Cutting Ball Theater Presents BONE TO PICK & DIADEM 1/14-2/13/11

San Francisco's cutting-edge Cutting Ball Theater rings in the new year with BONE TO PICK and DIADEM from playwright Eugenie Chan. Back by popular demand, BONE TO PICK, nominated for the 2008 Glickman Award for Best New Play, received its World Premiere in Cutting Ball's Avant GardARAMA!, becoming a stand-out of the 2007-08 season. Accompanying BONE TO PICK is the World Premiere of a newly commissioned companion piece, also by Chan, entitled DIADEM. Rob Melrose directs Paige Rogers in these stunning one-woman plays; Rogers reprises her tour de force role for this re-staging and accompanying new work. BONE TO PICK and DIADEM play January 14 through February 13 For tickets ($15-50) and more information, the public may visit cuttingball.com or call 800-838-3006.

BONE TO PICK re-imagines the myth of Ariadne, Theseus, and the Minotaur in a postmodern exploration of love, war, and complicity. Daughter of the cruel tyrant King Minos of Crete, Ariadne (Ria) betrays her father by helping Prince Theseus (Theo) escape an intricate Labyrinth after he kills her brother, the half-bull Minotaur. Once his task is complete, instead of marriage, however, Theo leaves Ria stranded in a diner at the end of a war-torn world. The San Francisco Chronicle dubbed the production "richly rewarding right down to its marrow," noting Paige Rogers' performance as "riveting." The San Francisco Bay Guardian hailed the production as "a fresh and shrewd refiguring of the Ariadne myth," and SF Weekly declared that " 'Bone' grabs you and doesn't let go...actress Paige Rogers sinks her teeth into Chan's muscular, direct language, never letting the audience or her wayward lover off the hook." Accompanying this incendiary play is DIADEM, a romantic re-telling of the earlier parts of Ariadne's myth, when she was a giggling teenage Minoan princess in love, dreaming of the return of her hero husband to Naxos. Together, these two original works convey the complete story of Ariadne's epic romance.

"We initially commissioned BONE TO PICK because of my obsession with the myths of Crete," says Cutting Ball Artistic Director Rob Melrose. "The success of BONE TO PICK during our 2008 Avant GardARAMA! made us wonder if it could stand on its own as a single evening of theater. At the same time, we realized that not everyone was familiar with the Minotaur myth. We wondered if there was a creative way of sharing the myth with our audience, which led to commissioning Eugenie Chan to write a companion piece, or prequel, which explored the earlier parts of the myth; the result is DIADEM." Continues Melrose, "Paige and I have known Eugenie for 10 years and have been collaborating with her for seven, doing her readings of Snakewoman and Kitchen Table, and commissioning her latest work Tontlawald. Her playful use of language and rich knowledge of the classics make her the perfect person to write these plays; she has a very sophisticated sense of what theater can be and she is the perfect playwright for Cutting Ball."

Paige Rogers returns to the Cutting Ball stage as Ria in BONE TO PICK and DIADEM. Rogers is Associate Artistic Director and co-founder of the Cutting Ball Theater. She appeared last season in the company's hit production of The Bald Soprano, and was featured in Cutting Ball's productions of My Head Was a Sledgehammer, As You Like It, The Vomit Talk of Ghosts, Macbeth, and The Taming of the Shrew. Rogers has been seen locally with Berkeley Opera, Lamplighters, Sonoma County Repertory Theater, and on tour with California Shakespeare Theater. Additionally, she has performed at The Kennedy Center, McCarter Theater, Trinity Repertory Company, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. At Cutting Ball, her directing credits include The Hidden Classics Reading Series, Suzan-Lori Parks' 365 Plays/365 Days, and Risk is This...The Cutting Ball New Experimental Plays Festival; she made her full-length directorial debut with Cutting Ball's acclaimed production of Mud.

Eugenie Chan is Cutting Ball Theater's resident playwright. Her plays have been produced and workshopped across the country at venues including The Public Theater, Magic Theatre, Thick Description, Brava Theater, Mixed Blood, PlayLabs, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and others. In addition to BONE TO PICK and DIADEM, her work for the stage includes Kitchen Table; B'umblebee; Pilgrim; Daphne Does Dim Sum; Rancho Grande; Emil, A Chinese Play, Novell-aah!; Tour Sino; Conset; and Willy Gee!. Her opera libretto Snakewoman was part of the Risk is This...The Cutting Ball New Experimental Plays Festival in 2004. She has written political satire for the Tony Award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe, is a resident playwright at the Playwrights Foundation, and a member of New Dramatists.

Co-founded in 1999 by theater artists Rob Melrose and Paige Rogers, Cutting Ball Theater presents avant-garde works of the past, present, and future by re-envisioning classics, exploring seminal avant-garde texts, and developing new experimental plays. Cutting Ball Theater has partnered with Playwrights Foundation, Magic Theatre, and Z Space New Plays Initiative to commission new experimental works. The company has produced a number of World Premieres, West Coast Premieres, and re-imagined various classics. Cutting Ball Theater earned the Best of SF award in 2006 from SF Weekly, was selected by San Francisco Magazine as Best Classic Theater in 2007, and received the 2008 San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie award for outstanding talent in the performing arts. Cutting Ball Theater was featured in the February 2010 issue of American Theatre Magazine, and was voted "Best Theater" in the 2010 San Francisco Bay Guardian Best of the Bay issue.

TICKETS:
For tickets ($15-50) and more information, the public may visit cuttingball.com or call
800-838-3006; discounts available for students and seniors