Cutting Ball Presents VANGUARDIA, 8/7

San Francisco's cutting-edge Cutting Ball Theater continues to celebrate its 10th season of critically acclaimed stagework with VANGUARDIA. This one-night only event will be held Saturday, August 7 at 8pm at the Cutting Ball Theater in Residence at EXIT on Taylor. "With Vanguardia, Cutting Ball is reaching out to the Latino/Latina theater community," said Associate Artistic Director Paige Rogers. "The six playwrights involved are spectacularly talented and their scenes give us a flavor of their particular experimental voice."

Spanish for "avant garde," VANGUARDIA features an evening of readings of experimental plays by six Latino playwrights: Kristoffer Diaz, Marisela Treviño Orta, Octavio Solis, Caridad Svich, Enrique Urueta, and Karen Zacarias.

The line up for VANGUARDIA is as follows:

f-ing vigwan
By Kristoffer Diaz
Directed by Sean San Jose

There are a lot of horrible people in the world. f-ing vigwan is a horrible play about some of those horrible people. Warning: play contains sex, drugs, police brutality, horrendously (and stupidly) foul language, necrophilia, neo-colonialism, and some approximation of true love. This play should probably not be seen by anyone.

GHOST LIMB
By Marisela Treviño Orta
Directed by Evren Odcikin

Set somewhere between nightmare and reality, GHOST LIMB is the story of a mother whose son is kidnapped during Argentina's "dirty war." Using her injured arm as a divining rod, she searches for her son while the world around her withdraws into a perpetual winter.

THE ORIGIN OF RIGOR MORIN
By Octavio Solis
Directed by Rob Melrose

THE ORIGIN OF RIGOR MORIN is one of playwright Octavio Solis' earliest works, written in Dallas in the early ‘80s when he was a self-proclaimed "naive young punk," and performed with a live band at the 500 Club. A tongue-in-cheek interplay of myth, Nuevo-wavo, verse, song, and dance, THE ORIGIN OF RIGOR MORIN is an installment from a 10-play cycle depicting the life and times of Geometricia, a heroine whose comic adventures are based upon a real high-school friend of the playwright.

IPHIGENIA CRASH LAND FALLS ON THE NEON SHELL THAT WAS ONCE HER HEART (a rave fable)
By Caridad Svich
Directed by Amy Mueller

IPHIGENIA... hurls one of Greek tragedy's most compelling sagas into a sleek netherworld of sex, drugs, and trance music. Iphigenia is the daughter of a political celebrity who embraces sensuous excess with a transgendered glam rock star named Achilles in a desperate attempt to flee her inevitable fate.

COLUMBIAN BOOK OF THE DEAD
By Enrique Urueta
Directed by Paige Rogers

After her son, David, is killed in a shooting at a Virginia university, Luz Miranda meets a hillbilly demon named Bubba, who offers her a chance to save her son. If she can find her son in the afterlife and bring him back within 24 hours, he'll be allowed to live, in exchange for her life. But the afterlife is nothing like Luz imagined. In her journey through the Appalachian afterlife, she struggles against headless Frenchmen, cumbia dancing corpses, and other beings from beyond as she makes her way to the one place she knows she will find her son: the afterlife of San Francisco.

EL VIRGEN
By Karen Zacarias
Directed by Mark Rucker

A blonde falls off a burning building and lives to tell the tale. A virgin Latino boy finds himself in a family way. Is this the beginning of the end of the world, or a just a good ol' Mexican-style miracle?

Following VANGUARDIA, Cutting Ball Theater opens its 11th season in November with a distinctive take on Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST. The season continues with BONE TO PICK, Eugenie Chan's retelling of the Ariadne myth, accompanied by a newly commissioned companion piece, DIADEM, in January. The company is poised to present the Bay Area Premiere of Will Eno's LADY GREY (in ever lower light) and other plays in March. The RISK IS THIS...THE CUTTING BALL NEW EXPERIMENTAL PLAYS FESTIVAL returns to round out the season in May with five exhilarating new works for the stage, three of which were commissioned by Cutting Ball.

Co-founded in 1999 by theater artists Rob Melrose and Paige Rogers, Cutting Ball Theater presents avant-garde works of the past, present, and future by re-envisioning classics, exploring seminal avant-garde texts, and developing new experimental plays. Cutting Ball Theater has partnered with Playwrights Foundation, the Magic Theatre, and Z Space New Plays Initiative to commission new experimental works. The company has produced a number of World Premieres, West Coast Premieres, and re-imagined various classics. Recipient of the 2008 San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie award for outstanding talent in the performing arts, Cutting Ball Theater earned the Best of SF award in 2006 from SF Weekly and was selected by San Francisco Magazine as Best Classic Theater in 2007. Cutting Ball Theater was recently featured in the February 2010 issue of American Theatre Magazine.

TICKETS:
$15-20 donation; no reservations necessary, pay at the door. For more information visit cuttingball.com.

The Cutting Ball Theater's productions are made possible in part by grants from The Compton Foundation, The Creative Work Fund, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The San Francisco Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, Grants for the Arts / San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, and the Zellerbach Foundation.