MADHOUSE TO TAKE THE FRINGE BY “STORM”

Uranium Madhouse: Conversation Storm and The House of Cards

May 8, 2011

In its Los Angeles premier, Rick Burkhardt’s “Conversation Storm,” along with Charles Mee’s “The House of Cards,” will launch Uranium Madhouse, the Los Angeles-based theater cabal, a participant in the 2011 Hollywood Fringe Festival. Directed by Founding Artistic Director Andrew Utter, the plays examine the sport of verbal sparring, practical applications of torture, extremes of human cruelty and the fragility of life, love and friendship.

Humor and horror collide in “Conversation Storm,” described by the director as a “giddy shotgun marriage of Chekhov and Brecht.” An examination of the question of torture, the play reunites three friends in a quiet café after a 20-year separation. As they talk, an intricate game evolves, entailing time loops and role-playing, as the friends wrestle with Donald Rumsfeld’s statement, “People are fungible.” “Conversation Storm” was voted Best New Play at the San Francisco Fringe Festival in 2007.

“In recent years, listening to voices in the U.S. mainstream having a ’conversation about torture’ felt to me like being trapped in a train car with a bunch of people who are having a ‘conversation about cannibalism.’”
—Rick Burkhardt

“The House of Cards" by Charles Mee, offers an astounding meditation on the simultaneous presence of sheer beauty and terrifying atrocity in our world. While building a house of cards, a woman unfurls parables of spellbinding mystery and terrifying violence.

Mee, known for his radical, collage-like reconstructions of existing texts, says of his work -

“I like plays that are not too neat, too finished, too presentable. My plays are broken, jagged, filled with sharp edges, filled with things that take sudden turns, careen into each other, smash up, veer off in sickening turns. That feels good to me. It feels like my life. It feels like the world.”

In its premiere production, Uranium Madhouse seeks to fulfill the company’s promise to “unleash chain reactions of personal and social transformation.”

As the company’s Artistic Director, Utter says “we see ourselves as the custodians of spiritual uranium . . . we see the theater as a place for madness . . . we see the actor as one who is ready to surrender her whole being to the passions, cares and extreme circumstances of another, effectively inducing a kind of madness in herself, a radioactive madness.”

For more information about Uranium Madhouse, as well as a complete list of the company’s Advisory Board and Associate Artists, visit www.uraniummadhouse.org.

“Conversation Storm/The House of Cards” begins June 10th at 8 pm and will continue Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays until June 25th at the El Centro Theater in Hollywood, 804 N. El Centro Ave. Hollywood, CA 90038.

Tickets are $18 and available through both Brown Paper Tickets, http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/171485 and The Hollywood Fringe Festival, http://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/502.

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Yolanda Seabourne
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