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| Selections include Between the Eyes, a play by the MacArthur Genius Award recipient, Naomi Wallace, Compression of a Casualty by Kevin Doyle, exploring the news coverage of the Iraq War; as well as a special performance OPENING WEEK ONLY by Bay Area native, Betty Shamieh, performing excerpts from her critically acclaimed play of monologues, Chocolate in Heat, Growing Up Arab in America. |
Presented in two alternating series: Series 1, Thursdays & Saturdays
Series 2, Fridays & Sundays
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 Special
Events, Free to the Public:Saturday, September 18 at 4 pm, Noh Space "Tazieh," a Traditional Iranian Passion Play Historical context & contemporary experiments Presenters: Rebecca Ansary Pettys, theater scholar and artist, Haleh Hatami, poet Sunday, October 3 at 4 pm, Noh Space Playwrights' Roundtable Join the artists in an informal discussion on writing and the Middle East |
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Staged Reading Series:
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Artist Biographies |
| William
Borden's
scripts have won 37 national playwriting
competitions and have had over 200
productions.
The film version of his play, The
Last Prostitute, was shown on Lifetime
Television and in Europe and is available on
video. His
novel, Superstoe, was recently republished by Orloff Press.
A Core Alumnus Playwright at The
Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, he is
Playwright-in -Residence with Listening Winds
Theatre.
He is a member of PEN, The Dramatists
Guild, ASCAP and the Authors Guild.
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| Fatma Durmush
was born in Larnaca, Cyprus, in 1959.
At the age of six, she migrated to
England with her family and, despite a brief
return to Cyprus in her teens, went to school
in London and studied Humanities at the Open
University for two years.
Her work has been published in the
Turkish language press and in the Big
Issue and Daily Express.
Fatma�s collection of plays and short
stories, I Sit in the Light, was published in 2000. She
won first prize for poetry in the FATAL Short
Story and Poetry Competition for Turkish
Speaking Women in 1998. Her poems can be found in Modern
Poetry in Translation, New
Series No. 17 � 2001.
Fatima writes in English.
|
| Novid
Parsi,
a son of immigrant Iranians, grew up in East
Texas and studied literature at Swarthmore and
Duke. His
plays have been produced and given staged
readings by Immigrants' Theatre Project, New
York; The New Group, New York; Stephen Joseph,
Scarborough, England; Paines Plough, London;
and the Young Vic, London, among others. Novid
has also published short fiction and
criticism.
He lives in Chicago.
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| Betty Shamieh is a Palestinian-American writer and actor. She is currently a Van Lier
Fellow at New Dramatists. Her solo performance
work Chocolate in Heat, in addition to
being remounted off-off-Broadway, will tour
various theatres on the West Coast.
Betty presented a monologue Tamam she
wrote for Imagine: Iraq at Cooper
Union (co-presented by The Artists Network and
SALAAM), which will be presented in London and
New York at the Brave New World Festivals.
She, along with a group of writers including
David Henry Hwang, has been invited to
contribute a new work for the Victory Project
that will be presented at Columbia
University's Miller Theatre later this year.
She received a BA in English Language and
Literature from Harvard College, MFA in
Playwriting from the Yale School of Drama and
is presently a Professor of Screenwriting at
Marymount Manhattan College.
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|
Lilly Thomassian was born in Iran and studied at the University of Geneva. She is an award-winning poet and playwright. In 1998, she was selected to participate in Wordsmiths, a workshop supported by the City of Los Angeles Cultural Department. That same year, her one-act play, How Do I Look, was a finalist in the Pathway Productions� National Contest. The Interrogation, a play inspired by the Iranian revolution, was a finalist in the 2001 Ashland New Plays Festival and the 2003 Senachai Festival in Chicago. She is perhaps best known for her play, Let the Rocks Speak, which won the 2001 Catawba College Peterson Award. It was also awarded an Honorable Mention in the Plays for the 21st Century by the Playwrights Theater in Texas and was the finalist in the David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Competition. In 2002, parts of the play were performed during the 1st Annual Genocide Commemorative Event at the Glendale Civic Auditorium. Let the Rocks Speak was produced by ShapeShifter Productions in March 2003 at the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood. Lilly has been a long time active member of FirstStage in Hollywood, where she is currently part of the Artistic Committee. She is also member of Playwrights Ink, a prestigious playwriting group whose members� plays have won many theatre awards. She belongs to the Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights.
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| Naomi Wallace was a 1999 recipient of the
prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the grant
popularly known as the genius award. Her
newest play, The Inland Sea, will have
its world premiere in London this spring,
produced by the Oxford Stage Company. Slaughter
City was awarded the 1995 Mobil Prize and
received its world premiere in January 1996 at
the Royal Shakespeare Company. In The Heart
Of America received its world
premiere at the Bush and was subsequently
produced at the Long Wharf Theater and in
Dortmund, Germany. It was published in American
Theater magazine and was awarded the 1995
Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Her plays are
published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber,
and in the U S by Broadway Play Publishing
Inc. A collection of her plays, In The
Heart Of America And Other Plays,
was published by TCG in 2001. At
present, Wallace is under commission by The
New York Shakespeare Festival-The Public
Theatre, Paines Plough of London, and is also
co-writing a film script on the Ludlow
massacre of 1913 with Bruce McLeod and the
historian Howard Zinn. |
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Tickets |
|
Advanced ticket sales available by phone using MC/Visa ($5 fee) Reservations/ Info: 510.986.9194 |
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| Dates |
|
September 16 to October 10 Noh Space 2840 Mariposa St., San Francisco October 15 - 24 The Ashby Stage 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley Previews - 3 admitted for the price of 1: September 16 & 17
Matinees at 3 pm on Sunday, October 17 and 24 |
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| Admission |
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General Admission $18, TBA/Student/Senior $12 Previews - 3 admitted for the price of 1 |
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| Performed At |
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September 16 to October 10 |
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| Snapshots |
|
Dinner by Lilly Thomassian
|
 Tazieh by Novid Parsi Don't Eat the Tomatoes |
| Series 1 Performance:
Toby Brooks & Ben
Beecroft in Melis Bilgin's
"Disheartened"
Katie Brown & David Fierro in William Borden's "Falling"
|
| Series 2 Performance:
Max Ewalt & Sheri Bass in Lilly Tomassian's "Dinner"
Zak Kilberg in Kevin
Doyle's "Compression of a Casualty"
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| Cast |
|
Ann Marie Donahue, Ben Beecroft, Cyrus
Tinati, David Fierro, Doyle Ott, Katy Brown,
Keahn Malak-Madani, Lisa Tateosian,
Maxmillienne Ewalt, Nail Ghechem, Patrick
MacKellan, Sara Luna, Sheri Bass, Suha Araj,
Tiffany
Harrison, Toby Brooks, Vida Ghahremani, Zak
Kilberg. |
|
| Crew |
| Sound Design: Marc Hagan Light Design: Stephen Siegel Set Design: Mikiko Uesugi Costume Design: Keri Fitch Video Artist: Alan Jose Set Build & Props: Patrick Keene |
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