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Tickets go on sale
Oct 9, 2024
The Actors’ Reading Collective presents
the West Coast premiere of
The Antipodes
by Annie Baker
directed by Alyson Schacherer
November 8 - December 1, 2024
514 Fourth St.
San Rafael, CA 94901
​​​A play about people telling stories about telling stories.
In Annie Baker’s The Antipodes, a group of people sit around a table for a TV show? A film? A mythology? This is a world where ghostly fables co-exist with mundane discussions of snacks and sexual exploits, where the vague instruction to tell stories about “something monstrous” (though “it might not be a literal monster”) becomes maddeningly impossible. Part satire, part sacred rite, The Antipodes asks what value stories have for a world in crisis.​
Running time: 1h55m, no intermission
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Cast: Samuel Ademola*, Harry Davis*, Anthony Fusco*, Isabel Langen*, Robert Parsons*, Timothy Roy Redmond*, Rajiv Shah*, David Sinaiko*, Liz Sklar*​​
*Member, Actors' Equity
Annie Baker
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright
Annie Baker's full-length plays include The Flick ( Pulitzer Prize, and Critics’ Circle Theatre Award, OBIE Award for Playwriting, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), Circle Mirror Transformation (OBIE Award for Best New American Play, Drama Desk nomination for Best Play), The Aliens (OBIE Award for Best New American Play), Body Awareness (Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations for Best Play/Emerging Playwright), and an adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, for which she also designed the costumes (Soho Rep). This year she moved from the stage to the screen with her recent film Planet Janet.
Ms. Baker was named a 2017 MacArthur "Genius" Fellow, recognizing her gift for “mining the minutiae of how we speak, act, and relate to one another and the absurdity and tragedy that result from the limitations of language.” Her plays have been performed at over 150 theaters across the USA and in England, Australia, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, Latvia, Sweden and Russia.
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Baker's The Antipodes premiered Off-Broadway at the Signature Theatre Company in 2017, with a subsequent production in 2019 at the National in London. With your help, ARC is excited to produce the West Coast premiere for Bay Area audiences in November 2024.
Fall 2024: ... top theater picks
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Lily Janiak September 5, 2024 Updated: September 5, 2024, 2:10 am
https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/theater/bay-area-fall-theater-2024-19666743
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The Antipodes. In the pandemic’s early days, James Carpenter and fellow A-list Bay Area actors started doing what they could to stay busy, keep their skills sharp and still feel like artists by reading plays together on Zoom. But what started as, jokingly, Just a Bunch of Friends Sitting Around Reading Plays Theater Company soon became much more serious, meaningful and organized. Four and a half years later, what’s now called the Actors’ Reading Collective is mounting its first fully staged production, and it’s a hot-ticket West Coast premiere by Annie Baker, of The Flick and Janet Planet fame.
The Antipodes is set in a well-resourced but windowless conference room where a group is brainstorming story ideas for an unnamed purpose. It could be a TV pilot, or something much weirder. To generate possibilities, the lanyard-wearing participants dredge up the most embarrassing anecdotes from their own lives, told with Baker’s fearless candor and her unparalleled ear for unfiltered human speech.
