Quantum Dragon presents Shualee Cook’s AN INVITATION OUT!
Quantum Dragon Theatre, the San Francisco Bay Area’s premiere science-fiction/fantasy theatre company, continues its ambitious third season with the west coast premiere of Shualee Cook’s science-fiction comedy of manners, AN INVITATION OUT, directed by Kieran Beccia. The production runs December 14-29, 2019 at Potrero Stage. Tickets are $31.50-$46.50 and 12/19 is Pay-What-You-Can. For more information and tickets, visit https://www.quantumdragon.org/an-invitation-out.
About the Play
“Nothing makes a person so vain as thinking they truly know someone.”
Like most successful young men in the somewhat distant future, Wridget has lived his entire life completely online, designing high-end custom avatars and throwing lavish parties in a Neo-Victorian world of his own devising. But when a mysterious Outdweller logs on to one of his virtual soirees, Wridget finds himself pulled between two realities, each with its own perils and promises.
The nine-person cast features actors old and new from around the greater SF Bay Area. Among them are Bay Area stage mainstay Don Wood (Shotgun Players, Mugwumpin, Anton’s Well), and returning QDT favorites Emily Dwyer (Fahrenheit 451), James Aaron Oh (Fahrenheit 451), and Caitlin Evenson (The Do’s and Don’ts of Time Travel). Will Livingston, Regina Leon, Caroline Portante, Alex Chernow, and Isabel Langen round out the ensemble cast.
On what originally attracted them to the play, director Kieran Beccia explains, “I was initially drawn to the questions it raises about permanence and identity in an intangible world. Shualee’s characters exist in conflicting states of desire and defiance. The implications of their actions are twofold, rippling through both virtual and physical space. I don’t want to give too much away,” they add, “but coming in, audiences should be prepared to question the identities that they project online.”
“The idea for An Invitation Out hit me nearly a decade ago,” notes playwright Shualee Cook, “when platforms like Facebook and Twitter were still sparkly and new. As countless posts skittered across my computer screen, I started to notice a trend – a sizable number of the things getting ‘liked’ or shared around were quick, two or three sentence attempts at humor or cleverness, a form that Oscar Wilde made his public reputation from. 21st century social media had found a new stage for the witty epigram.”
“My present moment at the time was a complex one,” she continues. “I conceived and wrote the first two drafts of the play when I was finally coming to terms with being transgender. It was a period marked by long stretches of feeling like a stranger in a strange land pretty much everywhere I went. And in a way, the online/offline worlds of the play became a way for me to discuss the experience of venturing outside of a worldview you’d grown comfortable with that doesn’t quite fit anymore, and the rewards and consequences that come with such a step.”
An Invitation Out is presented as part of PlayGround’s Potrero Stage Presenting Program.
An Invitation Out runs December 14 (8pm; opening night celebration) and 15 (2pm); 19 (8pm; pay-what-you-can tickets), 20 {8pm), 21 {8pm), and 22 {2pm); and 26 {8pm), 27 {8pm), 28 {8pm), and 29 (2pm). Tickets available at https://tickets.playground-sf.org/TheatreManager/1/online?event=238; season passes available now at patreon.com/qdt.
Shualee Cook (Playwright) has been writing theatre in the Midwest for so long that she’s starting to forget how to speak Californian. She is currently a fellow in Shakespeare Festival St. Louis’ Confluence Regional Writers’ Project and has been a resident playwright at Tesseract Theatre in Saint Louis and Stage Left Theatre in Chicago. Productions, readings, and workshops include Earworm (Tesseract Theatre, Campfire Theatre Festival), Cerc/e Hermaphroditos (Stage Left Theatre Summer Reading, Queer Village Reading Series), An Invitation Out (Mustard Seed Theatre, Quantum Dragon Theatre, Benchmark Theatre Fever Dream Festival), Sunset Artists of the American West (2016 Chicago New Work Festival, About Face Theatre), Tempest in a Teapot (R-S Theatrics, 2016 Idle Muse Athena Festival), and The Geography of Nowhere'(Mustard Seed Theatre). She was the Honorable Mention playwright for the 2019 Annual Parity Commission, has been a finalist for the 2019 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, 2016 Jane Chambers Award, the 2016 David Calicchio Award, and a two-time finalist for the Goodman Theatre Playwrights Unit.
Kieran Beccia (Director) is a Bay Area director, producer, and actor focused on devised and ensemble performance, development of new work, and subversion of classics. Recent favorite directing credits include Sarafael (The Forum/Ubuntu Theater Project), Where the Boys Are (Faultline Theater), Legal Tender Loving Care (Dragon Theater/Fuse Theater), Hidden: A Gender (Variance Festival), Pains of Youth (independently produced), and The Tempest (Barnstorm). They have assistant-directed around the Bay Area, including at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, Magic Theatre, and Shakespeare Santa Cruz, and sat on the literary council for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. They are a TITAN Award recipient, a two-time CA$H Grant recipient, a company member at the Ubuntu Theater Project, a former artistic director of the UC Santa Cruz poor theatre performance lab, Barnstorm, and a founding member of The Forum.
Quantum Dragon Theatre is a theatre company dedicated to bringing new and classic works of science-fiction and fantasy to the SF stage, along with works in any other genre appealing to the Bay’s ‘nerdy’ subculture. For more information, visit https://www.quantumdragon.org.