Acting in ShortLived Finals, August 3-5

Andrew Chung as Borkul the Orc and me as Elanil the Elf. Photo courtesy PianoFight.

Hey, remember how in mid-June, I was performing in the first weekend of PianoFight's audience-judged short play competition, ShortLived?

Well, the play I'm in—"All the Worlds are Stages" by Ruben Grijalva—won that round handily, so we're competing again in the finals this weekend! The whole team from June is coming back with dreams of glory: director Alejandro Emmanuel Torres and actors Andrew Chung, Tony Cirimele, and Danielle Doyle.

The championship-round performances, which feature the winning plays from all six weekends plus two "wild cards," are selling out fast. If they haven't all gone, you can get tickets here. Shows are Thursday through Saturday at 7 PM, with an additional Friday show at 9:30.

ShortLived has been getting some nice press, too—some of which uses the above production photo of me and Andrew:

• "ShortLived playwriting contest off to great start," by Leslie Katz for the San Francisco Examiner
• "At Bay Area's PianoFight, Anything Goes and Everyone Plays," by Sam Hurwitt for American Theatre (this means that I have now had my photo in American Theatre twice, once in a bedsheet toga and once in elf ears)

Acting in ShortLived round 1 at PianoFight, June 15-17

Last year, I participated in PianoFight's audience-judged theater competition ShortLived as a playwright... this year, for a change, I am acting in a ShortLived play!

For three performances, tonight through Saturday, I am playing a video-game elf in "All the Worlds are Stages" by Ruben Grijalva, directed by Alejandro Emmanuel Torres. The other actors in the show are Andrew Chung, Tony Cirimele, and Danielle Doyle. It is a very fun, fast-paced script with some nice twists to it, and for the first time ever, I have to do a bit of stage combat! (Credit to Kyle McReddie for teaching me and Andrew the fight choreography.)

Tickets for this weekend's edition of ShortLived are available here. (Note: show starts at 7 PM, so don't be late!) You'll see 6 new short plays and be asked to rank them. The top-ranked play from this week's batch will move on to compete in the grand-prize round in early August, with a shot at a $5000 prize.

Now if you'll excuse me, it's my lunch hour and I need to run out and get a green eyeliner pencil for my elf costume tonight.

"I must help the dolphins, and their tender hearts"

My performance as an intense French marine biologist talking about dolphin sex in a staged reading last November has been preserved for posterity:



Watch it, if not for my French accent and confessions to carnal acts with a cetacean, then for Nora Doane's spot-on and hilarious Miley Cyrus impression.

Credits:
Christian Teen Dolphin-Sex Beach Party by Anthony R. Miller
Staged reading on November 18, 2015 as part of the San Francisco Olympians Festival, directed by Colin Johnson
Actors: Jeremy Cole (Pastor Jeremiah Hannah), Nora Doane (Miley Cyrus), Jacque Frankle (Mabel Johnson), Colin Hussey (Doctor/Reporter), Eden Neuendorf (Tish/Stage Directions), Nickolas Rice (Ronnie Santini), Marissa Skudlarek (Professor Renelle Fouché), Kitty Torres (Judy Johnson)
Videography by Paul Anderson

Writing, Acting, and Directing in the 2015 Olympians Festival

2015 is my fifth year participating in the San Francisco Olympians Festival as a writer, but it is the first year I will be acting and directing for the festival as well!

We're advertising it with this Lisa Frank poster
because it's just too perfect.

On Wednesday, November 18, I am acting in the staged reading of Delphin: Christian Teen Dolphin-Sex Beach Party by Anthony Miller (directed by Colin Johnson). If you've ever wanted to hear me talk in a ridiculously thick French accent about having sex with a dolphin, THIS MAY BE YOUR ONLY CHANCE. The show is goofy as hell yet surprisingly sweet, and everyone in it is hilarious. And, I mean, I've always half-jokingly said that my goal in life is to be an intense French woman -- and now, thanks to the magic of theater, I get to do that for forty-five minutes. It's just that the thing I'm really intense about is dolphin-fucking.

"Tethys" poster specially drawn for the
Olympians Festival by Brett Grunig. I love
how dark and grim and rainy it is. I can
almost feel the cold seawater on my skin.

Then on Friday, November 20, I am directing a staged reading of my own Tethys, or You'll Not Feel the Drowning. It's a one-act play that draws upon my love for my home state of Oregon, its tenacious pioneer spirit and its beautifully bleak winter weather; as well as the terror that all Oregonians felt when they read that New Yorker article this summer about the possibility of a great Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. I've got a great cast -- Janice Wright as the formidable mayor of a small coastal town, Alan Coyne as a seismologist with bad news, and Kendra Webb as the schoolteacher who is caught between them -- and while my direction is pretty minimalist, I'm still learning a lot from the experience of directing my own work.

Both Delphin and Tethys are one-act plays, so they'll be paired with another one-act show in order to make a full evening of theater. I should also note that neither of these plays requires any prior knowledge of Greek mythology to enjoy! They explore some of the themes associated with the dolphin god Delphin and the deep sea goddess Tethys, but they don't actually re-tell a specific myth.

The Olympians Festival staged readings are at 8 PM at the EXIT Theatre (156 Eddy St, San Francisco). Tickets $12 online or $10 at the door.

August on the Theater Pub blog

Another month, another two columns.

In "A Monologue of One's Own," I wrote about the whirlwind experience of preparing to play Virginia Woolf in a monologue by playwright Jeremy Cole, part of an evening of pro-choice theater honoring NARAL. I was a replacement for an actress who'd had to drop out a week before the show, so there I was, still not really accustomed to thinking of myself as an actor, opening the show with an 8-minute monologue, portraying a real-life famous person with an accent not my own.

My performance was captured on video (credit: Paul Anderson) -- how do you think I did?


Then, this week, I wrote a something called "An Introvert's Guide to Theater" -- maybe the title is a little far-reaching for what it is, which is a piece about how I'm not anti-social, but I do get run-down after too much socialization. Which can be a disadvantage when you're a theater artist. There are probably more introverted theater people out there than anyone realizes, though, and it's a topic I'd like to explore more in future.

And (if you're reading this in time) come see the Pint-Sized Plays at Theater Pub! I didn't write or direct any of the shows this year, but I produced the whole evening: read all the submissions, selected the plays and directors, sent innumerable emails and put out a fair few fires. The result is a lot of fun and it's been drawing packed houses. We have 2 more performances, August 24 and 25.