PRESS RELEASE: Susan-Jane Harrison’s World Premiere HUNTING LOVE at The Flight Deck July 29-August 21, 2016
Local Dystopia presents the World Premiere of Hunting Love
by Susan-Jane Harrison
July 29-August 21, 2016 at The Flight Deck
…in which kitchen sink meets the extraordinary…
June 17, 2016— A suicidal Aphrodite encounters a life-loving Narcissus eager to escape his stony fate. A nymph regrets her greatest wish. A young girl tries to escape her incomparable mother. In Hunting Love, myth transforms across a generation as four souls strive for intimacy in a landscape defaced by wars, literal and metaphorical. How do we learn to love ourselves? Can we adapt our superpowers to fit within a family? And once a Goddess has your heart, will you ever get it back?
Written by Susan-Jane Harrison and directed by Erin Merritt, Hunting Love is an interdisciplinary play that melds bold movement and live music with a time-traveling tale that speaks to our fears about love, death, and what it means to live. Musicians Bruce Christian Bennett, Jed Parsario and Mia Pixley join Harrison, Danielle Gray, and Nican Robinson onstage in seamless choreography by Liz Tenuto to a score composed by Rona Siddiqui. Hunting Love is an Equity-approved project.
Featuring: Bruce Christian Bennett, Danielle Gray, Susan-Jane Harrison*, Jed Parsario, Mia Pixley, Nican Robinson *member, Actor’s Equity Association
Hunting Love runs July 29-August 21, Fridays and Saturdays, 8 pm, Sundays at 5 pm. Tickets are $15 Opening Weekend, and $35 for the rest of the run, with $20 tickets for students and seniors. Tickets are available at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2559842. Box office: (415)570-8605
Playwright/performer Susan-Jane Harrison trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and got her Masters of Fine Arts from the University of California at Davis. Unusual collaborations in Harrison’s artistic work and a wide range of teaching experiences have allowed her to develop across disciplines. As performer and playwright, Harrison continues to be produced in both the UK and USA. Most notably she has worked with BBC Radio and A&BC Theatre Co. in the UK. In the US, Harrison has worked with Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Aurora Theatre Company, Woman’s Will, ACT, California Shakespeare Company and A Traveling Jewish Theater. She was last seen performing in her solo show Possession on Theatre Row in NYC at United Solo Festival.
She has co-directed, danced and choreographed with Bollywood Groove (Chicago), and been a member of the Contemporary Dance Troupe Akat. On staff at Berkeley Repertory School of Theatre, Harrison draws on her years of training at RADA and beyond in methods developed by Cicely Berry, Patsy Rodenberg, Kristen Linklater and Rudolf Laban
Director Erin Merritt is an award-winning director, dramaturg, and producer best known locally as the founder of the all-female Shakespeare company, Woman’s Will. In 12 seasons there, Ms. Merritt directed 13 productions, including two “Top Ten Shows of the Year”—Brecht/Weill’s Happy End and Shakespeare’s Pericles, which featured a deaf narrator and a new ASL translation of the play—and played such roles as Rosalind (As You Like It), Algernon (Importance of Being Earnest) and the title role in Coriolanus. She also garnered rave reviews for her translations and adaptations, including Brecht’s Good Person of Szechuan; the expressionist hamlet: the melancholy dame; and a 5-person Macbeth (Loading Zone, Santa Rosa, and Woman’s Will).
After leaving Woman’s Will in 2009, Merritt traveled around the country having adventures that included producing a film for and about chimps for Primate Cinema in LA; directing the world premiere United, about United Flight 93 in Tucson; and directing veterans in their own stories of war with The Telling Project and undergrads in her own translation of Brecht’s Drums in the Night, both in Kansas City. Recently back in the Bay Area, she produced the 2013 and 2014 Bay Area Playwrights Festivals, and directed the world premiere of FSM; the West Coast premiere of Aditi Brennan Kapil’s Brahman/i: A One-Hijra Stand-Up Comedy Show (Crowded Fire); The Clean House (CCCT); and both Click Clack Moo and Cat in the Hat (Bay Area Children’s Theatre). By day, she is the Director of Artistic Engagement at Marin Shakespeare Company.
About Local Dystopia: Based in the San Francisco Bay Area with partnerships in the UK, Local Dystopia produces inter-disciplinary, international, and diverse new work alongside cutting edge interpretations of classics to spark communication across cultures, and invigorate the imaginations of humans, wherever they may be. We believe that people – theatre audiences – are hungry for more visceral, heartfelt experiences. We long to be surprised!
On our small Earth, the global is local. Take your seat at the table.
