RAT A (somewhat) modest Proposal

[brad rothbart <scrdchao@nni.com>]

All,

As part of my UNDERGROUND VOICES  reading series,
  I am doing a reading of STATIONS OF DESIRE,     conceived and edited 
by  Caridad Svich, on Monday 5 June.  at 8 pm. This was originally 
read at Bottom's Dream Theatre as part of the 1999 LA Rat Conference.

  STATIONS is a unique piece. An email text collaboration,  the  work 
was written by 12 outstanding American  playwrights, with the title 
as a common theme.
  The  Playwrights involved are Neena Beber, Cusi  Cram, Jose Ignacio 
Cortinas,  Heather Dundas,Julie Hebert, Julie Jensen, Ruth Margraff, 
Rachelle Minkoff, Anne Garcia Romero, Caridad Svich, Candfido Tirado 
and Elizabeth Wong

Because the work  was written in a manner reminiscent of a quilting 
bee, where everyone sends in a  square to a central location, and 
also because the title suggests  movement- I had the idea of 
replicating this on   a macro level (traveling the whole quilt)  by 
having multiple readings of the script on the same night ( Monday 5 
June @ 8PM ( in your Time Zone))  in cities  across the country. 
There are two caveats to this idea:
  1) that all theaters involved be resident,  not University theatres 
( this time around), and
2) that there only be one theater in each city involved with this project.
 

So far, theatres that have signed onto this project (not including 
Theatre Double in Philadelphia, my home base)  are:
  Bottom's Dream in Los Angeles
  Salvage Vanguard in Austin
New Georges in NYC

  I know  I would like at least 10 theatres involved in this.
  Cities that I am targeting include Boston, D.C/Baltimore, Atlanta, 
Denver, possibly Minneapolis,   Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, San 
Diego. I am more than willing to have that list added to, however. 
Please surprise me.

  Protocol: All participating theatres would be responsible for 
sending a priority Mail SASE to pay for script costs, casting and 
publicizing the reading.
   You would also be responsible for downloading ICQ- an  Instant 
Messaging  service which can be   found at http://www.ICQ.com, so 
that all theatres can keep in cyber-contact as the reading moves 
across North America.

  Reasons for signing on:
  1 Artistic reason:
1) it's fun, and a fairly low resource project.

1 pragmatic reason
  1) being able to  say you participated along with 15 other theaters 
across North America on a multiple-space, time- specific reading of a 
text that was itself created through email  text collaboration  looks 
great on a grant proposal.

   Feel free to answer me either on or of -list , and also  feel free 
to  Forward this proposal to other theatres   that you feel might be 
interested.

Brad Rothbart
Theatre Double