40 POUNDS IN 12 WEEKS Extends at the Marsh Through 4/30

With audiences lining up to laugh and commiserate with Pidge Meade in her dynamic one-woman show about the modern circus of weight loss, 40 POUNDS IN 12 WEEKS: A LOVE STORY is a hit, and will now extend through April 30 at the Marsh San Francisco, adding five performances, 5:00pm every Saturday throughout the month of April. With theatrical veteran Charlie Varon at the helm, 40 POUNDS IN 12 WEEKS: A LOVE STORY draws on Meade's real life experiences with the weight loss game, bringing the terrors and triumphs of yo-yo dieting tenderly and hysterically to life.

Critics have delighted in Meade's story and performance. The Bay Guardian applauds 40 POUNDS IN 12 WEEKS, declaring Meade "eschews easy sentiment for a sharply performed, consistently funny and genuine engagement with her younger, bigger self," while the San Francisco Chronicle calls the show "funny, frank...moving." The SF Bay Times includes 40 POUNDS IN 12 WEEKS on its list of "strongly recommended" performances and Marin Scope Newspapers calls the show "a truly entertaining evening," adding "Anyone who has ever taken the merry-go-round ride of dieting will laugh out loud." TheatreDogs.Net heralds the show as an "intimate, not to mention funny, moving, and generally marvelous, account of being a formerly fat lady" while SF Theatre Blog raves "Pidge Meade is the real deal."

Developed with and directed by Charlie Varon, the show seeks nothing less than to change the American conversation about weight. The play takes its title from Meade's experience at the end of her freshman year of college. As she heads home with loads of new ideas in her head... and too many new pounds on her five-foot-frame, her dad, a world-renowned gymnastics coach, takes one horrified look at his super-sized daughter and issues an ultimatum - shed that weight by summer's end or kiss college goodbye.

In 40 POUNDS, Meade tells her own story, but also brings to urgent life the entire modern weight-loss carnival of juice fasters and mindful masticators, cookies and calorie counts, tough love books and reality TV spectacle. The show blends memoir and satire, and refuses pat answers to the hard questions about how and why we eat our hearts out. 40 POUNDS moves forward and backward in time to chronicle Meade's decades-long ride on the weight-loss rollercoaster. While currently on the lighter side of the scale, Meade refuses to bow to the conventional wisdom that equates thinness with happiness. "Weight," says Meade, "is the ultimate Red Herring. We think it's all about food and exercise, discipline and willpower. It runs much, much deeper."

Meade developed 40 POUNDS IN 12 WEEKS: A LOVE STORY as one of six artists invited to join The Marsh's second Performance Initiative in 2009. She performed the show to great acclaim as part of the Festival of New Voices II in June of 2010.

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