We Players' HEROMONSTER Begins Tonight

We Players (Artistic Director, Ava Roy; Managing Director, Lauren D. Chavez), presents HEROMONSTER at the Fort Mason Center Chapel. This site-integrated production is produced in partnership with Fort Mason Center. Performers Ava Roy and Nathaniel Justiniano join forces to create this stunning new work of intensely physical theatre. With an original score by award-winning composer Charlie Gurke, We Players presents a feast of poetry, mythology, and interactive storytelling at the Fort Mason Center Chapel this October, 2015. HEROMONSTER runs tonight, October 9, through November 1, 2015. Tickets on sale now. For press reservations or more information call 415.547.0189 or email press@weplayers.org.

ABOUT HEROMONSTER
The ancient poem Beowulf serves as a provocation, a jumping off point, and as source text. Through rigorous physical and intellectual investigation, we explore and challenge conceptions of heroism and monstrosity, good and evil, light and dark, and how this dynamic lives in all of us. In an explosion of physically and sonically activated text and imagery, this daring duo invites us to examine our relationship with these epic archetypes.

THE MEAD HALL & THE CHAPEL

For We Players, Place is a character. Locations have distinct energies, personalities and even desires. In the poem Beowulf, King Hrothgar's great hall of Herot functions as an important cultural institution that provides light and warmth, food and drink - a place for singing, storytelling and safety. The mead-hall served as a place of refuge within a dangerous and precarious external world. The mead-hall was also a place of community, where traditions were preserved and loyalty was rewarded. This is where legends were created and perpetuated, reputations were built, fame broadcast, and history written through the telling of it. We imagine the WWII era chapel at Fort Mason, a place of quietude for private contemplation as well as a community gathering place, as the hall of Herot. Herot, like the chapel, is a sanctuary, a refuge for the tired and a place for rituals that support community.

THE PROCESS: AN EVOLUTION

Artistic risk often comes in the form of working with new materials, unfamiliar tools, and experimenting with new techniques. HEROMONSTER is a very different type of project for We Players. Unlike our hallmark large-scale, site-integrated theatre projects, which employ somewhere between 30 and 60 performers, artisans, and stage crew, this project features only three performers: two actors and a musician. This is part of a larger experiment for We Players, an exploration in balancing the massive scale of our signature works with projects smaller in scope, though still rich with poetic imagery and inspired by classical texts of epic dimension. We intend to build powerful theatrical events that are more flexible than our large scale works, and can be adapted to a variety of spaces, including indoor environments.

We built the piece while in residency at the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga this August. The month long immersion into the themes and imagery of heroism and monstrosity yielded the first version of HEROMONSTER, which performs in private homes throughout the greater Bay Area this month. New insights from each living room performance inform and fuel the ongoing development of the piece for October performances at the Fort Mason Center Chapel. In the living room version of the show, a post performance conversation is our "act two". At the Chapel performances, we invite audiences to spend time at our banquet table, break bread and be together before departing. We hope the piece and it's themes will serve as a catalyst for contemplation and conversation for all.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

In her sixteen years as the Artistic Director of We Players, Ava Roy has developed a creative process that seamlessly integrates text, artist, and location into an interactive experience that is emotionally, intellectually, and visually provocative. Nathaniel Justiniano is an award winning actor/creator, director, and teacher. Most recently you may have seen him as the Chamberlain and the grotesque Fisherman in Ondine at Sutro or previously in Macbeth at Fort Point or The Odyssey on Angel Island. Nathaniel has co-created and performed in multiple critically-acclaimed productions with his company, Naked Empire Bouffon.

ABOUT WE PLAYERS

Our mission is to create site-integrated performances that transform public spaces into realms of participatory theatre, in an effort to engage with history and the environment, build community, and activate personal relationships with place. Our work inspires, awakens the senses, and connects people with each other and the environment. We Players is a Bay Area arts non-profit founded in 2000 at Stanford University by Ava Roy, and managed by Ava Roy and Lauren Dietrich Chavez since 2009. For more information about We Players, please visit www.weplayers.org.