Upcoming—

For local friends: Saturday, Feb. 13, is our single public performance of King Lear on our home turf. Lear plays at the Arlene Francis Center in Santa Rosa, 7:30 pm. If you’re hereabouts, tickets are only $15 ($20 at the door if there’s room). Seating very limited, so make your reservations right away.

    Lear will continue in touring rep, with showings at Dell’Arte International (Blue Lake, CA) on April 8-9 and at the FuryFactory Festival, San Francisco, in June. Current plans are for a Pacific Northwest tour starting early November; a Southwest tour in January, and another trip to the Midwest and East Coast in the spring of 2016.

We’ll also be offering house-concert reading/performances from our new edition of Rash Acts, a medley of 35 sketches from our ensemble repertoires over the past 46 years. We’d also like to offer our house-concert piece Gifts, but only if we can find an appropriate overhead rack for the Prius — Lear packs it to the brim.

Rumi—

On Feb. 6th, we’re two of a dozen or so friends participating in Rumi’s Caravan. It’s a presentation of inspiring poetry and music that’s a long Sonoma County tradition. There’s an afternoon and an evening showing — we’re in the evening — as a benefit for the Center for Climate Protection.

It’s inspired by the ecstatic Sufi poetry of Rumi and Hafiz, though it spreads out pretty wide. Our pieces include Whitman, Billy Collins, Edgar Lee Masters, and Denise Levertov. All stem from the richness, intensity and mystery of life, and we’re enormously honored to be invited as part of this event.

Our Books—

Our new edition of Rash Acts had a sumptuous launch at Occidental Center for the Arts on Jan. 15th. We read some pieces, performed others off-book, and revisited some pieces we’ve had in our touring repertory for twenty to forty years — stuff we could do in our sleep and yet manages to be fresh each time we do it. From our two decades’ experience with the first edition, we know it’ll have a slow, steady sale with theatre people; the trick will be to convince general readers that they can enjoy reading a short dramatic sketch as much as a short story. Give it a try.

And our first novel Realists is now between covers. It’s a huge challenge to market self-published novels unless it fits a popular genre, and we’ve made a career of avoiding pigeonholes. It’s futuristic, it’s satirical, it’s political, it’s dystopian optimism, and it’s about real and quirky characters dealing with the very familiar speed-bumps of life — maybe somewhat akin to Vonnegut, Tom Robbins, or Russel Hoban in charting its own weird course. We hope to find some bizarre way to get it out there — perhaps strapped onto the backs of stray cats — but in the meantime it’s available, along with Rash Acts and other stuff, through our website.