La Jolla Playhouse Announces 'Without Walls' Festival

La Jolla Playhouse has announced that its acclaimed production of Moving Arts' The Car Plays: San Diego has been extended due to popular demand. The Car Plays: San Diego will now run two additional dates: Saturday, March 10 and Sunday, March 11, with performances at 3:00 pm, 4:30 pm, 7:00 pm and 8:30 pm each day. Tickets are $25 and are available online at LaJollaPlayhouse.org or by calling (858) 550-1010.

Building on the excitement and success of its first two WoW productions – Susurrus and The Car Plays: San Diego – The Playhouse also announces that it will host a WoW Festival in October 2013, featuring several site-based pieces by artists and companies from around the world. In addition to a special return engagement of The Car Plays, The Playhouse has also commissioned such renowned artists as puppeteer Basil Twist (Peter and Wendy, Dogugaeshi) and playwright Naomi Iizuka, Chair of UCSD's MFA Playwriting Program, to create works for the festival. The Festival location will be primarily centered around The Playhouse, with various productions taking place throughout La Jolla. Dates and additional programming for the WoW Festival will be announced shortly.

"Both Susurrus, our first WoW offering, and The Car Plays: San Diego have been extended by popular demand. San Diego audiences have a voracious appetite for unique theatrical experiences," said Playhouse Artistic Director Christopher Ashley. "The WoW Festival gives us the opportunity to create a spectacular community-wide event that will continue to transform our customary idea of theatre."

Funded by a generous grant from The James Irvine Foundation, WoW is a La Jolla Playhouse program designed to break the barriers of traditional theatre. Since 2010, The Playhouse has been commissioning and presenting a series of site-specific productions at locations throughout the San Diego community. Underscoring the theatre's mission of providing "unfettered creative opportunities for the leading artists of today and tomorrow," coupled with the idea that The Playhouse is defined by the work it creates – not the space in which it is performed – WoW is designed to offer theatrical experiences that venture beyond the physical confines of The Playhouse's facilities.

Moving Arts' The Car Plays: San Diego, conceived by Paul Stein, features a series of intimate ten-minute plays, each taking place in a car. Audiences of two move from vehicle to vehicle to experience works by different playwrights. Participants are ushered to their car seats, the car doors close, and the drama unfolds just inches away. Ten minutes later, the doors open, a seat in a new car awaits, and a fresh play begins. In the course of an hour, five evocative stories are revealed. Critics have been raving about The Car Plays: San Diego. "A funny, moving (and discomfiting) wonder," wrote the UT San Diego, while the North County Times hailed it as "a voyeuristic thrill ride… a quirky, engrossing and thoroughly entertaining experience."

Susurrus, which ran for several weeks in September/October 2011, was a unique audio play during which audiences experienced a subtly woven narrative by listening on iPods as they followed a mapped route through the beautiful San Diego Botanic Garden in Encinitas. Without actors or stage, Susurrus was part radio play, part avant-garde sonic art and part stroll in the park. The North County Times called it, "a fascinating theatrical adventure that should not be missed." The play also garnered a 2012 San Diego Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Special Event.

The nationally-acclaimed, Tony Award-winning La Jolla Playhouse is known for its tradition of creating the most exciting and adventurous new work in regional theatre. The Playhouse was founded in 1947 by Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire and Mel Ferrer, and is considered one of the most well-respected not-for-profit theatres in the country. Numerous Playhouse productions have moved to Broadway, including the currently running Tony Award-winning musicals Memphis and Jersey Boys, as well as Big River, The Who's Tommy, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, A Walk in the Woods, Billy Crystal's 700 Sundays, the Pulitzer Prize-winning I Am My Own Wife, Thoroughly Modern Millie, The Farnsworth Invention and 33 Variations. Located on the UC San Diego campus, La Jolla Playhouse is made up of three primary performance spaces: the Mandell Weiss Theatre, the Mandell Weiss Forum Theatre and the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Center for La Jolla Playhouse, a state-of-the-Art Theatre complex which features the Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre. La Jolla Playhouse is led by Artistic Director Christopher Ashley and Managing Director Michael S. Rosenberg.

The James Irvine Foundation is a private, nonprofit grantmaking foundation dedicated to expanding opportunity for the people of California to participate in a vibrant, successful and inclusive society. The Foundation's grantmaking focuses on three program areas: Arts, California Democracy and Youth. Since 1937 the Foundation has provided over $1 billion in grants to more than 3,000 nonprofit organizations throughout California. With about $1.5 billion in assets, the Foundation made grants of $65 million in 2011 for the people of California.

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