The Cutting Ball Variety Pack 2018
a festival of exploration and collaboration
November 8 – November 18, 2018
The Cutting Ball Variety Pack – the organization’s signature festival – returns for its second year. An eleven-day festival dedicated to exploration and collaboration, The Cutting Ball Variety Pack will feature directorial shorts, new play workshops, and roundtable readings.
About the festival:
Before a production gets its polish, there's process: the vigorous, messy playground of the imagination. This November, Cutting Ball's signature festival – half shindig, half artistic salon – returns and invites you to revel in process with a small army of fired-up artists. This eleven-day festival delivers a sumptuous line-up that's sure to delight the creatively curious.
The festival opens with Short Cuts, an exploratory evening of four short works helmed by four different directors. Short Cuts is divvied by three jovial mini-intermissions featuring the music of local bands, free snacks, and raffles. You can catch Short Cuts:
Thursday, November 8 at 7 pm
Friday, November 9 at 8 pm
Wednesday, November 14 at 7 pm
Friday, November 16 at 8 pm
Sunday, November 18 at 2 pm
Short Cuts will include:
The Spurt of Blood, Artaud's ‘impossible’ mini-play directed by Artistic Director Ariel Craft.
Valley of the Dead, a queer reimagining of the Eurydice and Persephone myth directed by Associate Artistic Director Maya Herbsman.
A selection from Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea directed by Susannah Martin.
Cyclops 2.0, an experiment in audience engagement directed by Erik Pearson.
Got a taste for in-progress plays? The Variety Pack invites you to partake of two unproduced and unpublished plays.
Zoohouse is a dystopic, poetic, metatheatrical fable set in an "asylum for the black and criminally insane" by New York-based playwright Aurin Squire, writer for This is Us (NBC) and The Good Fight (CBS). Zoohouse will be presented in a staged reading directed by Margo Hall on Sunday, November 11 at 2 pm.
Three Fat Sisters explores the identity politics of being a woman of size and the violence that women enact on one another and on their own bodies. Written and directed by Morgan Gould, resident playwright at New Dramatists in New York City, Three Fat Sisters will be presented in a staged reading on Saturday, November 17 at 8 pm.
Come as you are and gather around a communal table with artists for informal readings of lesser-known plays from the canon.
Sappho by Estelle Anna B. Lewis, a neglected verse play from 1876 about a lesbian romance, will be read on Sat, Nov. 10 at 2pm.
As Five Years Pass by Federico García Lorca in translation by Caridad Svich, considered by many to be Lorca’s most experimental work, will be read on Tuesday, November 13 at 7 pm.
The Physicists by Friedrich Dürrenmatt in translation by James Kirkup, about the culpability of scientific minds in nuclear threat, will be read on Thursday, November 15 at 7 pm.
The Variety Pack All Festival Pass
Our Variety Pack is all about sampling: for only $30, a V(I)P pass will grant you admission, with drink in hand, to any of the festival offerings.