The moment we’ve all been waiting for is finally here… Audrey Kessinger’s breaking onto the theatre scene with a staged reading of her play Audrey Scare People Play. It’s going to be fantastic. If you didn’t know already, Audrey is my 5 year old daughter and she wrote a play this past March called Audrey Scare People Play. It blew up on the interwebs (seriously, it showed up on boingboing), and tonight the lovely people at San Francisco Theater Pub decided to include it in their evening Pub From Another World!

It all gets going at 8pm at Cafe Royale in San Francisco. Show up early, because I’m 99% sure it’ll be packed.

If you want a taste of the play before tonight, you can read it here.

Tickets are now on sale for the encore performances of Women In Solodarity: Cat Ladies! Buy your tickets today on Brown Paper Tickets!

Seriously… Buy your tickets right now… You don’t want to be sorry and miss the show because it sold out again!

Monday June 10th at 8pm

Tuesday June 11th at 8pm

General admission tickets are $10.

The address of the venue will be emailed to you after you buy your tickets, email info@allterraintheater.org if you have any questions.

There is a serious romance that happens whenever I think of a new play I want to write… The honeymoon stage. Next semester (my first semester at SFSU) I’ll be taking a class called, directed writing. Basically, a teacher reads a play I’m developing and acts as a dramaturge. I was very excited to sign up for this class, and when I thought about which play I wanted to work on I decided to write something brand new for it. I was advised to write a new full length play for each semester I have at grad school, so this will be my first of (hopefully) six. I figure if I have a first draft before August (and I will be writing 31 short plays) I’ll be all set to work on this play all semester.

Now to the fun part… The romantic part… I love my idea. I don’t want to give away too much… But right now it’s looking to be an all female cast… Sci-fi… And there will be a giant squid in the opening scene. Yes. A giant squid. What’s not to love? This is the fun part… The part that I go to sleep at night and think up all the exciting scenes I want to include… The characters I get to create. I know there will come a time when I want to shove the whole script into a pot and set it aflame… But for know I’m in love.

Ready for the fantastic news???

The Fantasy Club is cast! And I am humbled by the talent that has signed on for this play, let me tell you…

The Fantasy Club

Written by Rachel Bublitz

Directed by Tracy Held Potter

Performed by:

Siobhan Doherty… Frances

Tavis Kammet… Max

Claire Rice… Samantha

Rob Dario… Jacob

And of course…

Stage Management by Chelsey Little

I am over the moon excited about my cast. And I hope you join us at The AlcoveTheater in August! Here are the dates again, in case you forgot:

Friday, Aug 2 @ 8pm

Saturday, Aug 3 @ 8pm

Sunday, Aug 4 @ 5pm

Friday, Aug 9 @ 8pm

Saturday, Aug 10 @ 8pm

Sunday, Aug 11 @ 5pm

Excellent news this morning! All Terrain Theater has added two encore performances of their hit showcase Women In Solodarity: Cat Ladies! The shows will be at the same location, a house in Berkeley (for the address you must buy tickets!), and the dates are Monday June 10th, and Tuesday June 11th! The show will be on sale soon, be on the look out because the whole run sold out in a snap the last time!

Time to get real guys… In one week my little girl’s play will be staged in a reading for San Francisco Theater Pub’s Pub From Another World. Haven’t heard of Audrey Scare People Play? Click here to read it.

Here are all the details:

“This strange brew of stories was concocted by Timothy Kay, Audrey Kessinger, Sang Kim, Allison Page, Sunil Patel, Bridgette Dutta Portman, Kirk Shimano, and Marissa Skudlarek. The intrepid troupe of actors includes Giovanna Arietta, Sam Bertken, Andrew Chung, AJ Davenport, Colleen Egan, Caitlin Evenson, Paul Jennings, Timothy Kay, Dan Kurtz, Meg O’Connor, Sunil Patel, Peter Townley, and Olivia Youngers.

The wormhole will be open for one night only: Monday, May 20, at 8 PM at the Cafe Royale. Admission is free and no reservations are required for this journey, but we recommend you come early for the best seats. Hyde Away Blues BBQ will provide food for all human guests.”

The little girl of the hour will be in attendance, so come out and support theatre, children, and scaring people! And as a warning, I imagine it’ll get pretty packed, so be sure and show up early.

See you next week!

Happy Mother’s Day!

We owe a lot to our mom’s, they brought us into this wild and crazy world. Tell her thank you today!

MCTC of the Mesa College Theatre Company is an amazing theatre program down in San Diego that I was lucky enough to go through. It’s a two year program run through a junior college, and no matter what your focus is you get the basic skills to do everything in a theatre. They put on two shows a year, nearly 100% run by students (teachers direct most of the shows), and while you’re putting shows on you go back forth taking acting and production courses.

In my two years, I was on the costume crew, light crew, set crew, prop master, actor, director, and image designer (for my last show with the company we did a multimedia documentary style play about the Cedar Fire from 2003, I was in charge of finding and licensing pictures and video shown during the show). In just two years! It goes without saying that I bonded tremendously with the folks that I went through the program with, that’s how us theatre people roll in case you didn’t know… But beyond gaining friends, I got a powerful background in theatre. I probably can’t walk into a theatre and fix lights for anyone, but I have some basics down. I know how to run a board, I can sew, and I know how to operate a drill. And, on top of all of that, we also read a play a week.

MCTC is run by a woman named Kris Clark. She runs the production side of things and asks as a walking theatrical how-to guide. She has been a mentor to me through the years and I was one of the first people that I sent my first play (The Fantasy Club) to.

If you’re looking to get into theatre and think you need some training before you jump in, find a program like this. Even if you just want to act, or you just want to direct… Knowing more about what everyone is doing just makes you a more helpful piece to anyone’s theatre puzzle… And if you want to be in theatre, being a helpful person is half the battle.

Here are some hilarious pictures of my time at MCTC:

We did Wild Oats, here I am about to get run over by a train:

And here in strange underwear:

I was one of three directors for the student directed one acts:

Cast and crew of the one act I directed! It’s A Marriage Proposal by Chekhov.

And more pictures from that show:

Rehearsing for the student directed one acts.

All of the directors, and some of my bestest friends… Jessi Reed, me in the middle, and Timothy Bundalian.

I was notified this morning that my short play about woman’s reproductive rights, My Body, is a semi-finalist for the 2013 sUBVERSIVE sHORTS Showcase! They are handing over the top scripts to the prospective directors, and the directors will have the final say. I feel pretty great it’s gotten this far! Stay tuned to see if My Body gets into the showcase!

99% of the time I love, love, love working on plays that I write. 99% of the time. Then sometimes theres a script or a deadline that just gets under my skin. Right now I have a script that I don’t want to work on and a deadline that I don’t want to meet. I’ve been avoiding both for weeks. Luckily with me being so busy I can get away with it pretty easily… But there are no swim classes this afternoon (Monday through Thursday I take my kids to swim class from 4-6), and I have nothing else I’m supposed to be writing or working on and so… So, here it goes… I’m ready to pull some teeth and hair, and hate every freakin’ minute of it… I hope in the end the script and I both are better for it.