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Press Release
Media Contact: David Perry & Associates, Inc. / David Perry
(415) 693-0583 / news@davidperry.com
Black Box Theatre Company Announces: The Creature
A live recording & podcast of a new digital adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Live before a studio audience October 30 at 8pm at SF's Magic Theatre;
World Premiere Podcast on Halloween, October 31 at www.blackboxtheatre.com
5 September 2006—SAN FRANCISCO, CA: Call it Orson Welles' War of the Worlds meets YouTube. On October 31 at 5:00pm (West Coast Time), Halloween, a World Premiere podcast called The Creature will take to the airwaves—ah, the web—at www.blackboxtheatre.com. Black Box Theatre Company, a non-traditional and often web-based theatrical troupe based in San Francisco, presents The Creature: a live-recording and theatrical podcast. The Creature will be taped before a live studio audience at San Francisco's Magic Theatre (Fort Mason Center, Building D, Laguna at Marina Blvd ) on Monday, October 30 at 8pm. This one-night-only, live, concert-reading and digital recording of a new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein will then be podcast the next day, Halloween.
“There are two sides to every tale, this is the creature’s story,” said Creature “creator” Trevor Allen, founder of Black Box Theatre Company. Kent Nicholson, noted Bay Area director, who will direct the new adaptation says “By telling the story from the creature’s point of view, we not only explore the ethical and scientific issues in the original story, but it also becomes a story about alienation and the effect of being outcast as an ‘other’ in society.”
Local acting treasure James Carpenter will portray the title character, Frankenstein’s Creature in this new re-imagining of Shelley’s master work. Other cast members include Andrew Hurteau as Captain Walton and Paul Silverman as Victor Frankenstein.
“The assembled cast is a Bay Area dream,” said Nicholson. “Jim Carpenter is an actor I have long admired and am thrilled to finally get the chance to work with him.” Allen agrees, “We couldn’t have hoped for a more talented cast. These are three amazing performers who really bring a lot of experience to the project.”
Founded by Trevor Allen, Black Box Theatre Company received a “Best of the San Francisco Fringe Festival Award” in 2000 for Chain Reactions, a fugue-like performance inside the Morrison Planetarium at The California Academy of Sciences. Other productions have included Working for the Mouse, a solo performance piece about the backstage life of a costumed character at Disneyland, which received its world premiere with Impact Theatre. Numerous staged readings at The EXIT theatre, The Marsh, Off Market and The Magic Theatres. Co-productions have included work with Crowded Fire, Combined Art Form Entertainment, The Cutting Ball and FoolsFury. Black Box Theatre Company was also responsible for co-producing the Bay Area Shakespeare Marathon in 2000 where all of Shakespeare’s plays were presented by 36 theatre companies in 10 days to raise funds for Theatre Bay Area’s Mary Mason Memorial Lemonade Fund for critically ill theatre workers.
“It’s thrilling to be presenting this piece in a unique and interesting new media form,” exclaims Nicholson. “Something that theater does so rarely is to be at the forefront of new technologies. It’s exciting to see how this can become an effective way of storytelling. Like radio of old, maybe we can learn to inspire people’s imaginations in unique ways.”
“Absolutely,” agrees Allen. “I love old-time radio, the pictures are great. But this is not a radio play, this is something new. This is a live theatre piece intended for podcast. We want to embrace the live theatrical aspect of the event, attempting to capture lightning in a bottle and then use this new technology to extend the scope of the audience. It’s really a storytelling medium.” He also notes, “the take-up rate of new technologies is decreasing exponentially. Look at how long it took for people to go from radio to television. The same shift is happening today with people upgrading from digital audio-only MP3 players to digital video players, except it’s happening so much quicker now. This work even requires the use of a new national “new media” contract. Working with both the AFTRA and AEA unions on this project to allow the play to be podcast has been exciting. As far as we know, this will be the first time that a full-length play has ever been recorded specifically for podcast, in front of a live audience, by professional actors, in an actual Bay Area theatre.”
Admission to the October 30th podcast taping is free but reservations are required due to limited seating. For more information and to reserve seats, visit www.blackboxtheatre.com or call (415) 731-4922.
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