GILROY
– As part of the
”
First Monday
”
play-reading series at Gavilan College Theater, in which new,
controversial, or hard-to produce plays are performed with minimal
producation on the First Monday of every month,
”
Word for Word
”
will present two stories.
GILROY – As part of the “First Monday” play-reading series at Gavilan College Theater, in which new, controversial, or hard-to produce plays are performed with minimal producation on the First Monday of every month, “Word for Word” will present two stories.
Word for Word is a professional theatre company from San Francisco that stages short stories, performing every word the author has written. Their mission is “to tell good stories with simple and elegant theatricality.”
The first of these is “The Wonderful Story of Zaal, A Persian Legend” by M. and N. Batmanglij and directed by Molly Noble. In this story, the baby Zaal, who has been banished by his father because of his unusual white hair, is rescued from death by the magical bird Seemorgh and grows up in the bird’s extraordinary castle high in the mountains
The second story is “The Killing Blanket” by Rilla Askew and directed by Sheila Balter. It is based on an event involving the Choctaw Indians in Oklahoma in 1892. This story explores the division of the Choctaw nation by the U.S. Government and the tragic tribal in-fighting the ensued.
“Our goals are to excite people about the written word, to inspire them to read more, to create new audiences for the theatre, and to share the world’s diverse cultures and stories” reads the company’s Web site, wordforword.
zspace.org. “As one of our company members says: ‘It’s like being read to and then some. While it’s fully literary in content it’s completely theatrical in form.’ ”
Their goals are to bring stories from diverse cultures to diverse communities, and develop future audiences’ love for the printed and spoken word, and to perform short works of fiction in their entirety, preserving the author’s voice and honoring her/his intent with exciting visuals and inventive staging.
Word for Word Theater performs at 6:30 p.m. Monday at the Gavilan College Theater, 5055 Santa Teresa Blvd. Admission to the show is free. For more information, please call Julianne Palma at 848-4717.
