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Our 10th Anniversary Projects
STRANGE AMERICA
A 10th anniversary celebration of the best short plays
commissioned and produced by ACME Theatricks.
At Seattle's Brown Bag Theatre, 1401 Second Avenue, in the Newmark Center
(Second Avenue between Pike and Union), on the following dates:
Friday, August 30th
Saturday, August 31th
Friday, September 6th
Saturday, September 7th
Friday, September 13th
Saturday, September 14th
Performances are at 8:00 pm. Tickets are $7.00/$6.00
students & seniors.
For reservations, call 781-6764.
Incorporated in 1986, ACME Theatricks has been
producing new work in Seattle for 10 years. An original participant in
the "Best of the Rest" theater fests (precursor to the Seattle
Fringe Theater Festival), works commissioned by ACME have gone on to productions
around the country and the world, including theaters in California, Rhode
Island, and London. ACME was the sponsoring non-profit theater for a Sundance
Playwrights Laboratory workshop production of Stuart Ostfeld's The Well
of Happiness in 1995, and has provided production expertise for drama programs
involving elementary school children and incarcerated youth. Five of the
plays in STRANGE AMERICA were originally commissioned or produced by ACME
as part of Seattle Fringe Theater Festival collaborations in 1992, 1993,
and 1994.
A comic look at some peculiarly American anxieties, STRANGE AMERICA is
composed of six short plays:
Mother Love in the Twenty-First Century by Nora
Douglass
The Nature of Things by David Golden
The Third Eye and The Oddfellows Moon Conspiracy by Stuart Ostfeld
Walter Visits and The World Well Lost by Samuel Blair
A snappy mom ushers her children into the new age, just ahead of a swarm of killer bees. A dog disappears into another dimension. Teasing schoolchildren uncover the suspected yet unbelievable truth about the local outcast. The mysterious lady in red awaits a payoff, but is double-crossed instead. A brother and sister solve fantastic mysteries in spite of some sibling rivalry and one-upmanship. And an alien invasion is thwarted by the gift of a simple flower.
The Seattle Fringe Theater Festival productions which originally featured the plays in STRANGE AMERICA are as follows:
The Northwest Humanoid Monster Project, 1994 originally featured Mother Love in the Twenty-first Century by Nora Douglass What whets our appetite for monster stories? Are monsters an expression of our own predatory nature? ACME weaves together 6 playwrights' personal examinations of our need for sometimes hairy, always scary creatures, creating a world where monsters often turn the tables and the line between humanity and monstrosity is blurred.
A Thin, Greenish Vapor, 1993 originally featured The Nature of Things by David Golden and The Third Eye by Stuart Ostfeld A series of short plays inspired by the life and work of Charles Fort (1874-1932). ACME commissioned 5 playwrights to write about the man who devoted his life to attacking one of the modern age's most sacred cows - SCIENCE. He collected and published reliable accounts of events that science cannot explain: falls of fish and frogs, red snows, and disappearing planets. Rather than inhabiting a mechanistic, logical universe, he proposed that our world is prankish and unpredictable. "A library myth that irritates me the most is the classification of books under 'fiction' and 'non-fiction.'" -from Wild Tales by Charles Fort
Strange Loops, 1992 originally featured Walter Visits by Samuel Blair and The Oddfellows Moon Conspiracy by Stuart Ostfeld Six short plays based on the logic traps of conspiracy theories and the Semantic Naivety Quotient quiz by Robert Anton Wilson, co-author of the Illuminatus! trilogy and author of the play Wilhelm Reich in Hell. True or false? All propositions are either true or false. The electron is a wave. The electron is a particle. Francis Bacon wrote Hamlet. A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim. The Federal Reserve Bank is controlled by the Bavarian Illuminati. -from "Beyond True & False" by Robert Anton Wilson What do we hold as orthodox and what do we see as the "fringes" of reason? The same skepticism that we apply to those things we consider suspicious can also be applied by others to the things we believe. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, Strange Loops uncovers worlds of uncertainty in the real, unreal, and surreal.
Nora Douglass is an ACME co-founder and since 1987 has served as a designer, director, dramaturge, or playwright on several premiere productions. Plays by Nora include Dancing Lesson (produced by ACME in 1990) and Garden Party (produced by ACME in 1987). She holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting from the University of Washington and is a winner of several national playwriting awards and fellowships, including the David Library National Award for Edmonds Stories in 1989. ACME has commissioned short plays from Nora for four Seattle Fringe Theater Festival productions.
David Golden is a playwright and screenwriter who lives in Seattle. He has received more than 50 productions of his plays in theatres in New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle, including Big Frogs at Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York, and Tales from the Great American Roadway at Actor's Alley Theatre in Los Angeles and Renton Civic Theatre. His work for television includes By the Book, a mystery commissioned by KCTS Television in Seattle, which won a regional Emmy award. His original screenplays Two By Two and The Absence of the Good are both currently in development in Los Angeles.
Plays by Stuart Ostfeld include The Well of Happiness (developed at the Sundance Playwright's Laboratory and produced by ACME in 1995), Outside Down, Can't Catch the Moon, and Motel Tales (produced by ACME in 1992). Stuart is a member of the Dramatists Guild and lives in California, where he teaches playwriting at the Playwrights Project in San Diego. He has received grants and commissions for new plays from the Anti-Defamation League, ACME Theatricks, the University of California, and the King Country Arts Commission. Among his current projects are a new play, Webelos Badge, and a feature-length screenplay, Who Do You Love?
Samuel Blair is a winner of the James Hall Award for Fiction. His play The World Well Lost was commissioned by ACME as part of an upcoming collaboration, The Countdown, scheduled for production in September, 1997. Sam is the founder of Anaconda Productions, a theater group based in Seattle, and he holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Washington.
The play will be directed by Madge Montgomery,
ACME co-founder and Artistic Director, and Nora Douglass. Madge was a contributing
playwright and co-director of ACME's I Own the Amazon Angel for the 1995
Seattle Fringe Theater Festival, and she directed the premiere of The Well
of Happiness.
Sound will be designed by Lance Hayes. Lance has seven years of music composition,
sound production, and engineering experience running the Hell's Gate studio
in Ballard. He designed sound for ACME's I Own the Amazon Angel and The
Well of Happiness, and for The Broken Theater's production of The Seagull.
He has worked with the Seattle Symphony on sound synthesis and sampling,
and is a graduate of the University of Washington's certificate program
for sound production.
ACME Theatricks is a member of Seattle's League
of Fringe Theaters (LOFT). ACME is a unique, non-profit, professional performing
arts association now in its tenth year of producing new works. STRANGE
AMERICA is ACME's twentieth production.
In June 1996, ACME volunteers worked on THE MOUNT RAINIER PLAY, presented
by the 5th grade class at Tacoma's XXX Elementary School. ACME is also
a financial contributor to the project.
e-mail ACME Theatricks for more information.
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