Clown Bible March 22, 2007

Clown Bible

Created by Maya Gurantz, Dave Malloy and the Ensemble
Music and Lyrics by Dave Malloy

Willard Middle School Metalshop Theater
2425 Stuart Street, Berkeley, CA
(Entrance on Regent St., Behind the School).

Background Information

CLOWN BIBLE
Music and Lyrics by Dave Malloy Book by Maya Gurantz, Dave Malloy and the Ensemble

From King David's song of thanksgiving to the Lord: “with the loyal you show yourself loyal; with the blameless you show yourself blameless; with the pure you show yourself pure, and with the crooked you show yourself perverse.”

Amen. Ten Red Hen Productions, the artistic team behind last year’s {99-Cent} Miss Saigon, now presents CLOWN BIBLE. Working directly from Biblical text, we have translated the tales, familiar and obscure, into an experimental, live theatrical event – combining a full musical score, acrobatics and dance with the broad comic performance language of clown (think Charlie Chaplin, not Ringling Brothers).

CLOWN BIBLE highlights and explores themes of masculinity, power, corruption and failure – themes that recur throughout the Bible in the relationship between man and God, and in God's own evolution from the Creation through the Resurrection. The show been created with an outstanding ensemble of performers that includes Jane Chen (The Chinese Clown Cabaret) as God and Jesus.

Just as our Miss Saigon approached the Broadway musical afresh by removing the form’s production values, CLOWN BIBLE offers a fresh take on familiar tales – indeed, some of the oldest in our collective cosmology – by extracting them from their religious context. We neither criticize nor endorse the faiths that hold the Bible to be holy writ—instead, we focus on the wild and wonderful stories themselves. By turns hilarious and tragic, crude and subtle, CLOWN BIBLE reconnects us to the mythic beauty and strangeness of the text, while holding up a mirror to our own human foibles and vulnerability.

Ten Red Hen is a young theater company based in Oakland. We're committed to creating engaging, relevant new theater that interrogates both the form of live art-making and the world around us. Our inaugural production, {The 99-Cent} Miss Saigon, was a poor theater version of the biggest musical of all time, deconstructing the expectations of the "Broadway musical." The show was a big success, with excited audiences, great reviews and special shout-outs in The Chronicle, SF Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, East Bay Express, Berkeley Daily Planet, 96 Hours and Flavorpill. This December, we used Week 4 of Suzan-Lori Parks’ 365 Days/365 Plays project as a meditation on Theater Every Day, bringing the magic of the plays into homes throughout the Bay Area.

Dates and Times

March 22-24 (Thurs-Sat),
March 30-31 (Fri-Sat),
April 5-7 (Thurs-Sat),
April 12-14 (Thurs-Sat)
All Shows at 8pm

Sliding Scale $15-20.
Buy Tickets In Advance at: www.brownpapertickets.com, or call 1-800-838-3006
No one turned away for lack of funds.

Official Website: http://www.tenredhen.net/currentshow.html