World Premiere of 'Falling & Loving' This Month
Peak Performances at Montclair State University will present the world premiere of Falling & Loving, a play written by Obie Award-winning Professor Charles L. Mee and directed by School of Arts Directing Concentration Head Professor Anne Bogart, on September 24, 2019.
Based on the circular nature of the four seasons with perspectives on the correspondingly cyclical quality of relationships, Falling & Loving explores embodiments of love through action, revealing universal manifestations of love that can speak to audiences of all ages and backgrounds everywhere. This transformative collaboration of creative approaches, styles, and movement vocabularies, requires bravery and outrageous courage from the artists and a spirit of adventure from audiences in a world that is increasingly challenged by fear of differences. In Falling & Loving, six actors from SITI Company and six dancers from STREB Extreme Action storm the stage and launch into the air with the aid of a Guck Machine, an enormous contraption conceived by avant-garde choreographer Elizabeth Streb that features rings and buckets armed to continually release materials into the stratosphere.
Mee has written Big Love, True Love, First Love, Hotel Cassiopeia, Orestes 2.0, Trojan Women, Summertime and Wintertime, among other plays. His plays have been performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, American Repertory Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, the Public Theatre, Lincoln Center, the Humana Festival, Steppenwolf, and other places in the United States as well as in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Brussels, Vienna, Istanbul and elsewhere. He was honored with a full season of his plays at the Signature Theatre. Among other awards, he is the recipient of the Award of Merit in Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Obies, of a Laura Pels Award, the Booth Award, and of the Richard B. Fisher Award. He is also the author of a number of books of history (Meeting at Potsdam, The Marshall Plan, The End of Order) that have been selections of the Book of the Month Club and the History Book Club. He is the former editor-in-chief of Horizon magazine, a magazine of history, art, literature, and the fine arts. Mee is a professor in the MFA theatre program at Columbia University.
Bogart is Co-Artistic Director of SITI Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is the recipient of three Honorary Doctorates from Skidmore College, Bard College, and Cornish College. Bogart is a recipient of a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, the Richard B. Fisher Award, a USA Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Some of her recent works include The Bacchae, Chess Match, The Theater is a Blank Page, Steel Hammer, Persians, A Rite, Café Variations, Trojan Women, American Document, Antigone, Freshwater, Under Construction, Who Do You Think You Are, Radio Macbeth, and Hotel Cassiopeia. Her operas include The Handmaid’s Tale, Alcina, Macbeth, Norma, Carmen, I Capuleti e iMontecchi, Nicholas and Alexandra, Marina: A Captive Spirit, Lilith, and Seven Deadly Sins. She is the author of five books; A Director Prepares; The Viewpoints Book; And Then, You Act; Conversations with Anne; and, most recently, What’s the Story. Bogart is the Concentration Head of Directing and a Professor in the MFA theatre program at Columbia University.
Opening: September 24, 2019, 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm
Location: Alexander Kasser Theater
Get your tickets here.