MARIN THEATRE COMPANY TO LAUNCH
CENTURY-OLD MASTERPIECE
Marin Theatre Company will launch 2025 with a fresh take on a rarely seen century-old political play, Waste (February 6 – March 2, 2025). This compelling work was written in 1906 by Harley Granville-Barker, an English actor, director, playwright, and critic, who came to fame performing and then directing the early works of George Bernard Shaw, eventually authoring The Voysey Inheritance, considered a masterpiece of the Edwardian stage. That highly regarded hit was followed by Waste, which was banned due to its shocking topic of abortion and politics, finally staged for the first time in 1927. In Waste, an ambitious politician’s career is wrecked over his illicit affair with a woman, who has died after a botched abortion. Rather than showing sympathy or outrage for the female victim, the work cynically focuses on the politician and his colleagues, who scramble to salvage his reputation. In a recent U.K. revival, British Theatre lauded Waste for its “crackling dialogue” calling it “Extraordinary. By some distance the best production to grace a National Theatre stage since Rufus Norris took the reins.” Director, playwright, producer, author, and educator Carey Perloff, artistic director emerita of American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, is set to direct, and Marin Theatre Artistic Director Lance Gardner will return to the stage as the politician under fire.
“I like to say that it was Harold Pinter who first got me into the theater
and Tom Stoppard who kept me there...”
– Carey Perloff
From The New Yorker...
The October 6 review in The New Yorker of Tom Stoppard's play Leopoldstadt cites Carey Perloff's new book Pinter and Stoppard: A Director's View
"Stoppard’s frequent collaborator Carey Perloff recently published “Pinter and Stoppard: A Director’s View,” and she spends a chapter discussing his not quite forgotten, always sort of known Jewishness, the way it emerged in past work as stories about doubles and twins, or heritage that is torn down and lost. Her book helped me think about where Stoppard’s experience surfaces in Hermann, a man who both knows and does not know his true situation, a man who thinks he has won the coin toss while the coin is still in the air."
Excerpt from the John Stokes' TLS Review:
"Directing, as Perloff conceives of it, “is an iterative process in which a script slowly reveals itself on stage through rigorous examination and the freedom to play and fail until solutions are reached which feel true to the spirit of the text”. The question is therefore: “How does a director uncover the laws governing the unique and mysterious world of a given play?” These “laws” or “rules of play” are the operating principles within a work that will allow it to generate a theatrical event; they are discovered in rehearsal and realized in performance. They are not universal and they shift with the shifting times, sometimes fundamentally. Stoppard, for instance, has said of Pinter that “he changed the ground rules” so you could no longer necessarily believe what a character might say, even on the most mundane level...."
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“How Jewish were we?” wondered celebrated British playwright Tom Stoppard to his cousin Sarka about their family’s Czechoslovakian roots. In his mid-50s, Stoppard and his mother, Martha, were meeting their relative for the first time, over lunch, while he was in rehearsals for his play “Arcadia” at the National Theatre in 1993.
Stunned by Stoppard’s question and ignorance of his identity, Sarka was incredulous. “You are completely Jewish,” she replied. As his cousin drew up an impromptu family tree on a piece of paper, Stoppard was gobsmacked to learn that his maternal and paternal grandparents were Jewish, and that all of them, along with three of his mother’s sisters and other family members, had perished in the Holocaust. “It was a little embarrassing, even shameful,” Stoppard wrote in a 1999 essay for Talk magazine.
Director Carey Perloff relates this story to the cast of the Huntington Theatre’s upcoming production of Stoppard’s masterwork “Leopoldstadt” on the first day of rehearsals. The revelation, she says, shook this most cerebral of British playwrights, and he embarked on a reckoning with his Jewish roots. “What does it mean for someone to reclaim their family?” Perloff says to the cast.
The discovery spurred Stoppard, more than two decades later, to pen the deeply personal “Leopoldstadt” and excavate this long chapter of his family history, refracting it through an altered lens. The drama went on to win four 2023 Tony Awards, including best play, and is being staged by the Huntington from Sept. 12-Oct. 13, in the first American production after its Broadway bow.
Leopoldstadt, The Huntington Theatre, Photo by Liza Voll
Leopoldstadt, Holden King-Farbstein, Joshua Chessin-Yudin, Quinn Murphy
Firdous Bamji; Photo by Liza Voll
–– Jewish Rhode Island
–– WBUR
Leopoldstadt; Mishka Yarovoy, Nael Nacer, Brenda Meaney; Photo by Liza Voll
Leopoldstadt, Brenda Meany, Samuel Adams, The Huntington Theatre, Photo by Liza Voll
BOSTON PUBLIC RADIO PODCAST PRESENTS
"Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt is on stage now at the Huntington. A Boston Public Radio interview with Director Carey Perloff and actor Rebecca Gibel about the play, about a Jewish family in Vienna at the rise of the 20th century."
It wasn’t until the early 1990s that the celebrated writer learned that all four of his grandparents had been Jewish and had died while imprisoned in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, along with his three aunts on his mother’s side.
With that awareness, the brilliant wordsmith – an Academy- and multi-Tony-Award winner for plays and movies including “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” “Arcadia,” “The Coast of Utopia,” and “Shakespeare in Love” – wrote the sweeping “Leopoldstadt,” a fictionalized account of the family he never knew now being given a heart-rending production by the Huntington, in association with Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, at the Huntington Theatre through October 13.
CURRENT & UPCOMING WORK
DIRECTING/ ARTISTIC ADVISING
LEOPOLDSTADT
Shakespeare Theatre Company
Washington, DC
November 30 - December 29, 2024
WASTE
Marin Theatre Company
Mill Valley, CA
February 6 - March 2, 2025
TINY THEATRICALS
“Rehearsing Greek Tragedy
for the Contemporary Stage”
In collaboration with
John Douglas Thompson and Nike Imoru
A Five-Part Digital Series
Debuted on Digital Theatre Plus March 2023
http://www.careyperloff.com/tiny-theatricals.html
JEKYLL & HYDE
Finland Ballet
Artistic Consultant and Dramaturg
Ballet West
October 25 - November 2, 2024
WRITING
IF GOD WERE BLUE
March 1 & 2, 2025
The Colorado New Play Summit
Helen Bonfils Theatre Complex
https://www.denvercenter.org/
tickets-events/colorado-new-play-summit/#tab-id-3
VIENNA, VIENNA, VIENNA
Finalist, 2023 Jewish Plays Project
Resident Artist
The Ground Floor, Berkeley Rep
August 2023
www.berkeleyrep.org/the-ground-floor
EDGARDO OR WHITE FIRE
Commissioned by Williamstown Theatre Festival
Finalist, O'Neill Playwrights Conference 2022
Workshop at Writers Theater Chicago
March 2024
Directed by Shana Cooper
Workshop at the Kiln
People’s Light Theater Company
Philadelphia
April 14-15, 2023
Directed by Yury Urnov
https://www.peopleslight.org/whats-on/the-kiln/
PINTER AND STOPPARD: A DIRECTOR'S VIEW
Bloomsbury Methuen Press
DIRECTOR COMMISSIONS
WORKSHOP OF OEDIPUS
Red Bull Theatre
New York
April 27 & 28, 2025
Developing a new concept for
THE OEDIPUS PLAYS
in collaboration with
John Douglas Thompson
Seattle Repertory Theater, 2021-2025
IN DEVELOPMENT
HOME?
A New One-Woman Play
by Hend Ayoub
Workshop Production with
Voices Festival Productions,
Washington D.C.
November 3-13, 2022
THE TRIAL OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
by Alex Poch-Goldin
Workshop at
Bard on the Beach
Vancouver, BC
September 21-25, 2022
TEACHING
GUEST PROFESSOR
Columbia University
MFA Directing Program
Spring 2025
CHECK HERE OFTEN FOR UPDATES
