HOOKMAN Opens At CalRep This Week

Lauren Yee's Hookman is a horror fairytale brought to life by the trauma of sexual assault. "Yee is one of the most important new voices in American playwriting today; her recent LA productions of Cambodian Rock Band and King of the Yees showcase her brilliance in telling family dramas in virtuosic and comedic ways", says Artistic Director Jeff Janisheski.

Lisa Dring is a writer, director, and actor. She is the Associate Artistic Director of Circle X Theatre Co. in Los Angeles. She was selected as one of two finalists for the 2018 Relentless Award for her play The Wicked One (formerly known as The 626 Project). The Wicked One was also a semi-finalist for the O'Neill Playwrights Conference. Kaidan: Walls Grow Thin, a play she co-wrote with Chelsea Sutton, was recently nominated for 8 Ovation Awards including Best Production (winner of 5). She has worked with The New Group, Asolo Rep, Actors Theatre of Louisville, East West Players, Circle X, Playpenn, SCF @ Son of Semele, One Year Lease, Bread & Puppet, Bootleg, Boston Court, Sacred Fools and Theatre of NOTE. Lisa will be in residence at the MacDowell Colony this fall. You can see her on Shameless, Grown-ish, NCIS, Good Girls and Shut Eye. Last season she played Danielle on How to get Away with Murder. Lisa is a proud member of Rogue Artists Ensemble and Hero Theatre. She co-founded Rogue Artists' Rogue Lab, a creative incubator for new, hyper-theatrical work. Lisa graduated from School of Dramatic Arts at the University of Southern California and was an apprentice at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Lauren Yee is a playwright born and raised in San Francisco. She currently lives in New York City. Her play CAMBODIAN ROCK BAND, with music by Dengue Fever, premiered at South Coast Rep and is at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this season, followed by La Jolla Playhouse and Victory Gardens. Her play THE GREAT LEAP has been produced at the Denver Center, Seattle Repertory, Atlantic Theatre, and the Guthrie, with future productions at Arts Club and InterAct Theatre. Also upcoming: THE SONG OF SUMMER at Trinity Rep. Lauren Yee's play KING OF THE YEES premiered at The Goodman Theatre and Center Theatre Group, followed by productions at ACT Theatre, Canada's National Arts Centre, and Baltimore Center Stage. Other plays include CHING CHONG CHINAMAN (Pan Asian, Mu Performing Arts), THE HATMAKER'S WIFE (Playwrights Realm, Moxie, PlayPenn), HOOKMAN (Encore, Company One), IN A WORD (SF Playhouse, Cleveland Public, Strawdog), SAMSARA (Victory Gardens, O'Neill Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival), and THE TIGER AMONG US (MAP Fund, Mu). She was a Dramatists Guild fellow, a MacDowell fellow, a MAP Fund grantee, a member of The Public Theater's Emerging Writers Group, a Time Warner Fellow at the Women's Project Playwrights Lab, the Shank playwright-in-residence at Second Stage Theatre, a Playwrights' Center Core Writer, and the Page One resident playwright at Playwrights Realm. She is the winner of the Horton Foote Prize, the Kesselring Prize, and the Francesca Primus Prize. She has been a finalist for the Edward M. Kennedy Prize, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the ATCA/Steinberg Award, the Jerome Fellowship, the PONY Fellowship, the Princess Grace Award, the Sundance Theatre Lab, the Wasserstein Prize. Her play The Hatmaker's Wife was an Outer Critics Circle nominee for the John Gassner Award for best play by a new American playwright. Her work is published by Samuel French. Her plays were the #1 and #2 plays on the 2017 Kilroys List. Lauren is a member of the Ma-Yi Theatre Writers Lab, a 2018/2019 Hodder fellow at Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts, and a New Dramatists playwright (class of 2025). She is currently under commission from The Geffen Playhouse, La Jolla Playhouse, Lincoln Center Theatre/LCT3, Mixed Blood Theatre, Portland Center Stage, Second Stage Theatre, South Coast Rep, and Trinity Rep. She has written for MIXTAPE (Netflix). BA: Yale. MFA: UCSD.

Freshman year at college is hard when your roommate is weird, you're feeling homesick, and a hook-handed serial killer is slashing girls' throats. But if Lexi can discover what really happened to her high school best friend on that car ride to the movies, everything will be okay. In this existential slasher comedy, Lexi and her friends learn what it means to grow up - and it's not pretty.

General Admission tickets are $23, tickets for students are $18, and for military and seniors (55 and older) are $20; go to www.calrep.org, to buy tickets and find out more information. The University Theatre is attached to the north side of the Theatre Arts Building while the Studio Theatre and Players Theatre are inside the Theatre Arts Building on the CSULB South Campus, accessible via 7th Street and West Campus Drive.