For Immediate Release:           

Contact:            

Shirley Howard-Johnson, General Manager

415-345-3985/shirley@lhtsf.org

Lorraine Hansberry Theatre presents

Lynn Nottage's

 

featuring Margo Hall & directed by Ellen Sebastian Chang

San Francisco, CA, January 13, 2011 - Lorraine Hansberry Theatre's 30th season will culminate in March with the Obie Award-winning Fabulation; or The Re-Education of Undine, by Lynn Nottage, who recently won the Pulitzer Prize for her latest play, Ruined.

Undine Barnes Calles is a successful African American Public Relations maven at the top of her game. Her Gucci glasses and Louis Vuitton bag are all real enough, but Undine's life is a fabrication. It all unravels when her Argentine husband embezzles all of her money and suddenly disappears, leaving her pregnant and penniless. Undine has no choice but to return to her childhood home in Brooklyn's Walt Whitman projects, where her journey of self-discovery truly begins. Undine's working class to riches-and back-to-rags journey is a thought-provoking morality tale with a comic twist.

The role of Undine will be played by Bay Area favorite, Margo Hall, whose last work for Lorraine Hasberry Theatre was as director of the co-production, with The SF Playhouse, of The Story. The colorful characters who populate Undine's world, from the luxury suites of Manhattan to the squalor of the projects, will be filled by LHT veterans, Michael Asberry, Halili Knox, Carla Punch, and David Skillman; as well as LHT newcomers, Daveed Diggs, Britney Frasier and Rudy Guerrero.

Helming the production will be the notable Bay Area writer and director Ellen Sebastian Chang, whose list of directing credits includes Bulrusher, Stateless; a hip-hop vaudeville, and Luxury Items. Choreography will be by Pampa Cortes, of Tango & More Argentine Dance.

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Tickets for Fabulation; or The Re-Education of Undine are $40 Thursdays & Fridays and $50 Saturdays & Sundays. Thursday performances are at 8:30pm, Friday and Saturday performances are at 8pm; Sunday performances are at 2pm and 7pm. Discounts are available for groups, students and seniors. Preview performances will be held on March 3 & 4 with the opening on Saturday, March 5, 2011. Sundays, March 6, 13 and 20 will be Target Family Matinées, where all seats will be half-price ($25). Fabulation will be presented at The Southside Theater, Fort Mason Center, Historic Building D, San Francisco, CA 94123. For more information, ticket availability, or to subscribe, call 415 345-3980, or visit us on the Web at www.lhtsf.org.

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Biographies of the Key Artists for Fabulation

Ellen Sebastian Chang (Director) is a director, writer and a creative consultant. Ms. Sebastian Chang was a cofounder and artistic director of Life On The Water, an internationally known presenting and producing organization at San Francisco's Fort Mason Center from 1986-1995. She has been fortunate to work with some of the most interesting artists and projects in the Bay Area and beyond. In 2009, she directed Stateless: a hip-hop vaudeville, created and performed by Dan Wolf and Tommy Shepherd; and Luxury Items, created and performed by dancer-choreographer Monica Jenkinson.

In 2008 she co-directed (with Margo Hall) the West Coast Premiere of Elsa Davis's Bulrusher; directed the East Coast tour of Kali Yuga: The Age of Chaos, her 2006 collaboration with Gamelan Sekar Jaya, Indonesian poet Goenewan Mohammed and spoken word/B-boy dancer Rashidi Omari Byrd; directed the 2006 premiere of Walkin Talkin Bill Hawkins, about the first black DJ in Cleveland, written and performed by William Allen Taylor at the Dobama Theater in Cleveland, Ohio.

Ms. Sebastian Chang began her career as the technical director and lighting designer for The Blake Street Hawkeyes from 1979-1983. Her directorial work is highly influenced by her love of, and affinity with the movement, color and temperature of light and shadow.

Her directorial and writing debut came in 1982 with Your Place Is No Longer With Us, the coming of age story of a ten-year-old biracial girl, staged in a Victorian mansion; a meal of black-eyed peas, mustard greens and corn bread cooked during the performance and was served to the audience at the end of the play. Your Place Is No Longer With Us won a Bay Area Critics Circle Award for New Directions in Theatre. This work was the beginning of Ms. Sebastian Chang's ongoing interest in children. Her work also explores dialogues in regard to race, in particular mix race issues and strong female identified images.

In 1988, she wrote and directed The Sanctified Church, based on the life and work of Zora Neale Hurston, at Life On The Water. It was later rewritten as a smaller touring production called Sanctified, with productions in L.A., Washington D.C., Miami and Texas. Ms. Sebastian Chang has had successful working collaborations with such solo performers as Awele Makeba (Rage is not a One Day Thing), Anne Galjour (Okra), Whoopi Goldberg (Moms), Holly Hughes (No Trace of the Blonde), Leonard Pitt (Ned), and Bill Talen (The Shape).

Other highlights of Ms. Sebastian Chang's carreer include self/the remix at Jumpstart, Texas in 2006; in 2005 she co-created and directed Dante's Divine Comedy with youth poets for the Youth Speaks Living Word; in 2004 she premiered Thieves in the Temple: The Reclaiming of Hip Hop and Aya deLeon is Running for President, written and performed by spoken word artist Aya deLeon, and the West Coast premiere of Philip Glass's Ahknahten for Oakland Opera Theater.

She has also worked with Shadowlight Productions, Asian American Theatre Company, Culture Clash, Magic Theatre, Brava! for Women in the Arts, Word for Word, and Lorraine Hansberry Theatre.

Margo Hall (Undine) is an award winning actor, director, and playwright. She recently starred in Aurora Theatre's Trouble in Mind. She also recently directed a co-production of The Story by Tracey Scott Wilson for The SF Playhouse and Lorraine Hansberry Theatre; as well as Sonny's Blues, by James Baldwin for San Francisco-based company, Word for Word, which premiered at Lorraine Hansberry Theatre before touring France. She co-directed Bulrusher with Ellen Sebastian Chang, a new play by Eisa Davis, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Margo recently received rave reviews in Jessica Hagedorn's Fe' in the Desert as the title character Fe'. She has performed for Arena Stage, Olney Theater, and Source Theater, in Washington, D.C., the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and locally at American Conservatory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Magic Theatre, Brava! For Women in the Arts, and Word for Word. She is a founding member of Campo Santo, a resident theater company at Intersection for the Arts, which celebrated 14 years in 2010.

She debuted as a Director with The World Premiere of Joyride (a co-production between Word For Word and Campo Santo) from the novel Grand Avenue by Greg Sarris, which was the Bay Area Critics Circle Winner for Best Original Script; the SF Weekly Black Box Awards for Best Production, Best Ensemble, Best Director; Drama-Logue Awards-Northern California for Best Production, Best Ensemble; the Backstage West-Garland Awards- Northern California for Best Production, Best Ensemble, and the Bay Guardian GOLDIE Award Winner for Stage, and directed Mission Indians, a new play by Sarris, with Nancy Benjamin. She co-directed Erin Cressida Wilson's award winning


The Trail of Her Inner Thigh with Rhodessa Jones. She also directed Hotel Angulo, by Luis Saguar, Sam Shepard's Simpatico for Campo Santo. She directed Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth for Word for Word, the triumphant Funnyhouse of a Negro for Intersections Directions and SPUNK, The Trojan Women, It Falls and Ragtime for Chabot College. Margo completed her first writing project in April 2005 with the World Premier of The People's Temple at Berkeley Repertory Theater, which won the Glickman award for best new play in the Bay Area for 2005. She was a part of a collaborative team of four writers who used interviews of survivors, and archival material to form a play exploring the People's Temple movement and the tragic ending at Jonestown. The play went on from Berkeley Rep. to The Perseverance Theater in Juneau, Alaska and the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Margo is also part of the acting ensemble.

Margo received her MFA from Catholic University in Washington DC, and in her spare time enjoys teaching theatre at Chabot College and the Alternative Theater Institute at Intersection for the Arts.

Pampa Cortés (Choreographer) hails from Santiago del Estero, Argentina. He is famous for his performance career (Forever Tango, Tango Revue, Fantasia Argentina, Destino de Tango). He is artist in residence for Tango & More - Argentine Dance in San Francisco, California. He was recently invited to perform and teach in Guatemala City for the prestigious ArteCentro Cultural Gaciela Andrade de Paiz. ArteCentro hosted a grand evening of tango, which headlined Cortés performing tango and folkloric dancing and teaching an introductory class to more than 120 attendees.

He shares his experience as a performer, choreographer, director and teacher with audiences and students in the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, Central & South America. His clean footwork and elegant masculinity have inspired thousands of people, encouraging them to achieve greater skill in their own tango.

Lynn Nottage (Playwright) often deals with the lives of African Americans and women in her work. She is a graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Drama. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2007. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2009 for Ruined.

Born in Brooklyn in 1964 to a schoolteacher and a child psychologist, Nottage attended New York's High School of Music and Art. Inspired by school productions of Annie and The Wiz, she penned her first play, The Darker Side of Verona, which told the story of an African American Shakespearean company. After attending Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, Nottage worked in Amnesty International's press office for four years.

Her best-known play is Intimate Apparel, co-commissioned and produced at Baltimore's Center Stage (where it premiered in February 2003) and South Coast Repertory. It was highly acclaimed in its Off-Broadway production in 2004, starring Viola Davis. The companion piece to Intimate Apparel, is the OBIE award-winning Fabulation; or the Re-Education of Undine, which is set 100 years later. The West Coast premiere of her Crumbs from the Table of Joy, at South Coast Repertory, earned two NAACP Theatre Awards for performance.

Nottage's play, Ruined, dramatizes the plight of Congolese women surviving civil war. It was first was performed in 2007 in the Goodman Theater New Stages Series in Chicago, and transferred to New York at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Ruined was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in April 2009. Her other plays include the children's musical, A Walk Through Time; Mud, River, Stone (Blackburn Prize finalist); Por'knockers; Poof! (Heideman Award); and Las Meninas.

Nottage's plays have been produced Off-Broadway and regionally by TheatreWorks, Lorraine Hansberry Theatre,The Acting Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Alliance Theatre Company, Capital Repertory Theatre, Crossroads Theatre, Freedom Repertory Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theatre Club, San Jose Repertory Theatre, Second Stage Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Studio Arena Theatre, Vineyard Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, The Goodman Theater, The Guthrie, and many others.

She has been awarded playwriting fellowships from Manhattan Theatre Club, New Dramatists, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is also the recipient of a Playwrights Horizons Amblin/Dreamworks commission and a National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group grant for a year-long residency at Freedom Repertory Theater in Philadelphia. Nottage is an alumnus of New Dramatists.

Nottage's latest play, Meet Vera Stark, will have its world premiere at Second Stage Theatre, an Off-Broadway company, during the 2010-11 season.

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ATTENTION CALENDAR EDITORS

Lorraine Hansberry Theatre presents Lynn Nottage's Obie Award-winning play, Fabulation; or The Re-Education of Undine,  featuring Margo Hall and directed by Ellen Sebastian Chang.

WHEN                                                                                                                              WHERE

PREVIEWS                                                                                                            Southside Theater

Thursday, March 3; 8:30pm                                                                                          Fort Mason Center

Friday, March 4; 8pm                                                                                          Historic Building D

San Francisco, CA, 94123

OPENING

SATURDAY, March 5, 8pm                                                                                          PRODUCTION RUN

                                                                                                                              March 3-27, 2011

TIME

8:30pm Thursday                                                                                                            TICKETS

8pm Friday-Saturday                                                                                          Thursday-Friday $40

2pm Sunday Matinées                                                                                          Saturday-Sunday $50

7pm Sunday Evenings                                                                                          Target® Family Matinees all seats $25

Target® Family Matinées - All seats 1/2-price ($25):                                    Discounts are available for students & seniors, and

Sunday, March 6, 2pm                                                                                                            groups of 10 or more.

Sunday, March 13, 2pm                 

Sunday, March 20, 2pm                 

To purchase by phone or in person, call or visit the Fort Mason Center box office, on Fort Mason Center's Pier 2, next to the Herbst Pavilion, San Francisco, at 415 345-7575, Tue-Thu-Fri, 10am-1pm & 2pm-4pm. Online tickets are available through www.lhtsf.org. For more information, group ticket sales, or to subscribe, call 415 474-8800, or on the web at www.lhtsf.org.

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