From: Christopher Johnson [mailto:corpuschristopher@hotmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 02, 2009 7:18 PM
Subject: ETCETERA Announces its 2009-2010 Season!
ETCETERA, the late-night series at Live Theatre Workshop, under the Artistic Direction of Christopher Johnson, proudly presents its 2009-2010 Season.*
All shows play Friday and Saturday nights at 10:30 PM.
All tickets are $10 at the door.
TALLGRASS GOTHIC
By Melanie Marnich
September 3 - 19, 2009
ARIZONA PREMIERE!
Directed by Christopher Johnson
The longing, isolation, desire and fear of the classic Jacobean tragedy The Changeling are transported to the Great Plains of the Midwest in this haunting tale. At the center of the story is Laura, whose need to leave her small, rural home and controlling husband is ignited when she falls in love with a man who offers her escape and a future. But in this place where history and its ghosts populate the landscape, Laura's hunger for a new beginning sets off a violent chain of events that leads her not out of town, but to a profound and terrifying understanding of her true nature.
"In Tallgrass Gothic, her lyric and strangely engrossing play...Marnich has sharply drawn some characters who may give the denizens of Wisteria Lane a run for their scandals... But the play is most exciting because of Marnich's promise as a writer. She has found a poetic, natural cadence for characters, and this heightened language is part of what makes Eugene O'Neill and August Wilson enduring figures."
-Minneapolis Star Tribune
(This production contains adult language, content, violence and nudity.)
KNUCKLE SANDWICH
By Christopher Johnson
October 9 - 24, 2009
WORLD PREMIERE!
Directed by Shana Nunez
An autobiographical memory play as performed by the author in which his friends and family join him on stage and literally play themselves in his own life. A humiliating and hysterical personal history of coming to terms with and in full-body combat against a barrage of eating disorders and their consequences, the author as himself re-lives twenty-odd years of anorexia, bulimia and violently compulsive overeating. Against a backdrop of motorcycle accidents, abusive men in dragon costumes and backyard wrestling, promiscuous sex and funeral buffets, all-you-can-eat past-it’s-expiration-date fridge-binging…the author struggles to figure out if his life is a mess because he eats or if he eats because his life is a mess. A play for anyone who has done their fair share of face-time with a toilet seat or who knows the meaning of the expression “what goes down, must come up.”
(This production contains adult language, content, sexuality and violence.)
WHITE PEOPLE
By J.T. Rogers
November 6 - 21, 2009
ARIZONA PREMIERE!
Directed by Toni Press-Coffman
Alan, a Manhattan professor, admires the determination of New York’s Dutch colonizers even as he acknowledges their persecution of Jews and Quakers. At the same time, he is exhilarated, almost smitten, by Felicia, a black student. But when he and his pregnant wife are mugged by black teenagers, he confronts his own intolerance. Mara Lynn, a mother in Fayetteville, N.C., wrestles with memories of her cheerleader past; the faded athletic glories of her husband, Earl, now a delivery-truck driver; and the struggles of her young, epileptic son. Frustrated, she vents her wrath on an Indian physician. Martin is a driven St. Louis lawyer who married for his wife’s blue-blood genes and bemoans what he sees as the decline of the English language and popular music. His disdain for his black secretary — and black culture in general — is pronounced, and yet he is dumbfounded when his son becomes a violent skinhead. A play about three white Americans who do the most damage with the best of intentions.
"In brutally honest confessions that eat through protective layers like acid from a battery…the piece never strikes a false note…rare plays like this one help lift the veil."
-LA Times
(This production contains adult language and content.)
THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW
Book, Music & Lyrics by Richard O’Brien
January 15 - 30, 2010
Directed by Shana Nunez
On the way to visit an old college professor, the two clean cut kids, Brad Majors and his fiancée Janet Weiss, run into tire trouble and seek help at the site of a light down the road. It's coming from 'the Frankenstein place', where Dr. Frank N Furter, a transvestite from the planet Transsexual in the galaxy of Transylvania, is in the midst of one of his maniacal experiments - he's created the perfect man, a rippling piece of beefcake christened Rocky Horror, and intends to put him to good use (his own) in his kinky household retinue, presided over by a hunchback henchman named Riff Raff and his incestuous sister Magenta, and assisted by a tap dancing groupie-in-residence, Columbia. Agape in this world of science fiction and fantasy, Brad and Janet don't know what next to expect. What ensues is an orgy of exploding libidos and mutinous cross-dressers from space…leaving Brad and Janet in a fog, incapable of readjusting to the normalcy of the life they've left behind in Denton, now that they've tasted the forbidden fruits of the Time Warp.
(This production contains adult content, language, violence and nudity.)
KILLER JOE
By Tracy Letts
February 5 - 20, 2010
Directed by Christopher Johnson
This exciting first play by the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning author of August: Osage County and last season’s Bug premiered at Chicago’s Steppenwolf before going on to acclaimed productions in London and New York. Hired by the dissolute Smith family to murder the matriarch for insurance money, Killer Joe Cooper takes the family’s invalid daughter Dottie to bed as a retainer against his final payoff, which sets off a series of gruesomely bloody events as the hit man meets his match.
"Killer Joe revels in its white trash stereotypes and gives you permission to do the same; it's pulp fiction which has it both ways, deriving humor from dirty realism. It's slick, it's well constructed, it knows exactly where it's going."
-N.Y. Daily News
(This production contains adult content, language, violence and nudity.)
THE LITTLE DOG LAUGHED
By Douglas Carter Beane
March 5 - 20, 2010
Directed by Amanda Gremel
Ruthless Hollywood uber-agent Diane is poised to land her handsome up-and-coming young client Mitchell the movie role of a lifetime, but she may have to push him back in the closet and everyone else in his life off a cliff to do it. This Tony Award-nominated outrageous and steamy comedy is a fast-paced, hilarious look at the world of celebrity and the down-and-dirty politics of show biz.
“Mr. Beane has a linguistic talent that peaked with post-World War I playwrights like Philip Barry and Noël Coward: the gift for making spoiled, shallow people seem interesting, and not because of how they spend their money or whom they sleep with, but because of how they talk.”
-The New York Times
(This production contains adult content, language and nudity.)
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST
By Oscar Wilde
April 9 - 24, 2010
Directed by Christopher Johnson
Oscar Wilde’s infamous masterpiece receives a contemporary treatment and an all-male cast from ETCETERA, the late-night series at Live Theatre Workshop. Without changing a word of the text or employing any drag queens, we instead see a transsexual Lady Bracknell and a straight-acting Jack Worthington with a taste for much, much younger men in one of the most famous and witty pieces of theatre in the history of the English language. As the last play he wrote before his imprisonment and his terribly early surrender to death, we here at ETCETERA like to think that this is the production Oscar Wilde himself would have liked to see today.
“Packed as it is with acid-like wit and a liberal dose of social commentary it has endured for well over a century and seems as relevant today as ever, which is no small feat for a very English comedy of manners.”
-ABC Brisbane
BEAUTIFUL CHILD
By Nicky Silver
May 15 - 29, 2010
ARIZONA PREMIERE
Directed by Christopher Johnson
Beautiful Child presents Harry and Nan, a couple whose marriage has become a comfortable battleground of witty barbs and infidelity. Everything they think they know, however, is called into question when their son, Isaac, an art teacher and painter, comes for lunch and asks if he can stay. The world's no longer safe for Isaac, as his secrets are about to become public—he has fallen in love, and has been having an equally romantic and sexual affair, with one of his students, an eight-year-old boy named Brian. Harry and Nan search for clues, desperate to make sense of this horror, alternately looking for exoneration and punishment for what must be their fault. As the couple struggles with their responsibility to the world and to the children in Isaac's future, the tragedy brings the two of them closer together as they arrive at a decision that is both painful and restorative.
"Beautiful Child is compelling…darkly demented, blazingly articulate and cheerfully outrageous…The return of Nicky Silver's voice is a pleasure!"
-NY Newsday
(This production contains adult content and language.)
*Titles and dates subject to change.
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