KPFA - Bay Area Theater

Laurel Ollstein, whose latest play, “Pandora,” will be streaming on the theatreworks.org website, is interviewed by host Richard Wolinsky.

Laurel Ollstein is also the author of “They Promised Her the Moon,” which was produced at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley and shut down prematurely due to the pandemic. She has been a theatre and television actress, short story writer and director over the course of her career, and worked with Tim Robbins’ Actors Gang in Los Angeles for fifteen years.

This latest project is a theatrical retelling of the myth of Pandora, the first human woman in Greek Mythology, who was said to have opened a box which allowed all the ills of the world to escape. The production, recorded in Zoom toward the end of May, 2020, is a workshop reading featuring actors from the Bay Area and beyond, and is directed by Giovanna Sardelli, is free on-line as a benefit for TheatreWorks Silicon Valley. Originally scheduled for the first weekend in June, it has been postponed to a later date.

Special thanks to Richard Lavin for his post-production assistance.

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Eve Ensler is one of America’s best known playwrights. She is the author of several plays, including Vagina Monologues, The Good Body, Here. Necessary Targets, a memoir, Insecure at Last, and co-editor of an anthology A Memory, A Monologue, a Rant and a Prayer.

Richard Wolinsky interviewed Eve Ensler in early June 2012 in the offices of Berkeley Rep, where she was preparing “Emotional Creature,” a theatrical adaptation of her book, I Am an Emotional Creature.

Since 2012, Eve Ensler has published a memoir, In the Body of the World, and in 2019 The Apology, in which she exorcised the demons left by her father’s abuse, and in wishing to no longer carry her father’s name, has invited people to call her V instead.

B&W photo: Creative Commons. Color photo: Richard Wolinsky, copyright 2012.

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This week’s playwright podcast hosted by Richard Wolinsky is with Simon McBurney as he discusses The Encounter, which ran at San Francisco’s Curran Theatre in April and May 2017. The Encounter is streaming on-line for free through May 22, 2020, 2 pm Pacific on You Tube or through the sfcurran.com website. If you plan on watching, the best experience is through headphones.

Simon McBurney is the director and performer of “The Encounter,” a theatrical piece inspired by the Book Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu, that played at the Curran in San Francisco in spring, 2017. Simon McBurney is the artistic director of Complicite, a London based theatrical company. He’s directed several plays and operas over the years, weaving in the high-wire tension of sports betting nevada to fuel those edge-of-your-seat moments that leave crowds breathless, and acted in such films as The Theory of Everything, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, and other films, as well as the TV series The Borgias and The Casual Vacancy. “The Encounter” came to San Francisco after a successful run in London and New York, and an American tour. Curran website.

“The Encounter” involves the use of headphones and binaural sounds to not only tell the story of the photographer Loren McIntyre in the jungles of Peru but to take the audience on its own trip,

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Tony Kushner, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky in 2006 and in 2014.

Tony Kushner is one of America’s greatest playwrights, and Angels in America is certainly one of the greatest American plays of the 20th Century. Tony Kushner is also the author of several other plays, including a Bright Room for Day, Slavs, Homebody/Kabul, and the musical Caroline or Change.Among his work as screenwriter was an adaptation of August Wilson’s play, Fences, plus original screenplays for both Munich and Lincoln, both of which earned him Oscar nominations, the HBO adaptation of Angels in America, and coming up, the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s film of West Side Story due at the end of 2020,, and after that, another Spielberg film, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara.

This podcast contains an interview recorded on March 17, 2006, while he was in San Francisco promoting the Library of America edition of the Collected Plays of Arthur Miller, for which he’d written an introduction. The recording was made in his hotel room. The second interview, dated June 11, 2014, for the Open Book program, came about because Berkeley Rep was presenting his newest play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (known as IHo), and was recorded live on the air, by phone.  (Photos: Wikipedia Commons)

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This is the second in a series of playwright interviews. Suzan Lori-Parks was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for playwrighting, for Topdog/Underdog in 2001. She won Obie Awards for her play, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, produced in 1989, and for Venus in 1998. Richard Wolinsky spoke with Suzan- Lori Parks when she was on tour for her only novel to date, Getting Mother’s Body, On May 20th, 2003. Since that time, she has continued to work in theatre, adapting the book of Porgy & Bess for a 2012 Broadway production, writing Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts One, Two and Three) in 2014 and won an Obie Award in 2019 for her play White Noise. Both these plays have recently been produced in the San Francisco Bay Area. She also wrote the screenplay for the 2019 film Native Son. Photos copyrright 2018 Suzan-Lori Parks.

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