Traveling Jewish Theatre and Playwrights Foundation present

VOICES UNDERWATER by Abi Basch

We invite you to join Playwrights Foundation and Traveling Jewish Theater in the development of a profound (if not prophetic), emotionally charged new play, Voices Underwater by Abi Basch (two-time winner of a Jerome Fellowship at The Playwrights Center in Minneapolis and Fulbright Scholar) at the end of October. The play will be performed in five workshops at Traveling Jewish Theater (October 27-30) and at Ashby Stage in Berkeley on Halloween evening (October 31). At its core, the play is a very erudite and spooky ghost story, a wonderful addition to Halloween festivities. Below please read about this extraordinary new work.

Emma and Franklin have inherited a deserted house in Alabama, but don’t know why. Heading South to explore its origins, the couple’s quick, romantic weekend is shattered by a violent storm. As floodwaters rise, and the house’s past inhabitants swell from its walls, each must face a long buried history. Using heightened poetic language and rigorous physicality, the play uncovers a family mystery which unleashes events of an unspoken legacy shared by both Black and Jewish Americans in the post Civil-War South.

DATE/TIME/TICKETS

October 27-31, 2005

Traveling Jewish Theatre, 470 Florida St. San Francisco: Oct. 27-30 Thu-Sat 8pm; Sun 2pm
Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. Berkeley: HALLOWEEN NIGHT, Monday, Oct 31, 8 pm

Tickets $12 - $15 sliding scale - buy tickets online now

(Discounts for students, seniors and groups of 5 or more. Thursday nights are pay-what-you-can.)

To purchase tickets online: www.atjt.com; or call 415/255.0786. Seating is extremely limited with only five performances. Be sure to get tickets in advance!!

Voices Underwater, first discovered during the 2004 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, is an experimental theatre piece by an award-winning emerging playwright, Abi Basch and directed by PF Artistic Director, Amy Mueller.

Featuring L. Peter Callender*, Rebecca White, Molly Shaiken and Ellen Scarpaci the workshop culminates two-weeks of exploration into the script’s most challenging theatrical elements. A very talented group of designers (Melpomene Katakalos, David Molina, Sofia Fong and visual artist Lori Del Mar) have been invited to work with us to experiment with the physical/visual/aural elements of this play and showcase it to audiences and theatres with an interest in daring new work. Each performance will be followed by audience discussion with the playwright and director.

Voices Underwater was chosen for a co-production opportunity for our 2005 Producing Partnership Initiative project, a new program of PF, launched one year ago to procure productions for at least one of the exceptional plays we discover each year during the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Through this project we have already fostered two premiere productions in the Bay Area: Dog Act with Shotgun Players (winner of the prestigious Glickman Award) and One Big Lie with Crowded Fire, both by Liz Duffy Adams. Voices Underwater is the third project in this initiative, with Traveling Jewish Theater as our producing partner for the workshop production. We invite artistic directors and literary staff of new play theaters to join us in considering this play for a Bay Area premiere.

We gratefully acknowledge support from Emory Theatre (Atlanta) Sister City Project, Vincent Murphy, Artistic Director, Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco Foundation and Bernard Osher Foundation for this project, as well as our producing partner, Traveling Jewish Theater.

Abi Basch is a playwright and director whose plays and performance installations have been presented at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Brave New Works in Atlanta, Fusebox, PulseWorks, and Out of Ink in Austin, Best Feet Forward in Minneapolis, hotINK! in
New York City, and Transeuropa in Hildesheim, Germany. She's received three Austin Critics Table award nominations, been a finalist for the Weissberger Award at Williamstown and for PlayLabs at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, and received Best of Fest in Fronterafest. She has developed work collaboratively with Live Action Set and the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, and Refraction Arts Project and Physical Plant Theater in Austin. Abi is a Core member of Austin Script Works, has received two Jerome Fellowships from the Playwrights' Center, and a Fulbright Fellowship for research on collaborative physical-theater methods in Germany. She holds an AB in History from Brown University and an MFA in Playwriting from The University of Texas at Austin.

*member of Actors’ Equity
photo: Rebecca White in the 2004 BAPF staged reading of Voices Underwater