Announcing world premiere fifth show!
First Person Shooter by Aaron Loeb
San Francisco, CA (April, 2007) – SF Playhouse (Bill English, Artistic Director; Susi Damilano, Producing Director) and PlayGround (Jim Kleinmann, Artistic Director) are pleased to announce that they will team up to co-produce the world premiere of four-time PlayGround Emerging Playwright Award winner Aaron Loeb's First Person Shooter, originally commissioned and developed by PlayGround last season. The play will fill the previously unannounced fifth slot in SF Playhouse's 2006-07 season, running May 2 to June 9, 2007. Directing this World Premiere is Jon Tracy.
The cast of First Person Shooter includes: Kate Del Castillo, Susi Damilano, Chad Deverman, Craig Marker*, Sung Min Park, Adrian N. Roberts* (*appear courtesy of Actors Equity)
Designers include: Betsy Ayala (props & costume) Brian Degan Scott (video), Jacqueline Steager (lights), Mellie Katakalos (set)
First Person Shooter takes us inside ‘JetPack Games’, a start-up video game company, where the hottest, most violent game on the market has brought instant success to its twenty-something tech geniuses. Their celebration fizzles when their game is blamed for a schoolyard shooting. As the young CEO of Jet Pack deals with an impending lawsuit and the father of one of the victims, he must confront whether he has any responsibilities in the world beyond his computer screen.
The play draws on the national debate over the link between violent videogames and school shootings, which first came to the fore after Columbine. Aaron, who now develops videogames, worked as a journalist covering the world of videogames at the time of Littleton, Colorado shootings and "wanted to write a play about the people caught in the echo chamber of the debate. What must it be like for the people actually accused of making a game that turns kids into killers? What about the parents of the victims? Their children are dead and the news is jam packed with talk of something so trivial as videogames!"
“This is a first time collaboration between the SF Playhouse and PlayGround” said Bill English (Artistic Director SF Playhouse) ”and we are thrilled! It is very exciting to find talent and develop it, especially when that talent is living right here under our nose!" Casting the world premiere production will be PlayGround Associate Director and SF Playhouse casting director Annie Stuart who has been involved with the play since its inception.
For tickets ($60 Opening Night May 5, 2007, $36 regular, and $18 preview performances) or more information, the public may contact the SF Playhouse box office at 415-677-9596, or visit www.sfplayhouse.org, TicketWeb.com, or the TIX box office on Union Square.
Aaron Loeb (the Playwright) Since 2002, Aaron has been a regular writer for the Bay Area theater company, PlayGround, and has won five PlayGround Emerging Playwright Awards for his 10-minute plays as well as a PlayGround Fellowship (a commission, with which Aaron wrote First Person Shooter) and a PlayGround Alumni Fellowship (a new commission, which he is working on now). Aaron's 10-minute play The Maror the Merrier was included in Three Plays About Your Mom, a production of three short plays that won "Best of Fringe" at the 2005 San Francisco Fringe Festival. His short works have also been produced at LaMaMa E.T.C. and the Playground theater in New York City as well as college venues around the country as part of the Performers' Workshop Ensemble. His play, Brown, was produced in 2005 at Berkeley's La Val's Subterranean Theater by Crowded Fire as part of their Matchbox Workshop Series. Aaron studied playwriting at New York University where he received BFAs in Dramatic Writing and Dramatic Literature. He is a member of the Dramatists' Guild of America, Inc. By day, Aaron is the Chief Operating Officer of Planet Moon Studios, one of San Francisco's fastest growing videogame developers.
Jon Tracy (Director) works as a director, producer, playwright and light/set/sound/combat designer with such companies as American Conservatory Theatre, Aurora Theatre, Magic Theatre, SF Playhouse, Playground, Z Space, AlterTheater, Woman's Will, New Conservatory Theatre, Oberlin Dance Collective, Napa Valley Repertory Theatre, The Foothill Theatre Company, Solano College Theatre, Traveling Lantern Theatre Company and the San Francisco, Marin, Stinson, Napa and Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festivals. He is the recipient of the Kennedy Center Meritorious Achievement Award, fifteen North Bay "Arty" Awards, and a Sacramento Elly Award. He is the cofounder and Artistic Director of Darkroom Productions, the North Bay’s lab for new art.
Jim Kleinmann is co-founder and Artistic Director of PlayGround, the Bay Area's largest incubator of new professional playwrights. For PlayGround, he has directed more than thirty works, including the world premiere of two short plays by Aaron Loeb. He is also a veteran arts administrator, with more than eighteen years of experience managing a variety of leading local nonprofit arts institutions, from theatre to ballet, and was recently appointed as the new Executive Director of Berkeley Symphony. He is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama and currently resides in Berkeley, California.
Founded by Bill English and Susi Damilano in 2003, SF Playhouse is Union Square’s intimate, professional theatre. Using professional actors and world class design, the SF Playhouse, which won the Bay Guardian’s 2006 Best Off Broadway Theatre Award and about which the San Francisco Chronicle raved, “San Francisco’s newest theatre isn’t just another tiny stage carved out of a storefront . . . its an enticing introduction to a new company,” has become an intimate theatre alternative to the traditional Union Square theatre fare, garnering 20 Bay Area Theatre Critic nominations in its first year. Providing a creative home and inspiring environment where actors, directors, writers, designers, and theatre lovers converge, SF Playhouse, hailed as a “small delicacy” by SF Weekly and “eclectic” by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, strives to create works that celebrate the human spirit.
