The Cutting Ball' VARIETY PACK Opens 2/2

Cutting Ball Theater's 2017-18 Season continues next year with THE CUTTING BALL VARIETY PACK, a two-week festival featuring four short, fully staged experimental works, readings of two brand new plays by New York-based playwrights, and more. The Variety Pack runs February 2 - 13, 2018. Single event tickets are $15; a festival pass with admission to any three events is a bargain at $30; and all tickets include a complimentary drink. Tickets may be purchased online at cuttingball.com or by phone at 415-525-1205.

The festival is organized into three components: The Directors Series, featuring four short works by four directors in a single sitting; The Playwrights Series, featuring staged readings of two unproduced and unpublished experimental plays; and The Reading Series, featuring readings of four works, both classical and new, canonized and lesser-known.

"We're offering audiences a smorgasbord for the artistic soul," said Cutting Ball Managing and Producing Director Liz Olson. "The Variety Pack is a great way to sample a number of eclectic works within the framework of exploration and collaboration."

"The Directors Series shines a light on the choices that directors make, how those choices impact audiences and how directors can draw from an interdisciplinary toolkit with music, dance and more. The Playwrights Series is an incubator for experimental new works. We're exploring the process by which words become characters and how playwrights develop work with actors. Finally, The Reading Series presents informal readings of plays that may find their way to Cutting Ball's stage in future seasons, or plays that are just plain exciting."

THE DIRECTORS SERIES

Friday, February 2 at 8 p.m.

Saturday, February 3 at 8 p.m.

Sunday, February 4 at 5 p.m.

Friday, February 9 at 8 p.m.

Saturday, February 10 at 8 p.m.

Sunday, February 11 at 5 p.m.

The following short works run in a single program on each of the above dates.

I. Ode

Choreographed by Daria Kaufman, currently based in Lisbon, Portugal, for Bay Area artist Randee Paufve, Ode is a solo dance theater work that explores ideas of power, bondage and the female body through the lens of classical ballet. "Ode approaches the ballerina's pointe shoe as a tool for exploring sexuality and persona," said Kaufman. "It is concerned with how this appendage re-figures the body, how it alternately restrains and liberates, and the illusions that it grants."

Before moving to Portugal in 2014, Kaufman worked in the Bay Area for eight years, completing her MFA in Dance from Mills College. Her work has been presented at venues throughout Europe from Berlin to Istanbul.

Paufve is the director of Paufve|dance. She was nominated for a 2016 Theatre Bay Area choreography award for her work on Cutting Ball's A Dreamplay, and she received a 2015 Isadora Duncan Dance Award for her solo show, Soil. She currently teaches at Saint Mary's College, the Shawl-Anderson Dance Center and Marin Academy.

Ode's scenic design is by legendary artist Lauren Elder, a member of the Bay Area experimental performance company Contraband in the 1980s and '90s.

II. Proben im Haus

A project long in the making, Proben im Haus is an original collaboration between Cutting Ball Artistic Director Paige Rogers and Left Coast Chamber Ensemble's principal cellist Leighton Fong. Together with actor Carla Pauli, most recently seen in Cutting Ball's Hedda Gabler and Pelleas & Melisande, they examine questions of rehearsal: how rehearsal intersects with home life and what it means to perform. Cello selections featured in the play include George Crumb's Sonata for Solo Violoncello 1 and Gaspar Cassadó's Cello Suite 1, as well as Eve Beglarian's Testy Ponywith text by poet Zachary Schomburg.

III. Iago: Images Unseen

Iago: Images Unseen is Bay Area native Jonathan Vandenberg's stark and original adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello, placing the lens on the journey and inner life of the play's villain, Iago. Performers in Iago include Ed Berkeley, last seen in Phèdre, and Max Forman-Mullin and María Ascensción Leigh, making their Cutting Ball debuts.

After receiving an MFA in Directing from Columbia University, Vandenberg co-founded Ashes Company in New York City. In New York, he also directed for Classic Stage Company, Mabou Mines/Suite, the Center for Performance Research and NYU Graduate Drama School, among others. His "visually captivating" work has been lauded for incorporating image, presence and ritual.

IV. Pezzetti 2

Beatrice Basso directed Pezzetti (which means "little pieces" in Italian) featuring co-creator and actor Valentina Emeri during last season's Avant GardARAMA! The piece investigated dislocation, childhood games and the loss of one's mother in a trilingual solo performance. Continuing to explore these themes and deepen the work begun last season, the duo returns with Pezzetti 2, this time bringing Basso onstage as well.

As a performer, Basso has worked at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, Brava Theater and Western Stage, among others. She has also worked as a dramaturge, translator and producer, serving for a time as Director of New Work at A.C.T. and as Long Wharf Theatre's Literary Manager. She is currently a student at Wesleyan University's Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance, and is an ensemble member with Affinity Project.

Emeri studied in Rome at the National Academy of Dramatic Arts Silvio D'Amico. Emeri has appeared in more than 50 theater productions and 18 movies, performing in Italian, German and English. She studied with Peggy Hackney and is a Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst.

THE PLAYWRIGHTS SERIES

I. Thunderbodies

by Kate Tarker

Monday, February 5 at 7 p.m.

Tuesday, February 6 at 7 p.m.

With the war finally over, Grotilde - a once gargantuan and always desirable woman - and General Itterod decide to wed. But, with the knowledge that every marriage ends in heartbreak, the two decide to jump right to the main event and plan an extravagant, celebratory divorce instead. In her new comedy, Thunderbodies, playwright Kate Tarker constructs a muscular and unrelenting war-torn world with an absurd language all its own.

Among Tarker's plays are God is Dead Let's Make Love and Laura and the Sea. Her works have been developed at The Lark, The Vineyard, The Wilma, Ars Nova, NYTW, Playwrights' Center and The O'Neill, among others. Honors include a Jerome Fellowship, The Vineyard's Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, The National Science Playwriting Award, Theater Masters' Visionary Playwright Award, a MacDowell Fellowship and a PWCenter/NET Ensemble Collaboration Grant. She has had two of her plays on the Kilroys List.

II. Complex (KOM-pleks)

by Alexa Derman

Monday, February 12 at 7 p.m.

Tuesday, February 13 at 7 p.m.

Katie isn't a genius, but Max - the guy she's been "casually" hooking up with - just might be. Maybe it's because he's a boy? Alexa Derman, currently an undergraduate at Yale, writes intimately and incisively about what it's like to be a young woman in the arts. Complex (KOM-pleks) is a taut and funny-scary play about the gender politics of brilliance and how to survive as a "bright and promising" teenager who feels anything but.

THE READING SERIES

I. The Marriage of Figaro

by Pierre Beaumarchais

Wednesday, February 7 at 7 p.m.

Often cited as a precursor to the French Revolution, The Marriage of Figaro exposed the lack of justice in an economically stratified society. Just two years after its premiere, Mozart's opera by the same name was given its first performance, minus the scathing political references from Beaumarchais's original.

II. Ritter, Dene, Voss

by Thomas Bernhard

Thursday, February 8 at 7 p.m.

Two sisters are preparing for the return of their brother from a mental institution where he has been a patient for quite some time. Austrian playwright Thomas Bernhard, who died in 1989, based this three-person play on the life of his countryman and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Bernhard's work is widely produced in Europe but rarely seen in the United States.

III. Natasha's Dream

by Yaroslava Pulinovich

Sunday, February 11 at 2 p.m.

Natasha's Dream is a young orphan's retelling of her upbringing in rural Russia. Playwright Yaroslava Pulinovich was born in Omsk, Russia in 1989 and is well known in the Russian theater. Her work has showcased at New Drama Festival, Moscow's Playwright and Director Center, and the Kiselev Young Spectator Theatre in Saratov. This play, in John Freedman's translation, has only been read and performed a handful of times in the United States. According to critic Oleg Loevsky, Natasha's Dream is "the reason for people to work in theater."

IV. The Book of Grace

by Suzan-Lori Parks

Monday, February 12 at 1 p.m.

One of Pulitzer Prize-winning Parks' lesser known plays, The Book of Grace follows a right-leaning border patrol officer as his son storms into his life, demanding answers. But it is his perpetually optimistic wife, Grace, who ends up connecting with her stepson. Ben Brantley of The New York Times said of the play's necessity: "This American home is under siege, it appears, and so - if you'll pardon my extrapolation - is the country in which (and for which) it stands."

A Cutting Ball favorite, Parks has been featured several times in past seasons: Betting on the Dust Commander in 2008, 365 Plays/365 Days in 2006 and Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World in 2005.

Co-founded in 1999 by Rob Melrose and Paige Rogers, Cutting Ball Theater presents avant-garde works of the past, present and future by re-envisioning classics, exploring seminal avant-garde texts and developing new experimental plays. In addition to producing West Coast premieres and re-imagining the classics, Cutting Ball Theater has produced nine world premieres and seven world premiere translations. Over the years Cutting Ball has received recognition and honors from numerous grant makers and media outlets including the San Francisco Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, San Francisco magazine, the Acker Awards, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the American Theatre Wing.

?The Cutting Ball Theater's 2017-18 season is made possible in part by Grants for the Arts / San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Mental Insight Foundation, The Kenneth Rainin Foundation, The RHE Charitable Foundation, The San Francisco Arts Commission, The Zellerbach Family Foundation, Northern California Community Loan Fund / Community Arts Stabilization Trust, Dolby, Microsoft/Yammer, Wells Fargo, Zendesk, and Season Producers Ken Melrose, Velia Melrose, Erik Blachford and Maryam Mohit, Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock, Kirsten Schlenger and Dave and Kate Yrueta.

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