In “Songs of Hestia – Five Plays From the 2010 San Francisco Olympians Festival,” five playwrights adapt some of Western culture’s oldest stories to illuminate our present-day concerns with imagination, creativity, curiosity and passion. These are plays that ask the hard questions, that explore our humanity through exploring the myths that make us who we are. Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, is variously an ex-nun who runs a Hollywood hot dog cart (Aphrodite: A Romance in Infomercials, by Nirmala Nataraj); a barista who serves as the play’s moral conscience (Hermes by Bennett Fisher); a sharp-tongued spinster (Juno en Victoria by Stuart Eugene Bousel); a crazed, childlike wraith (Demeter’s Daughter by Claire Rice); and a nurturing but ultimately ineffectual goddess (Hephaestus and the Three Golden Robots by Evelyn Jean Pine). With an introduction by Marissa Skudlarek. The San Francisco Olympians Festival is an annual festival produced by No Nude Men Productions. Each year the festival brings together over 100 Bay Area writers, fine artists, directors and actors to create plays inspired by Greek mythology to show how these Gods and myths remain relevant today. This volume brings together five of the plays from the first Olympians Festival in 2010 by Nirmala Nataraj, Bennett Fisher, Stuart Eugene Bousel, Claire Rice, and Evelyn Jean Pine with an introduction by Marissa Skudlarek.

Songs of Hestia: Five Plays From The 2010 San Francisco Olympians Festival

Literature & Fiction

Nataraj, Nirmala

Pine, Evelyn Jean

Bousel, Stuart Eugene

Fisher, Bennett

Rice, Claire

Dramas & Plays

EXIT PRESS

Literary Nonfiction. Travel. Fiction. Poetry. HAPPILY LOST IN TIME AND PLACE brings together over two dozen stories and poems by Erika Atkinson, inspired by her over fifty years of travel from a one-room country school house in Manitoba to all parts of the globe. "Since she was eighteen, and for all the years she has remained so, Erika has wondered and wandered about the earth, never searching (that, alas, would require a prior purpose), but always finding. Most of all she has found—or has become—the Rosetta Stone of the human condition; the strength, the humor, the guile, and the quirks that connect us all, from joyful Parisian bar hustlers to cold war, warm-hearted Soviet peddlers. Even a love-lorn, Antarctic penguin is only human. They all have a story—we all have a story—and Erika reminds us that a good story must be told, and told well."—Michael Welch

Happily Lost In Time and Place

Atkinson, Erika

History & Criticism

The five Chamber Plays of August Strindberg, written in 1907 and newly translated by Paul Walsh, including "Storm," "Burned House," "The Ghost Sonata,: "The Pelican," and "Black Glove." Strindberg began writing his chamber plays early in 1907 for a group of young actors embarking on a new endeavor: to open a small theater in the center of Stockholm dedicated to the Strindberg plays. The theater would be called Intima Teatern (The Intimate Theater), and it would explore the possibilities of a new kind of drama for the new century. In his Open Letters to the Intimate Theater, Strindberg provides a memorable definition of a chamber play: “The name itself suggests its hidden program,” Strindberg wrote: “The idea of chamber music brought into the drama: an intimate experience, a meaningful motif, a meticulous treatment. … No predetermined form should bind the author, for the motif should command the form. In other words: freedom of treatment, bound only by the unity of the conception and the tone.” Here was a recipe for experiment. It embraced the possibilities of intimate revelations, unbound by conventional notions of dramatic form and structure, to provide the audience with an intimate experience and an experience of intimacy. Included are Storm, Burned House, The Ghost Sonata, The Pelican, and The Black Glove. Paul Walsh (translator) is Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Yale School of Drama. Prior to coming to Yale, Walsh taught theater history, dramaturgy and dramatic literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and at Southern Methodist University (Dallas). He served as senior dramaturg at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) from 1996-2005, and as Artistic Director of the New Harmony Project, a new play development residency program in southern Indiana, from 2006-2012. Walsh’s translations of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (2004), Master Builder (2006), and Hedda Gabler (2007) have been produced at A.C.T., Yale Repertory Theater, Williamstown Festival, People’s Light and Theater, Aurora Theater, and by the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, among others. His translation of August Strindberg’s Creditors has been produced by A.C.T., Actors Theatre of Louisville, and Kitchen Dog Theater after premiering at the Classic Stage Company in New York in 1992. These translations of August Strindberg’s Chamber Plays were produced in repertory by San Francisco’s Cutting Ball Theater in the fall of 2012 as part of the international Strindberg year celebrating the 100th anniversary of the author’s death. Walsh has worked as dramaturg with theater companies across the country, including the Minneapolis-based Theatre de la Jeune Lune, with whom he collaborated on such award-winning project as Children of Paradise: Shooting a Dream, Don Juan Giovanni, Germinal and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that Walsh co-authored with A.C.T. artistic director Carey Perloff has played at A.C.T. since 2005. After completing a master’s degree in English literature at the University of Minnesota in 1978, Walsh received a guest fellowship from the Swedish Institute to study at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. He continued to live in Sweden for several years before enrolling in the doctoral program at the Graduate Center for the Study of Drama at the University of Toronto, where he received a Ph.D. in drama in 1988 with a dissertation on the early works of August Strindberg.

Chamber Plays of August Strindberg

STRINDBERG, AUGUST

TEN PLAYS is the first published collection of plays by playwright, director and performer Mark Jackson. Jackson's highly theatrical plays defy easy categorization, ranging in form and subject matter from grotesque comedies about contemporary pop culture to epic melodramas about ancient themes of love and war. Jackson's work has been seen on both US coasts, in the UK and Germany. This collection of ten of his plays includes American $uicide, BANG!, Brave, The Death of Meyerhold, Faust Pt1, The Forest War, I Am Hamlet, little extremes, Messenger #1 and R&amp;J, with notes by the author and a Foreword by critic Rob Avila.

Ten Plays

Jackson, Mark

Drama. Southeast Asia Studies. SNAKES OF KAMPUCHEA is a symbolic trilogy of plays about Cambodia. In the first play, Snakes of Kampuchea, a forest near a farming village teems with nature spirits, retaining a harmony, until the vicious Khmer Rouge take over, "the crocodile cannot control the waters of the lake," and refugees from the genocide flee to the West. In Tual Kan's Journey a single Cambodian mother in San Francisco's Tenderloin wrestles with flashbacks, her rebellious daughter, and the magical nature of her pre-refugee village life in this symbolic play of grief, goddesses, birds and a magic fish. In Return to Angkor a young Cambodian American woman returns to her ancestral village to search for her long separated sister, and makes a vow about the individual responsibility of shared history and collective memory, capping the trilogy.

Snakes of Kampuchea: three plays about Cambodia

Knego, Mark

New translations of three classic modernist plays: "Woyzeck" by Georg Büchner, "Pelleas and Melisande" by Maurice Maeterlinck, and "Ubu Roi" by Alfred Jarry; with a foreword by Oskar Eustis, an Introduction by Paul Walsh, and an Afterword by Rob Melrose "Rob Melrose is a kind of magician, and his theater, Cutting Ball, is one of the most exciting and integrity-filled enterprises going in the sometimes-shabby field of the American theater. These translations, lucid and sharp, are a beautiful testimony to the value of Rob's achievement." -- from the forward by Oskar Eustis artistic director of the Public Theatre New York City "To bring these three plays together into a single volume is to embrace a heritage of modernist experiment, left us by young men in their 20s living in the 19th century. It is a heritage that redefined risk as it redefined theater and the purposes it serves. And it is this that makes this volume so valuable. We are invited to see these plays that defined the theater of today afresh, in a language that is both immediate and theatrical, and embrace the risk they celebrate as our own. And isn't that what we should expect from a new translation? To experience again as new those very things that helped shape who we are?" -- from the introduction by Paul Walsh Associate Professor (adjunct) of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism Yale School of Drama

Woyzeck, Pelleas and Melisande, Ubu Roi: Three Translations From The Cutting Ball Theater

Büchner, Georg

MAETERLINCK, MAURICE

Jarry, Alfred

Drama. THREE PLAYS is the second collection of plays by Mark Jackson, bringing together three recent works—"God's Plot", "Mary Stuart," and "Salomania"—all based on incredible historic events. "God's Plot" illuminates a little known chapter of American history, a 1665 case in which three American colonists were sued for blasphemy by a fourth for having performed a political play in their local tavern. "Mary Stuart" is an adaptation of Friedrich Schiller's dramatic reimagining of the final showdown between Queen Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots. "Salomania" depicts the sensational 1918 libel case of dancer Maud Allan verses British MP Noel Pemberton-Billing, in which the former sued the latter for having accused her of being a lesbian, sadist, and German sympathizer as evidenced by her having performed in a production of Oscar Wilde's Salome."Playwright/director Mark Jackson has made his name as a first-class theatrical provocateur. Gutsy showmanship, brainy literary instincts, and laser-sharp satire mark his canon."San Jose Mercury News

Three Plays: God's Plot, Mary Stuart, Salomania

A new translation by Rob Melrose of the classic play Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry. Ubu Roi has divided audiences into passionate, dissenting camps since its 1896 premiere in Paris, an event that changed theater forever. With the first word of the play the audience erupted in pandemonium. People stormed the exits as fist fights broke out. Ubu was a scatological mockery that challenged assumptions about good taste and good behavior, a performance that questioned the very nature of theater and divided the audience between those who came expecting the ordinary and those who came hoping for the extraordinary. Now Ubu is seen as the precursor of the theatre of the absurd and playwrights like Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. Rob Melrose’s new translation brings out the Shakespearean echoes of Ubu while using words from classic American comedy to get the Punch and Judy feel.

Ubu Roi (Cutting Ball Translation)

These are the first English language translations published in America of the works of Fabrice Melquiot, one of the most imaginative, prolific, and influential French playwrights working today. We are thrilled to introduce you to this unique voice in world theater with this volume containing works for both adults and youth. “The Devil on All Sides” is a stunning work about the ravages of war in ex-Yugoslavia. Full of love, sadness, and humor, the French Drama Syndicate awarded it “Best French Language Play of the Year” in 2001. “The Unheard of World” and “Albatross” are both plays for “all ages,” fantastical tales of love, loss, and discovery. All are rich with immense theatrical possibilities. Translated from the French by Ben Yalom and Michelle Haner.

The Devil on All Sides and Other Plays

MELQUIOT, Fabrice

Drama. Over a dozen comic plays and sketches by Elisa DeCarlo including "Cervix With a Smile," "Toasted," "I Love Drugs," Size Matters," and "Diary of a Mad Fashionista." Elisa has a unique comic voice developed over 20 years on the stages of alternative off-off-Broadway stages of downtown Manhattan and San Francisco's Tenderloin. A contemporary of Jim Gaffigan, Spaulding Gray and Eric Bogosian, her ferocious black comedy and stark drama have been informed by struggles with alcoholism, mental illness and industry sexism. This collection is a must-read for playwrights, actors searching for monologues, and readers who want to have a good laugh. "While many performers purport to take us to 'the edge,' when DeCarlo gets there, she actually has something interesting to say about it."—Off-Off Broadway Review

Cervix With a Smile: Comic Plays and Sketches by Elisa DeCarlo

DeCarlo, Elisa

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