Independence—ARTS TIX Discount! Note: this play is not suitable for children. An intriguing and powerful display. “Independence” is filled with desperation and love, as a family’s soul emotionally unravels in Lee Blessing’s compelling drama. The story is set in Independence, Iowa, the lifelong home of Evelyn Biggs, who is “a little off”. Middle daughter Jo seems to exist solely to care for her mother, but when things get out of hand, her older sister, Kess, who has long been estranged from Mom, puts her university teaching job on hold and comes home to save the family, including Sherry, the youngest sister who is wild and can’t wait to leave town—and Mom—for good. Director Jay Mower says: this play represents a powerful microcosm of four people trapped in a sort of prison, each desperate to escape to their own personal ‘independence.’ Audience members may see aspects of their own family dynamics.” “Hats off the Blessing, Mower and the entire cast. This play is a winner” North County Times.
Pump Boys & Dinettes—ARTS TIX Discount!
Drive a ways outta town, and you'll come to a filling station run by Jim and L.M. Across the blacktop is the Double Cupp Diner, operated by Rhetta and Prudie Cupp. To look at it, you wouldn't know that this little stop on Highway 57 is where all the action is. But trust us, once the boys get that guitar and bass fiddle revved up, you won't want to be anywhere else. Packed with hummable, hilarious songs like "Be Good or Be Gone," "Tips," and "The Night Dolly Parton Was Almost Mine," it's a foot-stomping good time that will make you want to order a big slice of cherry pie and a second cup of coffee, before you hit the road in search of life's simple pleasures.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street—ARTS TIX Discount! Note: ARTS TIX will stop selling tickets by noon for matinees. Stephen Sondheim’s chilling, suspenseful, heart-pounding masterpiece of murderous barber-ism and culinary crime is a mix of macabre, visceral drama with howlingly funny dark humor. Sweeney Todd, a barber seeking revenge, joins forces with Mrs. Lovett, the proprietress of the pie shop downstairs, and soon the people of 19th century London are lining up for her wonderful and mysterious new meat pies!
Tom and Huck and Jim: A Mark Twain Centenary Tribute—ARTS TIX Discount! Note: The performance is traditionally uncensored towards friendship and race. San Diego State University’s School of Theatre, Television and Film is proud to announce the original production of “Tom and Huck and Jim, A Mark Twain Centenary Tribute.” Based on the classic novels by this notable author, this production brings to life the adventures of Tom and Huck in pre-civil war America. In “Tom and Huck and Jim,” audiences are transported to 19th Century Hannibal, Missouri where Mark Twain grew up and wrote his classic stories. This classic, literary tale paints the picture of growing-up in a segregated America and the trials and temptations therein, including the racism and prejudice of the day. Mark Twain will act as our tour guide and narrator. New musical compositions are being created for this production heavily influenced by ragtime and gospel themes.
Triple Espresso—ARTS TIX Discount! Note: ARTS TIX will stop selling tickets by noon for Sunday matinees and at least three hours before the show for all other performances. "Triple Espresso" tells the story of three guys whose bid for showbiz fame and fortune ended in 4-minutes of magnificent failure on national television. Hugh Butternut, Buzz Maxwell, and Bobby Bean tell their rags-to-rags story earnestly, with hysterical results. Butternut is a musician, a vulnerable soul with a lounge lizard smile; Maxwell is an uncertain magician with an attitude; and Bean is an irrepressible, all-over-the-map entertainer with big dreams. The laughter is infectious and the comedy appeals to everyone from first graders to college students to baby-boomers to grandparents.
Fighting Words: Play Reading Festival—ARTS TIX Discount!
MOXIE Theatre's first ever Play Reading Festival, featuring staged readings of new plays that have MOXIE: rich language, huge imagination, bold personalities, and female characters who expand the idea of what is feminine. “Red Helen” by Jennifer Barclay, a dark and twisted comedy about bloody money, blood-red meat, and blood relations; “Re-Drowning Ophelia” by Katie Henry, six high school girls refuse to be defined by a dead fictional character; “Adoration of Dora by Lojo Simon,” Parisian surrealist photographer Dora Maar tries to find her own voice as an artist while living with threat of war and in the long shadow cast by her lover, Pablo Picasso; “Coming Attractions” by Zsa Zsa Gershick, during the dying days of the Disco era, a group of Hollywood has-beens and hangers-on gather at The Desert Knight—onetime hideaway of Tinseltown’s “twilight” set; and “the terrible girls” by Jaqueline Goldfinger, a wicked dark comedy of friendship, obsession, and Southern sensibilities.
Symmetry Project Note: Performance contains full nudity. Jess Curtis and Maria Francesca Scaroni. The Symmetry Project is a journey through perception. Two naked bodies interact through a highly structured improvisational score, constricted in a specific physical practice; that of moving symmetrically, relative to themselves or to each other. In this space of temporary “habitus”, the two bodies are constantly tuning, reformulating the perception of the self and of the other. In the sharing of a central axis, spine, mouth, genitals, face, and anus reveal their interconnectedness and centrality in embodied experience. Limbs entangle and intertwine creating an inter-corporeal kaleidoscope of flesh. A kind of über-intimacy develops, going far beyond sexuality into a kind of communal biology, a symbiotic sensory field. Exploring and manipulating our perception, they reveal the body’s awkwardness, its monstrosity, its potential failure and finiteness, they create space for the possibility of the unknown, the wondrous, the ecstatic, the infinite.
Orestes—ARTS TIX Discount!
Orestes, Mother Killer! For over 2000 years one of the most disturbing, violent and hilarious tales ever told. A sister sacrificed, a father butchered in frenzy, a mother and her lover's blood still warm on their hands. Who's next...?
Weekend with Picasso—ARTS TIX Discount! Note: This event is unavailable online. Tickets may be purchased in person at ARTS TIX and ARTS TIX North. ARTS TIX will stop selling tickets by noon for Sunday matinees and at least three hours before the show for all other performances. A cataclysmic comedy by Peter Sim Nachtreib. Directed by Sam Woodhouse. Biologist Jules is dead sure that a comet is going to hit the planet any minute and has a plan to repopulate the human race. He invites journalist coed Jo over to his subterranean lab for a hookup that promises "sex to change the world." What follows is a whacked out farce that asks huge, intellectual questions like: "How did we get here and where the heck are we going?" Flipping from pants-around-the-ankles comedy to hipster "Twilight Zone" sci-fi, "boom" is an epic myth and an intimate love story.
