Four Shows

Here are those details I have been promising you about the season:

ANNOUNCING SEASON 7!

Rorschach Theatre announces its hotly anticipated SEASON 7, opening on Halloween with a terrifying contemporary adaptation of Frankenstein, an area premiere of Roberto Aguirre Sacasa’s genre-bending meld of Shakespeare’s TEMPEST, comic-book fantasy and contemporary New-York, an area premiere of a Jose Rivera magical realist masterpiece and a world premiere urban fantasy adaptation of a Grimm fairy tale developed by Rorschach Theatre’s Magic in Rough Spaces.


Building on their recent successes Rorschach Theatre has chosen four plays that are uniquely suited to the company’s style and vision, with epic plays whose themes connect past and present, explore the form and purpose of myth and storytelling and focus on dynamic ensemble performances.

Rorschach Theatre is a fierce young company known for their inventive use of space, performances of feverish intensity and a passion for epic stories told in new ways.

MONSTER
BY NEAL BELL
From Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN
Directed by Randy Baker
Opens Halloween 2006

MONSTER has been hailed as one of the most inventive and frightening adaptations of Frankenstein ever to be put on stage. Drawing parallels between our modern science and morals and those of Shelley's characters, playwright Neal Bell has created a unique and chilling telling of this Gothic Classic. Take away the Hollywood lens, and the story of Victor Frankenstein and his creation becomes a lean, terrifying tale of morality and immortality.

ROUGH MAGIC

BY ROBERTO AGUIRRE-SACASA
Directed by Jenny McConnell Frederick
February 2007
(Washington Premiere)

Caliban has escaped from Prospero's island after being imprisoned for 500 years. On the run from his sadistic and powerful master, he finds himself in modern-day New York where he joins forces with a dramaturg with magical powers and a love-struck lifeguard who might be the child warrior fated to save the world. Taking his cues from many of today’s most popular comic and graphic novel writers like Neil Gaiman (SANDMAN), Bill Willingham (FABLE) and Warren Ellis (PLANETARY), Aguirre-Sacasa, a writer for Marvel Comics and one of America's hottest young playwrights, melds a very real New York with Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST, creating a modern tale of thrills, chills and drag queen furies.

REFERENCES TO SALVADOR DALI MAKE ME HOT
BY JOSE RIVERA
April/May 2007
(Washington Premiere)

Strange things happen in a moonlit backyard on the edge of the California Desert. The cat talks with a dangerously seductive coyote and the moon plays his violin for a lonely woman awaiting her husband's return from war. When he arrives, broken and distant, the reality of their relationship seems as strange as the apparitions in the desert night. Jose Rivera, a contemporary master of magical realism and the painful and gritty realities of human relationships, has created a suddenly relevant play that explores the scars of war both on those who fight it and those who get left behind.

birds.

BY JENNIFER MAISEL
Directed by Wendy McClellan
July 2007
(World Premiere)

A woman caught between the world of her past and the present she has made for herself falls into the city’s urban underbelly when she gives a homeless man her lover’s coat. A series of unbelievable events are set in motion that are at once are at once magical and at the same time grounded in the realities of modern-day New York. Jennifer Maisel’s adaptation of a Grimm fairytale is a dark circus of lost lives and magic charms where the lives of the homeless man, the prostitute and the stockbroker are inextricably intertwined.

BIRDS was developed by Rorschach Theatre’s MAGIC IN ROUGH SPACES new-play program.