PHALARIS'S BULL to Make West Coast Premiere at Santa Monica Playhouse

Santa Monica Playhouse today announced the Los Angeles premiere of PHALARIS'S BULL: SOLVING THE RIDDLE OF THE GREAT BIG WORLD, the special event which earned unanimous raves from the New York critics on its spectacularly successful run last season at The Beckett Theatre at Theatre Row.

Conceived and performed by Steven Friedman, PHALARIS'S BULL will be presented for one night only as part of the Santa Monica Playhouse Benefit Series on Friday, February 17th at 8 PM.

Harvard-educated, molecular biologist, visual artist, and provocative visionary philosopher, Steven Friedman has the answers to life's big questions.

PHALARIS'S BULL is a one-of-a kind theatrical event - neither play nor lecture - staged to reflect Friedman's prismatic, eclectic, transformative, and deeply consoling vision of the world using personal narrative, poetry, art, and science to tell the story of a contemporary philosopher's quest to fulfill Einstein's ambition "to solve the riddle of the great, big world."

In a spellbinding performance, Friedman offers a solution to the world's pain - a philosophy starting from Kierkegaard's story of an ancient torture device, Phalaris's bull, that turned the terrible sounds of pain into music: "To create is to enter Phalaris's bull, and our pain becomes beauty."

After Harvard, author/performer Steven Friedman was accepted into the PhD program in molecular biology at UCLA under a grant from the National Cancer Institute and then into UCLA's School of Medicine. His contributions to molecular biology and medicine range from developing methods to work out the structure of viruses to conceiving smart chemotherapeutics against cancer. As a fine artist, Friedman has been represented by Robert Berman Gallery at Bergamot Station Arts Center in Los Angeles since 1999. His art, ranging from representational pastels to acrylic-under-acrylic poles, has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions and has entered major collections around the world. His writings include over 200 works of philosophy, six collections of lyric poetry, the play A PASSION OF THE MIND, and the philosophical narrative poem THE BOOKS OF JOSHUA. His output has also included such unconventional forms as the beachbook T LITE BOOK BY THE SEA, presented in 5000 tea lights adjacent to Santa Monica Pier in 2009, and the skybook PROVING GOD IN WORLDS FROM EVEN TO ODD, skytyped over Huntington Beach, CA in 2010.

Tickets to PHALARIS'S BULL are $25 and are available through www.ShowClix.com or by calling (310) 394-9779 ext 1. Santa Monica Playhouse is located at 1211 4th Street (just south of Wilshire Blvd). For more about PHALARIS'S BULL: SOLVING THE RIDDLE OF THE GREAT BIG WORLD, visit www.SolvingTheRiddlePlay.com.

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