Word for Word presents LUCIA BERLIN: STORIES at ZBelow Theater

Word for Word's first production of the 2018 Season is Lucia Berlin:Stories running February 14-March 11, in the Z Below Theater in San Francisco. The stories are from Lucia Berlin's posthumously published, critically acclaimed, A Manual for Cleaning Women featuring the stories "Her First Detox", "Emergency Room Notebook 1977", "Unmanageable", "502" and "Here It Is Saturday". Directed by Nancy Shelby and JoAnne Winter, Lucia Berlin:Stories is set to an evocative jazz score by Marcus Shelby. Author Lydia Davis in The New Yorker described Berlin's work: "Lucia Berlin's stories are electric, they buzz and crackle as the live wires touch....This is exhilarating writing"

Lucia Berlin's 5 harrowing, comic stories feature very complex women, balancing motherhood, relationships, and a working life. Set in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, Berlin's stories paint a woman's journey through alcoholism and the unlikely places it takes her. These redemptive stories feature Bay Area actress and Word for Word charter member Jeri Lynn Cohen and a strong, diverse group of Bay Area actors.

Lucia Brown Berlin (1936 - 2004) was an American short story writer. She had a small, devoted following, but did not reach a mass audience during her lifetime. She rose to sudden literary fame eleven years after her death, in August 2015, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux's publication of a volume of selected stories, A Manual For Cleaning Women, edited by Stephen Emerson. It hit The New York Times Bestseller List in its second week, and within a few weeks, had outsold all her previous books combined.

Berlin was born in Juneau, Alaska, and spent her childhood on the move, following her father's career as a mining engineer. The family lived in mining camps in Idaho, Montana and Arizona, and Chile, where Lucia spent most of her youth. As an adult, she lived in New Mexico, Mexico, northern and southern California and Colorado. She became published relatively late in life. Her first small collection, Angels in the Laundromat, was published in 1981, but her published stories were written as early as 1960. Several of her stories appeared in magazines such as The Atlantic and Saul Bellow's The Noble Savage. Berlin published six collections of short stories, but most of her work can be found in three later volumes from Black Sparrow Books: Homesick: New and Selected Stories (1990), So Long: Stories 1987-92 (1993) and Where I Live Now: Stories 1993-98 (1999).

WORD FOR WORD Performing Arts Company, a program of Z SPACE, is an ensemble whose mission is to tell great stories with elegant theatricality, staging performances of classic and contemporary fiction. Founded in 1993 by Susan Harloe and JoAnne Winter, Word for Word believes in the power of the short story to provide solace, compassion, and insight into our daily lives.

Z SPACE: Operating two venues in San Francisco's historic Mission District, a mainstage and a black box theater, Z Space hosts new works from a variety of performance disciplines year-round. Under Artistic Director Lisa Steindler, keystone initiatives include New Work, a development program that supports artists and ensembles from conception to realization of unique works, Word for Word, a resident theatre company that transforms works of literature verbatim to the stage, and Youth Arts, an arts education program promoting literacy and engaging students' creativity. We foster opportunities around the nation for these works and we engage diverse audiences through direct interactions with the process, the projects, and the artists.