STAGE TUBE: Artistic Director Tony Taccone Introduces FALLACI at Berkeley Rep

Even as his latest book attracts international attention, Pulitzer Prize-winner Lawrence Wright premieres his new play at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. A reporter renowned for his work with The New Yorker - and the bestselling author behind The Looming Tower and Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief - Wright is also the playwright who penned My Trip to al Qaeda and The Human Scale. Now he debuts a fictional play about the last days of legendary journalist Oriana Fallaci. Don't miss this sizzling new script, which is directed by Oskar Eustis, stars Concetta Tomei and Marjan Neshat, and features an incredible team of designers. The 65th world premiere presented by Berkeley Rep, Fallaci begins previews in the Roda Theatre on March 8, opens March 13, and runs through April 21.

Below, watch a video of Artistic Director Tony Taccone introducing the play!

With Fallaci, Wright turns the spotlight on a fellow reporter and her fascinating contradictions. Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci was larger than life. Her childhood courage resisting the Nazis fueled her work as a war correspondent with an antiauthoritarian zeal that perfectly matched the '60s and '70s. She gained fame by grilling Kissinger, Castro, Khomeini, Qadaffi, and other public figures who squirmed under her ferocious questioning. In this world premiere, a young woman interviews the fiery author at the end of her life, when she became a darling of the right. What begins as a discussion of journalism ends with two women exchanging life-changing lessons about destiny and empathy.

Lawrence Wright is an award-winning journalist, author, screenwriter, and playwright who has written four previous plays. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992, where he won two National Magazine Awards for reporting. He is the author of eight books, including The Looming Tower (2006), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, and most recently Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, which was released last week. His first play, Cracker Jack, was produced at the Paramount Theater in Austin, TX (1984). Sonny's Last Shot received two productions in Austin, at the Arts on Real Theater (2003) and the State Theater (2005). Wright performed his one-man play My Trip to al-Qaeda at the Culture Project in New York (2007), and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC and New York's Town Hall (2008). Oskar Eustis directed Wright's second one-man show, The Human Scale, for The Public Theater in New York (2010) and at the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv (2011). Wright has written two movies, The Siege (1998) and Noriega: God's Favorite (2000). His next play, Camp David, will premiere this autumn at Arena Stage in the nation's capital.

Oskar Eustis has been artistic director of The Public Theater since 2005. From 1981 through 1986, he served as resident director and dramaturg at the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco, and then as its artistic director. In 1989, he moved to LA's Mark Taper Forum as associate artistic director, where he remained until 1994. Then he became artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company, where he served for 11 years. At Berkeley Rep, Eustis staged the world-premiere production of Rinne Groff's Compulsion (2010), the world premiere of Philip Kan Gotanda's Fish Head Soup (1991), and co-directed Execution of Justice (1985). At The Public, he staged the 2008 Shakespeare in the Park production of Hamlet, featuring Michael Stuhlbarg and Sam Waterston, and the New York premieres of Compulsion; The Ruby Sunrise, also by Groff; and The Human Scale by Lawrence Wright. His numerous directing credits at Trinity Rep include the world premiere of Paula Vogel's The Long Christmas Ride Home (Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Production), Homebody/Kabul (Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Production), Angels in America, Part I: Millennium Approaches (Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Director), and Angels in America Part II: Perestroika. Eustis has also directed world premieres of plays by David Henry Hwang, Emily Mann, Eduardo Machado, Ellen McLaughlin, and Suzan-Lori Parks, among many others. Along with Tony Taccone, he commissioned Tony Kushner's Angels in America at the Eureka and directed its world premiere at the Taper. He received the 2009 Tony Award for The Public's revival of Hair.