Joan Didion's THE WHITE ALBUM receives World Premiere Stage Production

Multimedia artist and designer Lars Jan has been granted permission to stage Joan Didion's seminal essay The White Album. Preceded only by a Broadway production of The Year of Magical Thinking, Jan's production will be the second of Didion's works to be adapted for the stage. The White Album is currently in development, and is scheduled to premiere on October 4, 2018 in Pittsburgh, PA, followed by subsequent performances in New York and Los Angeles.

The complete text of the essay, performed word-for-word by Obie-award winning actor Mia Barron (The Wolves), unfolds against the backdrop of an escalating house party staged within an architectural set designed by P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S Architecture.

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
-Joan Didion

That opening line from Didion's essay hits on a double-edged truth for director Lars Jan: "First, storytelling is living. Second-and this is the sharper of the edges-the stories may be, in part, creative acts of self-delusion. Our performance is double-edged too, and in a way, there are actually two performances happening at the same time, one nested inside of the other, for two distinct audiences. One audience, seated in the theatre, experiences every word of the essay's fifteen vignettes-which span from 1966 to 197-performed in full by Mia Barron. Behind her is a large soundproof room, with a glass wall. Inside this room, the second audience creates a house party onstage that increasingly takes on a life of its own."

In the essay, Joan Didion traverses the tectonically shifting landscape and iconic characters of the late 1960's - The Black Panthers, student protests, The Doors, Charles Manson - and she tells this particular story with herself at its center. Her voice is unmistakable: at turns unequivocally cool, impossibly illuminating, and just shy of total collapse.

The White Album is commissioned by Center Theatre Group with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in partnership with Brooklyn Academy Of Music (BAM). Additional commissioning support came from the Wexner Center for the Arts, Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, and CalArts Center for New Performance. With thanks to Joan Didion and ICM Partners.

The project is produced with Los Angeles Performance Practice (performancepractice.org).

ABOUT LARS JAN
Director Lars Jan's climate change-themed performance installation, Holoscenes, caused an international sensation in Times Square when the administration withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords in early June 2017. His play The Institute of Memory (TIMe) was a New York Times Critic's pick and is still touring widely. As the winner of the 3rd Audemars Piguet Art Commission, he built Slow-Moving Luminaries, a kinetic pavilion during Art Basel Miami in December 2017.

ABOUT LOS ANGELES PERFORMANCE PRACTICE
Los Angeles Performance Practice is a non-profit organization devoted to the production and presentation of contemporary performance by artists whose work advances and challenges multi-disciplinary artistic practices. Our mission is to support a unique and diverse constellation of artists and audiences through the active creation and presentation of groundbreaking experiences that use innovative approaches to collaboration, technology and social engagement. Anchored in Los Angeles, our artists and projects have national and global reach. Across a range of platforms and partnerships, we build an active network of contemporary practitioners-curators and producers, artists and designers, audiences and patrons-all leveraged in service to the ideas and issues of our time.

www.performancepractice.la

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