AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.
The Faggot King or The Troublesome Reign of Edward II
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 19, 2017
Contact: Jen Albert
[email protected]
or The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second
at the 2017 Hollywood Fringe Festival
Los Angeles, CA – The company and creative team behind last summer’s Punch and Judy get medieval on your ass as they return to Fringe with the earliest and bloodiest gay drama in the English canon … The Faggot King or The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second by Christopher Marlowe.
The Warrior-King Edward Longshanks has died and his son has ascended to the English throne. Though the armies of Scotland and France menace his borders, the new-crowned Edward II remains oblivious, preoccupied with pining for his exiled lover Piers Gaveston. In ordering Gaveston’s return despite Longshank’s dying wish to the contrary, young King Edward provokes the outrage of the church. The many disturbing changes that accompany Gaveston’s return arouse the alarm and anger of the nobility. And when Edward’s humiliated Queen allies herself with the rebellious Earl of March in a desperate bid to be rid of her hated rival Gaveston, the stage is set for a civil war that will divide and consume the realm.
The School of Night is proud to present a raucous blend of song, sex, spectacle, horror, gender-swapping, clashing steel and versified bombast such as only the most controversial playwright to emerge from the English renaissance could conjure.
Lust … obsession … adultery … treason … war … fabulous.
Owing to the inclusion of adult content, the production is not recommended for children.
Christopher Johnson (Director) most recently helmed the School of Night’s critically acclaimed Punch and Judy. Other Los Angeles directing credits include Entropy, The Pity of Things – Desert Aria, (both Theatre of NOTE) and Henry VI, Part I (The Production Company). Before moving to LA Chris was the founding artistic director of Chicago’s historic Defiant Theatre for whom he served as producer on dozens of projects including the U.S. premieres of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and Phaedra’s Love as well as multiple iterations of the cult-classic Action Movie: The Play. Defiant directing credits include Titus Andronicus, A Clockwork Orange, Macbeth, Dope and Hamlet plus world-premiere adaptations of Stephen King’s Apt Pupil and Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon (the latter garnering Chris a Jeff Citation for Best New Adaptation). Other Chicago directing credits include Balacarita: The Adventures of Young Krishna (Silk Road Theatre Project), Cave Dwellers (North Avenue Productions) and Dulcitius (The School of Night, pre-LA). He has appeared as an actor at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Lyric Opera, Chicago Opera Theatre, Redmoon Theater, The Building Stage, A Crew of Patches and Defiant Theatre.
Jen Albert (Producer/Fight Choreographer) is an actor, producer and award-winning fight choreographer. She earned a BA in theatre from Columbia College Chicago and became SAFD certified in all manner of stage combat before going on to get her Blue Belt in Kenpo. She is an emeritus company member of Babes with Blades, Chicago’s first all-female stage combat theatre company. She is currently a faculty member of Art of Acting – the Conservatory of Stella Adler in Hollywood where she teaches stage combat. Recent Los Angeles fight choreography credits include: The Big Chase, an immersive commercial (Asics), Normal (The Vagrancy), Punch and Judy (2016 LADCC Award for Fight Choreography and Stage Raw nominee), Entropy (Theatre of NOTE), Fifty Shades of Shrew (Broads’ Word Ensemble), The Noir Series (Heretick Theatre Lab), Henry VI, Part 1 (The Production Company), Big Love, Conduct of Life and Down in the Face of God (both The Vagrancy), Very Still and Hard to See, and Beauty Queen of Leenane(both The Production Company. Favorite roles as an actor include Kate in Fifty Shades of Shrew, Inez in Women w/o Walls (both with Broads’ Word Ensemble), Poison Inniman in Action Movie the Play (Defiant theatre), Gwen in Fifth of July (The Production Company) and Yvonne in War (Theatre Banshee).
Christopher Marlowe (Playwright) attended Corpus Christi College, Cambridge where he received a B.A. in 1584 and an M.A. in 1587. Upon graduation he relocated to London where he and roommate Thomas Kyd kicked off the era considered by many to represent the high point of English language drama. During his short life Marlowe was rumored to be an atheist, a brawler and murderer, a sodomite, a sorcerer, a Catholic, a counterfeiter and a spy in the service of Queen Elizabeth I. He died in 1593 at the age of 29, stabbed in the eye during a bar brawl for reasons that remain murky to this day. His credits as playwright include Dido, Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine the Great, Parts I and II, The Jew of Malta, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Edward II and The Massacre at Paris. In recent years scholars have concluded that he also co-authored Henry VI, Parts I-III and Edward III in partnership with William Shakespeare. A renowned translator of Latin classics, Marlowe’s rendition of Ovid’s Amores won the distinction of banning and burning by order of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The cast includes Adrianna Colón, Tiffany Cole, Alex Elliott-Funk, Kara Hume, Sondra Mayer, Drew Petriello, Eric Rollins, Heather Schmidt, J.B. Waterman and Jordan Worthy.
Production staff includes Linda Muggeridge (Costume Designer), Daniel Halden (Choral Director), Andrew Leman (Properties/Graphic Designer) and Erica Lawrence (Stage Manager).
There will be one preview performance on Saturday 6/3 at 8:00pm. Regular performances are Saturday 6/10 at 8:00pm, Sunday 6/11 at 8:00pm, Wednesday 6/14 at 8:00pm, Saturday 6/17 at 4:00pm, Sunday 6/18 at 2:00pm, Friday 6/23 at 10:00pm and Saturday 6/24 at 2:00pm.
Tickets are $7.50 for the preview and $15 for the regular run. Tickets may be purchased online at: www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/4595
All performances are at The Lounge Theatre, 6201 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90038.
The School of Night is a not-for-profit theatre company dedicated to the textual preservation and live presentation of the dramatic works of the European renaissance and their antecedents: the folk and religious dramas of the middle ages as well as the tragedies, comedies and spectacle entertainments of pagan antiquity.
The School of Night strives to employ a combination of the finest theatrical artistry and dramaturgical scholarship to create performances that evoke for a contemporary audience the same emotional immediacy, linguistic power, charged spirituality and theatrical vitality that these entertaining, artistically influential and culturally significant gems of world theatre provided audiences in their own times.
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