A High-Flying Princess

by Kat Zukaitis


Once upon a time, a young princess was placed under a magical curse that could only be broken by the power of true love.

This is that story… sort of.

In The Light Princess, a barren King and Queen turn to the Queen’s sister—a Witch—for help having a child. They are overjoyed when a baby girl arrives, even though she seems unusually cheerful… and unusually light. In fact, she floats! The Witch has taken away the Princess’ gravity, both physical and emotional: she cannot touch the ground, and she cannot feel any truly weighty emotions, such as fear, sadness or love. If the Princess cannot find her gravity before her sixteenth birthday, the Witch will take over the kingdom, and the Princess will remain weightless forever.

Angela Balogh Calin’s costume design for the Princess.

As the Princess’ sixteenth birthday approaches, her parents desperately dream up ways to weigh her down. They try to make her cry, to no avail, for nothing can make the Princess truly sad. The Queen realizes that her own tears stem not from sadness, but from love. Perhaps the thing that will give the Princess gravity is falling in love!
But the Princess doesn’t want to fall in love. She wants to swim in the lake, the one place where she feels the weight of the water. One day, a wandering Prince—who would rather be a musician—hears her splashing and sets out to save her from drowning. Instead of a grateful damsel, though, he finds a furious Princess who wants nothing to do with him. She hates suitors and wants to return to her lake. He’s not a suitor, he insists, and he hates Princesses. But as the two of them fall back into the lake, they also begin a much more terrifying journey—they begin to fall in love. 

Back at the castle, the King announces a suitor competition, promising the Princess’ hand in marriage to any man who can keep her on the ground, even if it means chaining her to the floor. Meanwhile, the Witch bespells the Prince to drain the Princess’ beloved lake—and with it, all the water in the kingdom. There’s only one way to protect the lake, but it may cost the Prince his life. Can the Princess find her gravity—and save the day—before it’s too late?

Angela Balogh Calin’s costume design for the Prince.

Playwright Lila Rose Kaplan and composer/lyricist Mike Pettry adapted The Light Princess from a 19th century fairy tale by George McDonald, adding a few twists of their own along the way. This Princess is no damsel in distress waiting for a rescue; she is a young woman who must rely on her own wisdom to try to save herself, her Prince and her kingdom. Director Casey Stangl calls the play a “fractured fairy tale” for the way it assembles classic fairy tale elements—a witch, a cursed princess, a prince in disguise—and recombines them into a story about growing up and learning the value of sadness as well as joy. For the Princess, the path to adulthood means embracing both tears and laughter as integral parts of the human experience. “It’s an important story for children,” says Stangl, “and also adults!”

For the SCR production, Stangl wanted to find a way to keep the Princess aloft without wires, looking instead for a “theatrical metaphor” for flight. As luck would have it, the literary staff at SCR had recently been in touch with a choreographer and AcroYoga instructor named Ezra Lebank, the Head of Movement at California State University, Long Beach. Stangl went to see a workshop featuring Lebank and two accomplished Cal State Long Beach theatre students, Taylor Casas and Cynthia Price, and knew that she’d found the way to make her Princess fly.

In The Light Princess, Casas and Price play “gravitrons,” using their expertise in dance and AcroYoga to keep the Princess aloft. With their help, and that of choreographer Rebecca Nakano, SCR newcomer Arielle Fishman floats and soars across the stage as the Princess, her feet (almost) never touching the ground. Stangl felt that it was especially important for this story about a young woman’s empowerment to feature other young woman “lifting their sister up,” so to speak. Add in Mike Pettry’s irresistible music, which is sweeping and silly by turns, and this show really takes off!

François-Pierre Couture’s set design for The Light Princess.

Fishman, Casas and Price are joined onstage by Gina D’Acciaro, making her SCR debut as a very sassy Witch, as well as several actors known and loved by SCR audiences: Ann Noble as the Queen, Justin Figueroa as the Prince, Joel Gelman and Emily Eiden as the Wisemen and Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper, returning for his eighth SCR show, as the King.

SCR audiences will also recognize director Casey Stangl, whose work here includes several TYA productions, most recently The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and James and the Giant Peach; last season’s Venus in Fur; and the upcoming world premiere of The Siegel. Deborah Wicks LaPuma (musical direction), François-Pierre Couture (scenic design), Angela Balogh Calin (costume design), Karyn Lawrence (lighting design) and Jeff Polunas (sound design) round out the creative team, helping to bring this delightfully imaginative—and unconventional—fairy tale with music to life.

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Mystery, Memory and Music in Peter Shaffer’s "Amadeus"

by Andy Knight

Asher Grodman, Marco Barricelli and Liesel Allen Yeager in Amadeus.

“Well, the genesis of Amadeus was, I suppose, a long-felt desire to celebrate Mozart in me, but the play actually is not about Mozart, fundamentally. It is about Salieri. It is about the nature of a man’s sense of injustice, and to me the crucial things in the play of Amadeus occur after Mozart’s death, to some extent, when Salieri…finally says to the audience, ‘I was wondering all this time when I would be punished,’ and comes to the conclusion that his punishment lay—because he survived Mozart by 30 years and was a huge success in Vienna, gigantic success, much more successful on the level of acclaim than Mozart—when he spent thirty years being called distinguished by people incapable of distinguishing.”

—Playwright Peter Shaffer

In 1823, the year that Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus begins, Antonio Salieri, at one time Vienna’s most celebrated composer, is past his prime. Now 73 years old, Salieri has lived long enough to see his music fall out of fashion and his influence in the Viennese court dwindle, as his role as the royal music director fades from a position of power to a mere title of respect. What’s more, the buzz around Vienna—“the city of Slander”—is that Salieri has gone mad: after all, the reclusive Italian won’t stop raving that he killed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the revered Austrian composer who died thirty years earlier. “I don’t believe it,” the gossips say. “All the same… Is it just possible? Did he do it after all?”

Only Salieri knows the truth, and as he waits for death, he begs the ghosts of the distant future—his audience—to hear his story, to know his truth once and for all. For their benefit, he revisits the past. “The year—to begin with—seventeen eighty-one,” says Salieri as he sets the scene. “The age still that of the Enlightenment: that clear time before the guillotine fell in France and cut all of our lives in half.”

At 31, Salieri holds the illustrious position of chamber composer in the Viennese court of Joseph II and is the model of success: his operas are loved in both Vienna and across Europe, his musical taste is exquisite and his skill at court politics is undeniable. But the pious Salieri knows that success doesn’t come for free; he believes that God bestows His gifts on only the most righteous, the most deserving. The composer, therefore, commits himself to serving God through music and to leading a virtuous life as a show of gratitude.

But then Salieri meets Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, wunderkind composer and enfant terrible. Mozart is gaudy, bawdy and petulant—but a remarkable talent. It’s not long before Salieri recognizes his own music is, at best, adequate next to Mozart’s—amusing trifles in the shadows of great works of art—and he’s consumed by jealousy. How could a just God give so much to someone so small? And how could the Almighty withhold the same kind of talent from Salieri, his greatest attendant? As Salieri’s envy grows, he wages a war against God, and Mozart is the battleground. “What use, after all, is Man,” Salieri points out, “if not to teach God His lessons?”

Portrait of Salieri by Joseph Willibrord (circa 1814).

Portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart by an unknown artist (circa 1788–90).

In Amadeus, Peter Shaffer, author of Equus and Lettice and Lovage, brings his story of jealousy and revenge to life using a technique in which the present and past (in Amadeus’ case 1823 and 1781-91, respectively) exist at the same time. On what he believes is his last night alive, Salieri conjures up the past and both participates within it and comments upon it (from the vantage point of the present). Time and location change frequently, but there is no interruption, no breaks between scenes; instead, the audience is ushered from event to event by Salieri, with a fluidity that allows the sweeping story to pick up momentum as its suspense grows.

But Shaffer also complements Amadeus’ storytelling with musical elements—not just with the play's use of music in the literal sense, but also with its nods to operatic forms. For example, Amadeus begins when “savage whispers fill the theatre” chanting “Salieri.” This chorus is quickly replaced by the Venticelli, two “little winds,” or gossips, who tell the audience about Salieri’s confession of murder. The sequence functions much like an introductory movement—or overture—to the play. Beyond that, one might describe Salieri’s monologues as the play’s arias; or discover that the word games between Mozart and his wife Constanze contain the rhyming patterns of song lyrics; or even find motifs from Mozart’s operas, like blackmail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) or destructive fathers (Don Giovanni), dropped into Amadeus.

“While it’s not a musical, it functions like one,” says director Kent Nicholson, who returns to SCR after directing the 2014 production of The Light in the Piazza. But it’s not only the musicality and epic scope that draw him to the piece: “I think people will be surprised how funny Amadeus is…I think that to make people have a profound experience, they have to laugh first.”

To bring Amadeus to life, Nicholson has assembled a creative team of SCR favorites. The design team includes set designer John Iacovelli, whose many SCR credits include this season’s production of Abundance; costume designer Alex Jaeger, who recently designed costumes for the world premiere of Office Hour at SCR; lighting designer Lap Chi Chu, who designed this season’s world premiere of Future Thinking; and sound designer Darron L West, who designed last season’s world premiere of Of Good Stock.

The cast of Amadeus includes SCR veterans, as well as newcomers. Marco Barricelli, whose successful career includes roles on Broadway and at the top regional theatres across the country, returns to SCR after last appearing in the theatre’s 1996 production of The Taming of the Shrew. Asher Grodman makes his SCR debut as Mozart. The cast is rounded out by Christian Barillas, Mark Capri, Peter Frechette, John-David Keller, Louis Lotorto, Louis Pardo, A.J. Sclafani, Camille Thornton Alson and Geoffrey Wade, all of whom have appeared in previous SCR productions, as well as Bo Foxworth, Cynthia Marty and Liesel Allen Yeager, who are making their SCR debut.

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Cracking Open Trouble

by John Glore

“When you see someone in pain, constant pain, you can’t help it: if you’re human, you feel a little pain too.” It’s a good working definition of compassion, offered by Gina, the central character of Julia Cho’s new play, Office Hour.

“One of the particular challenges of writing plays is that as time goes by and life gets more complicated, it’s harder for me to find the kind of solitude and quiet that allows me to sink into my subconscious. That’s the place plays truly come from, not from external things I read or see, but from some deep current within me. I can’t force myself to write a play out of an idea. I have to be still and quiet and let the play come out of its own accord.”

– Julia Cho

But there isn’t much compassion on display in the play’s first scene, when Gina meets with two fellow adjunct creative writing teachers to discuss a student who has set off alarm bells with his hostile classroom demeanor and the violence and perversity in his writing. Gina, who has just begun a new class with this student, is uncertain about how seriously to take his strange behavior. But David and Genevieve have come to a stark conclusion: “the kid” is Trouble, and they’re afraid if someone doesn’t do something soon, he could go off like a time bomb. (They won’t even say his name, perhaps not wanting to humanize the threat they have discovered in their midst.) And from the way they describe him, their fears seem justified.

Then the other shoe drops. Having no apparent way to deal with the potential problem through official channels because of various bureaucratic roadblocks, David and Genevieve have concluded that Gina is the only one who might be able to get through to the troubled student and thereby defuse the time bomb. Genevieve reasons that because Gina shares the student’s cultural background, “you guys must have stuff in common.”

However presumptuous Genevieve’s assessment might be, Gina does have to find a way to deal with the problem that has been dumped in her lap. Although she never set out to be a teacher—it became necessary when success as a writer proved elusive—she still takes her teaching seriously and she believes she has an ability to connect with her students. And then there’s that feeling of compassion she can’t seem to shake. So she reluctantly summons the troubled student to a meeting.

The rest of the play covers what happens when he shows up for Gina’s office hour, and nothing can prepare Gina for what she learns about her student—or about herself—as she begins to crack through his shell of hostility.

Although its mode is realistic, the structure of Office Hour is not entirely conventional. Rather than following a linear progression from the beginning of Gina’s meeting with her student to the end, the play fractures at key moments in a way that can’t be explained without giving too much away. But the fracturing becomes key to the experience of the play and, more importantly, it allows the play to honor the complexity of its subject matter.

Office Hour deals with the potential for sudden, shocking violence in a society where too many people—particularly a certain breed of young men—feel alienated, powerless, persecuted and misunderstood, and respond by lashing out. It’s a perplexing, almost unexplainable phenomenon, and the societal fissures it causes seem to spread uncontrollably, like cracks in a thin sheet of ice, one crack leading to another and then another. That’s why Cho has chosen as much as possible to let the story control its own telling.

The result is a suspenseful, thought-provoking drama, whose outcome remains in doubt even as Gina’s final words reverberate in our minds: “Figure it out.”

Tony Amendola, Laura Heisler, Leo Marks, Linda Gehringer and Betsy Brandt in the 2010 world premiere of The Language Archive by Julia Cho.

Sandra Oh

Raymond Lee

Corey Brill

Sola Bamis

To all intents and purposes, Julia Cho’s professional career began at South Coast Repertory in 2002, when her play, 99 Histories, had a reading in the Pacific Playwrights Festival (PPF). By now, her relationship with SCR has included three commissions, two world premieres (The Piano Teacher in 2007 and The Language Archive in 2010), three appearances in PPF and one NewSCRipts reading. Although her work has been produced at many of the leading theatres in the United States and she has won such prestigious honors as the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (an international award for the best English-language play by a woman), she continues to think of SCR as an artistic home—so this world premiere of her latest SCR commission, Office Hour, marks a homecoming that both she and the company welcome.

Office Hour had a reading in SCR’s NewSCRipts series in 2015 directed by Neel Keller, who returns to stage the full production. An associate artistic director at L.A.’s Center Theatre Group, Keller has made a career of directing new plays at theatres across the country, including the provocative, formally inventive work of such playwrights as Sheila Callaghan, Kimber Lee, Jennifer Haley and Dael Orlandersmith.

Making her SCR debut in the role of Gina is Sandra Oh. Although she may be best known for starring as Cristina Yang in the long-running TV series, “Grey’s Anatomy,” Oh has made frequent stage appearances throughout her career, both locally (Mark Taper Forum, La Jolla Playhouse) and nationally (The Public Theater in New York and Victory Gardens in Chicago). She also appeared in the films Sideways and Under the Tuscan Sun.

Gina’s troubled student will be played by Raymond Lee, last seen here earlier this season in the very different role of a rap-singing, love-making, motorcycle-riding refugee in the world premiere of Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone. Lee has also appeared at SCR in the Theatre for Young Audiences production of Robin Hood and the Studio SCR presentation of Four Clowns.

Rounding out the cast of Office Hour, as Gina’s colleagues, David and Genevieve, are Corey Brill and Sola Bamis. Brill has played a diverse series of roles at SCR, including Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice and the philosophizing fetus in Noah Haidle’s Smokefall. Bamis is making her SCR debut after appearances at such leading theatres as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis.

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Celebrity, Stalkers and Parents

by Kimberly Colburn

Cosplay at the Comic Con San Diego

Crowds at Comic Con San Diego

Chiara is a child star who has grown up in the spotlight, always with her doting mother, Crystal, at her side. Growing up in Nebraska, Crystal had few options open to her. An unhappy marriage left Crystal with hope for a better life through her only daughter. She took Chiara’s childhood dreams of stardom seriously, and parlayed that into helping create a child star. Rolling the dice, Crystal moved them from their lakeside home that was far from the spotlight to heed the siren call of Los Angeles and all its glory. Success didn’t happen overnight but, with Crystal’s guidance, Chiara persisted. Chiara’s now 23, and she and Crystal have enjoyed the luxury grown from their humble beginnings. They’ve both gotten a chance to see the world…though through grueling film shoots and press junkets.

Now Chiara has a plum role on a popular science-fiction television series called Odyssey. When she makes an appearance at Comic Con, a huge annual gathering that celebrates comic books, movies and television series related to the sci-fi/fantasy genre, an allegedly deranged fan, Peter, is apprehended as he comes near her booth. Last year at the convention, he tried to give her a vial of his blood, so this time he was quickly spotted and bodyguard Sandy whisked Chiara back to her hotel room for safety. Sandy has been in charge of protecting her for years, and spends more time with her than he possibly could with his own kid.

Future Thinking by Eliza Clark opens as Peter is being questioned in a makeshift space by Jim, the head of security. Jim has taken it upon himself to interrogate Peter, biding his time until they know if Chiara’s “people” are going to press charges. Jim fancies himself a future cop, and he’s using Peter to practice his techniques and act out a fantasy of his own. Peter insists that he’s been misunderstood—even last year, because the vial of blood he attempted to give Chiara was not a threat of violence, but instead a meaningful gift that only fans of the show would understand (in the world of Odyssey, clean blood is the only valuable currency). Peter tries valiantly to explain himself, but Jim doesn’t watch the show and can’t possibly understand.

Meanwhile, Crystal and Sandy tend to Chiara, who responds to her gilded-cage life with childish histrionics and hilariously obnoxious acting-out. All three quickly become too wrapped up in their own concerns to worry about the man being held downstairs. The demands of upholding a public image and the accompanying lifestyle it requires recently have begun to take their toll on all of them, and Chiara is chafing at what it means to have your mother double as your career counselor.

The notion of celebrity is a familiar one to playwright Clark. Though she did spend time as a child actor, she’s quick to point out that the play is not autobiographical, and the humor in Chiara and Crystal’s relationship is purely from her imagination. Clark has drawn from many sources of inspiration  to inform the play’s thematic territory, including the fact that she has recently become a mother herself. She’s also married to another writer, Zac Whedon, who writes films and comic books, and she’s attended Comic Con with him so has seen first-hand the role-playing, awkwardly funny moments, and obsessions with a fantasy world that can permeate fandom.

Chiara calls Crystal’s role as a mother into question, while finding that the public role she plays might be more limiting behind closed doors. Crystal enjoys the lifestyle they’ve become accustomed to but doesn’t know what to make of her spoiled daughter. Sandy’s trying to keep the peace, but perhaps has become a little too entwined in Crystal and Chiara’s lives. In another space, Jim is role-playing the cop hero he’s always dreamed he could be, and poor Peter is trapped. He is dressed as his favorite character from his favorite show, but Peter’s intentions in reaching out to Chiara are different than what Jim assumes. Everyone’s got a fantasy and a role to play, and by the end of Future Thinking the worlds—of fantasy, reality, fame and parenthood—all collide in this comedy that asks surprisingly deep questions.

Heidi Dippold, Jud Willford, director Lila Neugebauer, Arye Gross, Virginia Vale, Enver Gjokaj and playwright Eliza Clark on the first day of rehearsal for Future Thinking.

The Road to Production

Clark’s play first appeared at South Coast Repertory as a reading in the 2014 Pacific Playwrights Festival. It returns as a full production, helmed by the same director, Lila Neugebauer (who previously directed SCR’s Trudy and Max in Love by Zoe Kazan). Clark and Neugebauer are longtime friends, having met as freshmen in college, but this is the first major production they’ve had the chance to collaborate on. Neugebauer has assembled a cast that includes SCR veteran Arye Gross playing Peter—the first of many shows he was in at SCR was The Time of Your Life in 1978. Heidi Dippold (Smokefall) and Virginia Vale (The Purple Lights of Joppa Illinois) return to our stages, while Enver Gjokaj and Jud Williford make their SCR debuts.

Learn more about the cast.

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Mortality That Makes You Laugh

by Kimberly Colburn

Going to a Place where you Already Are asks big questions—but it’s so firmly based in character-driven humor that it is anything but didactic. The characters are grappling with their own troubles navigating their relationships with one another, due to their opposing viewpoints. 

First, we meet Joe and Roberta. They’re a lively older couple whom we first see at a funeral for Joe’s co-worker. Since he barely knew her, Joe and Roberta attend more out of a sense of social obligation than anything else. They’re avowed atheists, especially Joe, and attending church service is not part of their regular life—mostly weddings and funerals, and these days it’s more often the latter. The play opens with them in a pew, lightly commenting on the action around them. The setting makes Roberta begin to realize their mortality and the conversation turns to the question of what might happen to people when they die. Roberta used to be a believer, and there are some things she can’t dismiss as easily as Joe can.

Next, we meet Ellie and Jonas. They met yesterday by chance, and surprisingly they have quickly wound up in bed together. In contrast to Joe and Roberta’s longstanding relationship, Ellie and Jonas are just beginning to feel their way towards each other. They have an instant connection and are so comfortable with one another—if only there weren’t the hurdles of life (and Ellie’s overwhelming questions and insecurities) to get in their way…mid-conversation, Ellie dismisses a call from her step-Grandmother Roberta, but briefly wonders what she’s calling about.

Roberta has been complaining about back pain, probably from bending over to weed the dandelions last week, but Joe thinks she must have pinched a nerve. When the pain doesn’t subside after a few days, Roberta is sent for what is intended to be a routine MRI, until an allergic reaction causes her heart to stop momentarily. While Joe sits at her bedside, Roberta sees herself in a foreign place she doesn’t understand, being greeted by someone she doesn’t know but who feels terribly familiar. Suddenly, she returns to consciousness, and Joe tells her what happened, that she had a brief scare but she’s fine now. Roberta doesn’t need his explanation; she knows exactly where she went—to heaven. Joe gently ignores her passionate descriptions as a dream, but their attention is grabbed when the doctor returns and tells them the MRI showed bad news. Roberta’s full of tumors, and it’s not looking good for her. Her experience in heaven doesn’t seem so far-fetched after all, but Joe refuses to focus on anything except finding an impossible and non-existent cure. Roberta’s more interested in the larger philosophical question, and accepts her fate because she already knows where she’s going to go next. 

Rebecca Mozo, Christopher Thornton, Linda Gehringer and Hal Landon Jr. in Going to a Place where you Already Are.

Going to a Place where you Already Are was first heard by SCR audiences in a NewSCRipts reading, followed later that season by a reading as part of the Pacific Playwrights Festival. Anyone who attended either of those readings will discover that the character’s trajectories have changed significantly. Playwright Bekah Brunstetter explains that this is a normal part of her process, that she finds herself constantly writing and re-writing, including changing the fates of the characters.

Artistic Director Marc Masterson was impressed by Brunstetter’s skill as a writer and was drawn to directing the project himself. “What struck me first about Going to a Place was the sense that ‘I’m in the hands of a writer who has this vivid idea of who these people are and is able to bring them to life for me in a very short span of time.’” Brunstetter is highly collaborative, and needs the feedback from the cast to fine-tune what she wants to say. Masterson has convened a top-notch cast: SCR favorites Linda Gehringer, Hal Landon, Jr. and Rebecca Mozo, who are joined by two people making their SCR debut, Stephen Ellis and Christopher Thornton (though both have been with the play throughout its stages of development).

Brunstetter creates characters like Joe, Roberta, Ellie, and Jonas with great skill and empathy, placing them carefully in awkward situations and then using humor and heart to have them stumble their way through. They can’t always control their fates, but to have questions amid the daily struggles is a fact of humanity. Roberta’s impending mortality is hard for everyone, but her brief near-death experience of heaven which she finds comforting makes Joe irrational. How can you adapt when something occurs that is outside of your belief system? What does it mean to have faith—and what does it mean for those around you?

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Making "Pinocchio" New Again

by John Glore

The tale of Pinocchio, the little puppet who wants to be a real boy, is one of the best-loved stories in children’s literature. It has been the source of numerous adaptations, including Disney’s popular animated film, and its mischievous protagonist has shown up in everything from the Shrek movie franchise to the ABC series, “Once Upon a Time.” Is there any way to make this familiar story new again?

Playwright Greg Banks

You bet! Turn it over to the clowns! Four Clowns, the L.A.-based, internationally known company with whom SCR teamed for our Theatre for Young Audiences production of Robin Hood in 2012, returns to the Argyros Stage to reimagine the adventures of Pinocchio. Using their special brand of physical comedy and creative theatricality, and once again working with an adaptation by Greg Banks (who also wrote the script for Robin Hood), director Jeremy Aluma and his company will employ the simplest of theatrical trappings to take you from Geppetto’s little shop, to a traveling tent show, to the fabulous Playland and even into the belly of a whale before they deliver little Pinocchio to his happy ending.

The story follows the outline of the original Carlo Collodi tale. When Geppetto, an old woodcarver struggling to make a meager life for himself, finds a magical talking piece of wood, he decides to turn it into a puppet boy, so he can finally have a son to call his own. He names the little marionette Pinocchio, and marvels at the boy’s ability to walk, talk and get into trouble without benefit of strings.

Author Carlo Collodi

But Pinocchio isn’t content to be a puppet: he wants to be a real boy (even if he doesn’t have a clue what that means when his adventures begin), and the first step in that process is to go to school and learn what real boys learn. Geppetto sells his own thread-bare coat to buy a schoolbook for Pinocchio and sends him on his way—but as soon as Pinocchio is on his own, he demonstrates that he has a nose for trouble. When he hears music coming from a traveling show, he decides school can wait until tomorrow. He sells his schoolbook to buy a ticket to the “Punch and Judy” puppet show, and before he knows it he has become the show’s star attraction.

From there, Pinocchio, newly enriched by five gold coins given to him by the show man, falls in with a clever Fox and a dim-witted Cat, who pretend to be his friends in order to rob him. They tie up Pinocchio and leave him to die in the frosty night, but the puppet manages to escape that dire fate with the help of a fairy. At first Pinocchio lies to the fairy about how he has got into such a fix, but with each new fib his nose grows longer, and only when Pinocchio finally tells the truth does his nose return to its proper size. The fairy saves him from his plight and warns him to stay on the straight and narrow path from now on.

Needless to say, Pinocchio does no such thing, but each time he strays—whether it’s forgoing school again so he can go to Playland, where his goofing off earns him donkey ears, or getting himself swallowed by the aforementioned whale —he learns a new lesson about what it means to be a well-behaved human boy. And, in the end, that’s exactly what he becomes.

THE CAST: Joe DeSoto, Jennifer Carroll, Dave Honigman, Kevin Klein and Tyler Bremer

You're in for Some Fun With This Cast

Four Clowns was formed in 2010 by a group of recent graduates of Cal State Long Beach, who continued their study of clowning techniques at The Clown School. Led by artistic director Jeremy Aluma, their first show was called simply Four Clowns, a decidedly adult entertainment that won the Bitter Lemons Award for Most Outrageous Theatre at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. That show also appeared in SCR’s Studio SCR series in early 2012. The company went on to create such shows as Four Clowns: Romeo and Juliet, Sublimity, That Beautiful Laugh and Lunatics & Actors, and soon began touring their work nationally and internationally.

Partly inspired by their experience performing for young audiences in Robin Hood at SCR, Four Clowns added a new programming component called Four Clowns Jr. While remaining mischievous in spirit, Four Clowns Jr. applies the company’s signature style of clowning, dance, music and text to work that is entirely appropriate for kids.

SCR’s production of Pinocchio features five of the Four Clowns. No, that isn’t a misprint: since its small beginnings, the company has grown to number more than a dozen performers who take turns appearing in Four Clowns shows. Tapped for SCR’s production are Kevin Klein (the only one of the five who also appeared in SCR’s Robin Hood), Dave Honigman (who began his study of acting in SCR’s conservatory program), Jennifer Carroll, Joe DeSoto and Tyler Bremer.

With the exception of DeSoto (who only plays Pinocchio), all the actors take on multiple roles. For some characters (such as Fox and Cat), masks are used, while others are suggested by the donning of a simple costume element. Shadow puppetry helps tell parts of the story, and the production includes several songs sung by the company, who accompany themselves on a variety of musical instruments.

While not wanting to give away the fun of this production, we should mention that when you arrive for a performance you may think a terrible mistake has been made. You’ll find the stage full of scaffolding, step ladders and drop cloths, and there won’t be any actors to be found—just a handful of backstage technical workers. They will be as surprised to see you as you are to see them.

But the show must go on. And it will, in the most delightfully imaginative way, as Four Clowns springs into action to tell the story of the puppet who would be a real boy.

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The Many Layers of Red

by John Glore

Paul David Story and Mark Harelik in Red.

Writing About Rothko

Sometimes, blessedly, something comes fully formed. I walked into the Tate Modern and had no idea I was going to walk out writing a play. I walked into a room with the Seagram Murals for the first time. It was in a larger room, very dark, and there were 12 of them, all the way around. They stopped me cold. It was at a point in my life when I needed something to stop me—really, to stop my life. And they did. I was struck by them, and I gave them time to work on me. I went over and I read the little description on the gallery wall which talks about: “Mark Rothko painted these for the Seagram Building. He decided to keep the paintings, gave the money back, and committed suicide ten years later.” And I instantly thought this was a two-hander play, because, you know, color-field paintings are binary by nature … And so I walked out saying: I think I need to write a play about this.

*  *  *

I did a year of research before I wrote a word. I read the complexity, the sort of rabbinical, scholarly nature of his diatribes on art, and I thought: that’s what this person needs to sound like. … With Rothko, I knew what I wanted to write about. I knew why I was writing it, which had to do with my relationship with my father. The fact that the characters happened to be painters was secondary to me. And I knew that Rothko was going to have to have a huge speech about people not appreciating his work, people not taking him seriously enough. There’s a long speech in the play … and it ends with “I’m here to make you think, I’m here to stop your heart.” That’s the first thing I wrote, because I knew he was going to have a speech like that. Then I thought: If I could get past that, I could write the rest. So I wrote the hardest part first.

–from an interview with playwright John Logan in the theatre magazine, Chance

Playwright John Logan

The main activities in John Logan’s Red are: talking about painting; preparing to paint; and then beginning to paint. While this might not seem the stuff of urgent drama, the underlying action of the play is indeed urgent, stemming from a profound struggle going on in the heart and mind of painter Mark Rothko. That struggle is made manifest in his volatile interactions with the young man who has come to serve as his assistant, and in Rothko’s relationship to the world outside his studio.


Still, Red is not a portrait of a tormented artist disintegrating under the corrosive force of his own misunderstood genius (think, the Hollywood version of the Van Gogh story). It’s true, Rothko has his demons, and he will eventually take his own life, but that won’t happen until ten years after the end of Red. The two-year period in which Logan’s play takes place, 1958-59, is actually the time when Rothko experienced his ascendancy as one of the leading artists of the 20th century.


As the play begins, he has been given a commission—a sizable one —to paint a series of murals that will hang in the newly erected Seagram Building, itself a masterpiece of mid-century American architecture. Rothko should need no further proof that, after 30 years of professional striving and frustration, he has finally arrived. The commission might have gone to any of a number of other, arguably more prominent abstract expressionist artists. But the renowned architect Philip Johnson has come to him, and the honor means as much if not more to Rothko than the money.

“Rothko’s love of the theater informed his works throughout his life; he painted theatrical scenes, admired many playwrights, and referred to his paintings as ‘drama,’ and his forms as ‘performers.’ His experience painting stage sets in Portland may well have influenced the murals he designed years later for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building in 1958 and for Harvard University in 1961, and those commissioned by Dominique and John de Menil for a chapel in Houston in 1964.”

-- Diane Waldman, Mark Rothko in New York

And yet … (There must be an “and yet,” or there would be no drama.)


And yet, his success feels terribly fragile. He remains convinced that people don’t understand his work, even if they’re willing to pay top dollar for it. He distrusts the very idea of the artist as celebrity, of art as commodity—but he can’t help feeling perturbed that other artists are more famous, that their work hangs in the best galleries and museums while his does not, that a has-been like Picasso can make a fortune selling misshapen pots and doodles on napkins, while at the same time a new generation of artists breathes down Rothko’s neck, rejecting the tenets of abstract expressionism and looking to replace it with a kind of self-aware, ironic “pop art” that Rothko finds altogether execrable. And the work of those unworthy upstarts—Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, et al.—is hanging in the same galleries that previously exhibited Rothko’s paintings.


So yes, this lucrative commission offers a kind of validation and vindication.


And yet … how can he take the money without feeling that he has sold out to the very anti-artistic forces that he has long vilified? Part of the problem is that the murals are destined to hang not in some grand foyer or dedicated gallery space, but on the walls of the Seagram’s Four Seasons restaurant, a “Temple of Consumption” in the words of Rothko’s assistant, Ken. Rothko has decided that this improbable setting will provide him with an opportunity to confront and provoke the richest, most powerful members of society with his work. A leftist since becoming politicized during the Depression, Rothko enthusiastically embraces the subversive possibilities of this commission.


And yet … “Selling a picture is like sending a blind child into a room full of razor blades,” he tells Ken. And he means it. Although Rothko has a flesh-and-blood daughter (and will soon have a son), he thinks of his paintings as his progeny, to be protected at all costs from unfriendly eyes, uncomprehending hearts and the maws of unscrupulous predators. So how can he consider letting them hang amidst the ravening and maneuvering and dinner-table palavering of New York’s power elite?


That’s what so perplexes and frustrates the young assistant, Ken. An aspiring artist himself, he signed on for this job because of a true admiration for Rothko and his work. Ken has lived his own story of pain and hardship at an early age, which makes it possible for him to understand in a deep way Rothko’s insistence that art must spring from a tragic impulse, that there must be “tragedy in every brushstroke.” Although Rothko insisted when hiring Ken that he had no intention of serving as his mentor, his rabbi, his father-figure or his therapist, he eventually becomes all of those to some degree. The more time Ken spends in the studio, listening to Rothko, working with Rothko, communing with Rothko, the more Ken’s admiration deepens.


And yet …


Although Red uses art—and the psyche of the artist—as its specific dramatic material, its human concerns are more universal than that. The goings-on in Rothko’s studio, the day-to-day business of a working artist, are fascinating (and in one instance, even thrilling), but they are only the surface layer of Logan’s story of two men grappling with the conundrum of life from two very different perspectives. Ken is just starting out as an artist and a man; Rothko is very near the pinnacle of achievement, a vantage-point from which one inevitably begins to consider the possibility of decline and loss. Ken needs to understand; Rothko needs to be understood. Ken still sees life as a process of addition; Rothko understands that it is inescapably a process of gradual subtraction and simplification (a process that has also informed the development of his art). Ken is young and hungry; Rothko is getting old … but he’s still hungry. Red is about the synergy that arises between them as they pursue a common goal and discover their connection.



Paul David Story and Mark Harelik in Red.

Red Dream Team

SCR’s production of Red is staged by founding artistic director David Emmes. While casting is always a vital aspect of directing, it becomes especially crucial when a play includes only two characters, one of whom is a titan of 20th century American art with a larger-than-life personality and a propensity to be loquacious. Emmes didn’t commit to taking on Red until he had found, in Mark Harelik, an actor who could do justice to the role of Mark Rothko.

Harelik’s illustrious association with SCR spans 25 years and six previous productions (along with a great many workshops and readings). He played leading roles in Search and Destroy (1990), Tartuffe (1999), The Hollow Lands (2000), The Beard of Avon (2001), Cyrano de Bergerac (2004) and In a Garden (2010). He has also appeared in New York (where his credits include the original Broadway production of The Light in the Piazza), in regional theatres nationwide, and in numerous films and television shows. SCR has long considered him to be one of the leading theatre actors of his generation, and we welcome his return in Red.

In some ways, the greater casting challenge came in finding a young actor who could hold his own onstage with Harelik. Paul David Story makes his SCR debut (apart from appearing in the NewSCRipts reading of Death of the Author) in the role of Rothko’s assistant, Ken. Story has appeared on and off-Broadway, at such leading regional theatres as Baltimore’s CenterStage and the Dallas Theatre Center, and on film and television.

A play about art demands a scenic design of consummate artistry: One of the finest set designers in the American theatre, Ralph Funicello, returns to SCR for his 29th season, after having contributed designs for such disparate productions as Zealot, Hamlet, Misalliance (twice) and Brooklyn Boy, among many others. The design team is rounded out by costume designer Fred Kinney (whose SCR set and/or costume assignments have included Sight Unseen, Sunlight, A Wrinkle in Time and Ordinary Days) and Cricket Myers (Mr. Wolf, Zealot, Trudy and Max in Love and many others) for sound design; but no one thus far mentioned outdoes lighting designer Tom Ruzika for SCR longevity, as this marks his 40th year of contributing lighting designs to SCR productions (including all 36 years of A Christmas Carol).

SCR’s production of Red does include passing references to 19th- and 20th-century art, architecture and literature. Need a refresher? Check out the art movement glossary.

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"Red" Glossary

While it isn’t necessary to hit the books before attending SCR’s production of Red, the play does include many passing references to 19th- and 20th-century art, architecture and literature. The following glossary is offered for those who want an introduction or refresher course on some of those references. Names in boldface are referred to in the play. For copyright reasons, we are not able to reproduce the work of artist Mark Rothko. The following links provide access to some of Rothko’s paintings.

The official Mark Rothko website:
http://www.markrothko.org

The Seagram Murals, displayed at the Tate Modern in London:
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/exhibition/rothko/room-guide/room-3-seagram-murals

20th Century Artistic Movements 

(for more in-depth discussions of these movements and their artists, we suggest visiting the encyclopedic website, www.artstory.org.)

Cubism: an early-20th-century movement, pioneered by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, which revolutionized European painting and sculpture. The term broadly categorizes a wide variety of art produced in Paris during the 1910s and 1920s. In cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form; instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist breaks volumes into fragmented planes, to depict the subject from multiple viewpoints and/or to create a sense of movement and the operation of time. Abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning is said to have been greatly influenced by cubism.

Abstract Expressionism: a post-World War II movement in American painting, developed in New York in the 1940s (hence sometimes called the “New York School”). The movement's name is derived from a combination of the emotional expressivity of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools. Even so, according to artstory.org, “Abstract Expressionist art was championed for being emphatically American in spirit—monumental in scale, romantic in mood, and expressive of a rugged individual freedom.” While Absract Expressionism has an image of being rebellious, anarchic and highly idiosyncratic, a hallmark of much of the work was a striving for balance between chaos and control. This was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and it put New York at the center of the western art world. The term is loosely applied to any number of artists who had markedly different styles, and even to work that is neither especially abstract nor expressionist. Rothko’s mature work is usually labeled Abstract Expressionism, although he balked at that or any other label. Other principal artists of the movement included Jackson Pollock (known for his action paintings composed of drips and splashes), Willem de Kooning (another practitioner of gestural action painting), Arshile Gorky (who, like Rothko, moved from surrealism to abstract expressionism), Barnett Newman and Robert Motherwell (the last two recognized with Rothko as among the preeminent “color field” painters).

Frank Stella came along late in the abstract expressionist period and moved away from that loose, expressive form to a kind of minimalism that emphasized flat surfaces filled with lines and bands of color, pin-stripes and geometric forms, stripped of expressive emotional content.

Pop Art: A movement that emerged in the late ‘50s that used imagery from popular culture, including advertising, comic books and the daily news, often emphasizing banal, kitschy aspects of the culture. The movement arose as a reaction against the then-dominant forms of abstract expressionism, and pop art is sometimes considered an early example of post-modernism. Aiming to blur the boundaries between “high art” and “low culture,” Pop Art restores representationalism (recreation of recognizable images), but replaces the “high-art” interest in morality, mythology, religion or classical history with attention to commonplace objects, every-day imagery and pop-culture icons. Its mode is generally ironic. Best known practitioners include Andy Warhol (Campbell’s soup cans, Marilyn Monroe), Jasper Johns (American flag paintings), Robert Rauschenberg (collage-like “combines” of trash, found objects and images) and Roy Lichtenstein (comic book imagery employing enlarged “Ben-Day” color dots).

Paintings Referred to in the Play

Caravaggio's Conversion of Saul in the Santa Maria del Popolo

Matisse's painting The Red Studio

“Chatterton in his classic Pieta-pose”: Henry Wallis, The Death of Chatterton

Rembrandt’s Belshazzar's Feast, National Gallery of London

Miscellaneous

Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library staircase, Florence

Pentimento: an alteration in a painting, evidenced by traces of previous work, showing that the artist has changed his or her mind as to the composition during the process of painting. The word is Italian for repentance.

Seagram Building

Seagram Building: a 38-story skyscraper, located at 375 Park Avenue, between 52nd and 53rd Streets in Midtown Manhattan; completed in 1958. The structure was designed by German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe while the lobby and other internal spaces—including The Four Seasons and Brasserie restaurants—were designed by Philip Johnson. One of Mies’ most innovative architectural decisions was to set the tower back from the property line to create a forecourt plaza and fountain on Park Avenue. Although the choice was to become widely influential as an urban design feature, Mies had to convince the project’s bankers that a taller tower with significant open (“wasted”) space at ground level would enhance the presence and prestige of the building. Mies’ design included a bronze curtain wall with external mullions that went beyond what was structurally necessary, prompting some detractors to criticize it for having committed the “crime of ornamentation.” But in 1999, Herbert Muschamp, architecture critic of the New York Times, hailed the Seagram Building as “the Millennium's most important building.”

Mies van der Rohe: widely regarded as one of the pioneers of modern architecture, along with Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright. Like many of his post-World War I contemporaries, he sought to establish a new architectural style that would represent modern times the way Classical and Gothic did their own eras. Boldly abandoning ornamentation, he sought extreme clarity and simplicity in his designs—with rectilinear and planar forms, clean lines, pure use of color, and the extension of space around and beyond interior walls. Referring to his buildings as "skin and bones" architecture, he strove for structural order balanced against the implied freedom of free-flowing open space. He is often associated with his quotation of the aphorisms, “less is more” and “God is in the details.”

Philip Johnson: American architect who helped pioneer the “International Style,” which introduced European ideas of modern architecture to America and reshaped American architecture in the latter half of the 20th century. Johnson argued that the new modern style maintained three formal principles: 1) an emphasis on architectural volume over mass (planes rather than solidity); 2) a rejection of symmetry; and 3) rejection of applied decoration. He had a lifelong professional relationship with Mies van der Rohe—as collaborator and competitor. Among his many buildings are the New York State Theatre at Lincoln Center and the Crystal Cathedral in Orange County.

Moccasin slippers with Neolite soles: Ken, Rothko’s assistant, relates a memory in which “I put on my slippers—they were those Neolite ones that look like moccasins.”

Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy

a brief summary (passages in bold apply most particularly to references in Red)

The Birth of Tragedy is divided into twenty-five chapters and a forward. The first fifteen chapters deal with the nature of Greek Tragedy, which Nietzsche claims was born when the Apollonian worldview met the Dionysian. The last 10 chapters use the Greek model to understand the state of modern culture, both its decline and its possible rebirth. The tone of the text is inspirational. Nietzsche often addresses the reader directly, saying at the end of chapter twenty, “Dare now to be tragic men, for ye shall be redeemed!” Nietzsche forms a very strict definition of art that excludes subjective self-expression. Despite his criticisms of human culture, however, Nietzsche has great faith in the human soul and urges us to drop our Socratic pretenses and accept the culture of Dionysus again.

Nietzsche describes the state of Greek art before the influence of Dionysus as being naive and concerned only with appearances: the observer was never truly united with or immersed in art, instead remaining always in quiet contemplation of it. Apollonian formal control was designed to shield man from the innate suffering of the world, and thus provide some relief and comfort.

Then came Dionysus, whose ecstatic revels shocked the Apollonian spirit of Greek culture. In the end, however, it was only through one's immersion in the Dionysian essence of Primordial Unity that redemption from the suffering of the world could be achieved. In Dionysus, man found that his existence was not limited to his individual experiences alone. As the Dionysian essence is eternal, one who connects with this essence finds a new source of life and hope, and the possibility of transcending the fate of all men, which is death. Nietzsche posits Dionysus as an alternative to the salvation offered by Christianity and its demand that man renounce life on earth altogether and focus only on heaven: in order to achieve salvation through Dionysus, one must immerse oneself in life now.

However, while man can find salvation in Dionysus, he requires Apollo to provide form to the essence of Dionysus. The chorus and actors of tragedy were representations through which the essence of Dionysus was given voice. Through them, man was able to experience the joys of redemption from worldly suffering. These Apollonian appearances also stood as a bulwark against the chaos of Dionysus, so that the viewer would not become completely lost in Dionysian ecstasy. Nietzsche emphasizes that in real tragic art, the elements of Dionysus and Apollo were inextricably entwined.

Because words could never serve to delve into the depths of the Dionysian essence, music was the life of the tragic art form. Music exists in the realm beyond language, and so allows us to rise beyond consciousness and experience our connection to the Primordial Unity. Music is superior to all other arts in that it does not represent outward appearances, but rather expresses the "world will" itself.

In contrast to the typical Enlightenment view of ancient Greek culture as noble, simple, elegant and grandiose, Nietzsche believed the Greeks were grappling with pessimism. The universe in which we live is the product of great interacting forces; but we neither observe nor know these as such. What we put together as our conceptions of the world, Nietzsche thought, never actually addresses the underlying realities. It is human destiny to be controlled by the darkest universal realities and, at the same time, to live life in a human-dreamt world of illusions. The Greek spectator became healthy through direct experience of the Dionysian within the protective spirit-of-tragedy on the Apollonian stage.

This glossary is a companion to an article about John Logan’s Red. Read the full article.

A Woman's Life—Hilariously Frank

by Kat Zukaitis

Sandra Tsing Loh

“Oh my God. What have I done? It’s like waking up the star of one of those hilarious Hangover movies. Except that you are not a guy, you are not in your twenties, you have no madcap party buddies and this is not hilarious.”

Welcome to Sandra Tsing Loh’s midlife crisis—a funny, frank story about subject matter that rarely gets a funny or frank treatment…especially if you’re a woman.

We all have an idea of what a midlife crisis looks like, and while the details inevitably vary from person to person, the basic outlines—or at least their typical pop cultural representations—are startlingly similar. There’s practically a script.

Here’s how it happens on TV (or in movies, books, and plays): Generally, men purchase a ridiculous sports car or motorcycle, and spend a few weeks or months reliving the glory days of their youth, maybe having an affair with a much younger woman on the ride. Then, having learned a lesson about embracing maturity, they likely have the choice to return home to reinvest in a newly harmonious relationship with the (initially upset but eventually understanding) spouse and children. Or they move on to a new family, secure in the knowledge that they get another chance to get it right. Women in these stories are often handed a very different script, one that involves fewer Harleys and a lot more trauma. Let’s take a quick survey of some classic literary and cultural models of women who, mid-life, need to reinvent themselves.

The traditional narrative involves a housewife trapped in a lackluster marriage who decides to find fulfillment at any cost, often with tragic consequences. In Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, a frustrated but unapologetic Nora Helmer walks away from the only life she’s known, leaving her husband and children behind. Edna Pontellier, the protagonist of Kate Chopin’s landmark 1899 novel The Awakening, also rebels against society’s expectations of her as a wife and mother—but her chosen method of escape is first an affair; and then, when that sours, suicide.

But surely more recent narratives of middle-aged women who take charge of their destinies are more empowering?

Yes and no. Remember Thelma and Louise from the iconic 1991 movie, a waitress and housewife who shoot a rapist and take off in a Thunderbird? Their tragedy is that there’s not room for women like them in the world—at least not that they can see—and they elect to go out with a bang. Perhaps the biggest midlife crisis movie of the past decade has been 2010’s Eat, Pray, Love, in which Elizabeth Gilbert—like Sandra Tsing Loh, a successful writer who endured a painful divorce—travels the world and, instead of dying or going mad, finds happiness in Bali with a Brazilian lover. 

Here’s the catch: every one of these women blows up her life in the process of redefining her identity, and they never go back. If the stereotype of the male midlife crisis involves banging an intern and buying a Harley, the female stereotype involves the total destruction of one’s marriage, family life and stability. With a very few exceptions (Fried Green Tomatoes, anyone?), we simply do not get popular stories of women who navigate a midlife crisis without throwing away the life they had. 

Enter Sandra Tsing Loh. At 46, she, too, has blown up her life. I won’t give away the details here, but it involves a trip to Burning Man (picture a neo-hippie Woodstock populated by pyromaniac artists), a freak sandstorm, an unexpected affair, the onset of menopause and a lot of questionable advice. As the mother of two young daughters, moving to Bali isn’t exactly an option for her—but neither is going back to the way things were.

Unlike the women in most pop cultural representations of crisis, Loh does not try to leave behind the smoking ashes of her old life. She stays to deal with the fallout, piece by painful piece, and sometimes the wreckage is not pretty. The Madwoman in the Volvo, which both challenges and embraces the stereotype of the female midlife crisis, is the story of living with your scars and loving the person who emerges from the flames.

Southern California audiences are already familiar with Sandra Tsing Loh as a celebrated writer and radio personality. Her radio shows include The Loh Life on KPCC and The Loh Down on Science, and she has been a regular contributor to NPR's Morning Edition, PRI's This American Life and American Public Media's Marketplace. The New York Times review of her 2008 memoir Mother on Fire described her writing as “no less than a feat of genius.” A graduate of Cal Tech and USC, she currently teaches visual art and science communication at UC Irvine.

Loh breathed fresh life into the female midlife crisis genre with her 2014 memoir, The Madwoman in the Volvo, which was named to that year’s New York Times list of 100 Notable Books. The memoir became the basis for an interactive solo show that she performed at New York’s Public Theatre. Now, Orange County has a chance to catch a reimagined version of Loh’s hilarious, heartbreaking performance. Loh performs as herself, and she's joined by Caroline Aaron and Shannon Holt, who populate many characters in this theatrical imagining premiering at South Coast Repertory.

Loh teams up with director Lisa Peterson, a longtime LA resident, to tell her story. Before moving to New York, Peterson was the associate director at La Jolla Playhouse and resident director at Mark Taper Forum. She directs new work around the country and has received Obie and Lortel Awards for An Iliad, which she directed and co-wrote with Dennis O’Hare. Rachel Hauck’s set, Candice Cain’s costumes, Geoff Korf’s lighting and Lindsay Jones’ music and sound designs round out the experience.

So how does Loh miraculously transform her tale of tragedy into a hilariously frank discussion of midlife, menopause and moving on? There’s no magic formula, but persistence, friends, and an enduring sense of humor are a big help. So is a willingness to speak publically about one’s imperfections, embarrassments and heartaches. The fact that there are no easy answers is part of what makes Loh’s story so affecting. The solutions are just as messy as the problems—which are just as messy as real life.

When your life goes down in flames, sometimes all that’s left is to make art from the ashes.

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