisco's historic Mission District, we are now entering into our third decade of thought-provoking theater, music and educational programs.

Series listing dates, times, titles and brief descriptions:
THE VISIT by Friedrich Durrenmatt, Monday, October 12, 2009 @ 7:30pm. An off-the-wall tragi-comedy about the sweet seduction of greed when a rich heiress returns to the impoverished town of her childhood. This just might be the perfect macabre parable for our own financially challenged times.

DRUNKEN CITY by Adam Bock, Monday, March 8, 2010 @ 7:30pm. On the bar crawl to end all crawls, three twenty-something brides-to-be lives turn topsy-turvy as they confront the ever shifting nature of love in this hilarious comedy of the heart.
SGT. CASEY'S REMAINS by Lauren Wilson, Monday, April 19, 2010 @ 7:30pm. On a US military base, while the men are overseas in combat, their wives form a community of supportive friendship, until war pulls the rug out from under them.
THE THREE SISTERS by Anton Chekhov, Monday June 14th, 2010 @ 7:30pM. Chekhov's classic play about three sisters whom yearn to return to the Moscow of their youth, gets the Precarious make-over, and promises to cripple you with laughter.

WHERE: Brava! For Women in the Arts, 2781 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110

TICKETS: $15 Advance/$20 @ the door. To purchase tickets visit www.brava.org call 415-641-7657.