Friday, January 13, 2012

Upcoming: Somewhere in Utopia, Out of Context Productions for FronteraFest at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, January 25 - February 4


Received directly:

Out of Context Productions





continues its inaugural season withSomewhere in Utopia Jarred J. Stein Out of Context

Somewhere in Utopia

written by Jared J. Stein
directed by Becca Plunkett

January 25 at 9:15 PM, January 28 at 7:15 PM, February 3 at 9:15 PM, and February 4 at 3:00

FronteraFest at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, 2803 Manor Rd.

Tickets are available at the door and online at www.ocplimited.com and www.hydeparktheatre.org. Please contact info@ocplimited.com for booking inquiries.

Out of Context Productions is thrilled to present the Austin Premiere of Somewhere in Utopia as the second production in their first full season of shows. Written by Jared J. Stein and directed by Becca Plunkett, the show will take place at the Salvage Vanguard Theater (2803 Manor Road 78722) as part of FronteraFest Long Fringe. The performance dates will be

In this peculiar piece, our heroes, Marcus and Bobby, have not left their home in years. Their only joys consist of watching TV and waiting for the mail, joys withheld by the omniscient, sadistic and sexually eccentric Narrator. Then there’s Cassady. She was in the body bag.

Somewhere in Utopia confronts many of the things that modern society has defined as “normal.” It attacks societal norms of race and gender while simultaneously questioning the human race’s undeniable propensity for violence. The play’s setting, characters and content are all utterly absurd, forcing the audience to consider that true absurdity lies within the norms themselves. Somewhere n Utopia is a play that seemingly deals with nothing, but as the play progresses, it becomes clear that there is very little difference between nothing and everything.

The initial development of Somewhere in Utopia occurred in 1994 while Stein was a BFA Director at Carnegie Mellon Drama in Pittsburgh. Its first full production was at the Francis Ford Coppola One-Act Marathon in 2000, while the author was an MFA student at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. Workshops followed in Los Angeles, New York and Bulgaria, and its last full production took place at the Blue Heron Arts Center in New York in 2004. It has now been revised in collaboration with Becca Plunkett for the Austin production.

Dramaturg Leon Katz said of the play: “...So remarkable and original a voice that I’d hate to see its fantastic quality inadvertently overlooked. [Jared J. Stein] has written what Beckett and Arrabal have made into a genre: a comedy of universal rage...and doing it with a sense of image and language that, to my mind, puts it awfully close to the company of the great ones noted above.”


Out of Context Productions is a young theatre company based in Austin, Texas that is committed to collaborating with both students and theatre professionals to produce works that are both thought provoking and exciting. This project marks a collaboration between a wide range of current and former Southwestern University students as well as theatre artists around Austin.
For more information contact us at info@ocplimited.com

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