FEBRUARY 12 - March 13, 2011
Now at Track 16, Bergamot Station:
City Garage’s “Critic’s Choice” LA Premiere of Paradise Park
City Garage is proud to announce its new collaboration with Track 16 at Bergamot Station. On February 12th it will extend for the second time its LA Times “Critic’s Choice” and LA Weekly “Go” production of Paradise Park by Charles L. Mee in this new location for a limited run of fourteen performances only.
Production Title: Paradise Park
Author: Charles L. Mee
Director: Frederique Michel
Re-Opening Date: Saturday, February 12, 2011
New Closing Date: Sunday, March 13, 2011
Performance Schedule: Fridays & Saturdays 8:00PM, Sundays 2:00PM
Admission: $25.00, Students/Seniors $15.00
Sundays: “Pay-What-You-Can”
Box Office/Information: (310) 319-9939
Purchase Tickets Online or visit citygarage
Performance Address: Track 16, Building C1
Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Ave.
Santa Monica, Ca, 90404
Directions: City Garage is now performing at the Track 16 Gallery at Bergamot Station, which is located near the intersection of Olympic and Cloverfield in Santa Monica. 10 West to Cloverfield Exit. North on Cloverfield to Michigan Ave. Enter the Main Gate of Bergamot Station. Building C1 is to the left.
Paradise Park
By Charles L. Mee
Welcome to Paradise Park by Charles L. Mee, where nothing is quite as it seems. City Garage is proud to re-open its critically acclaimed production at Track 16, Bergamot Station. Pay your admission, get on the boat, and let your imagination take you into a unique, magic world of carnival. Or is it a Club Med for mad people? Is Ella really going to run away with an elephant? Does Benny have any chance of love with her? Why does Darling, a sixteen-year-old girl, have a crush on a man who wears a dress? And are Nancy and Morton, her parents, completely insane or just looking for the meaning of life? Why does Vikram dream of Edgar, the schizophrenic ventriloquist, and are his dummies, Mortimer and Charlie, real or not? Will anyone ever make it back to Londonland or Hamptonland, and is there a Civilization World anywhere close? Come take a ride with us and discover a secret you won’t forget. Beware of the crocodile!
Frederique Michel & Charles Duncombe
Frederíque Michel, Artistic Director
Frederíque was born in Paris and studied theatre at the Conservatoire. She has led the company as Artistic Director since its founding in 1987. She received a Dramalogue Award for her direction of Dissident. Her 1998 production of George Sand: An Erotic Odyssey in Seven Tableaux was nominated for four L.A. Weekly Theater Awards, including Best Director. She was nominated again for Best Director for MedeaText: Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore (2000). In 2005 she won the LA Weekly Award for Best Direction (one-act) for La Leçon. Her production of The Battle: ABC was nominated for Best Direction and received the 2006 LA Weekly Award for Best Ensemble. She once again won Best Direction (one-act) for Quartet at the 2008 LA Weekly Theater Awards and was also nominated for her direction of The Bald Soprano. At the 2009 LA Weekly Theater Awards, she received (along with Charles Duncombe) the “Queen of the Angels Award” for “decades of directing and producing scintillating, politically charged theater that challenges audiences to reconsider their assumptions about the nature of politics and the nature of theater itself.”
Charles A. Duncombe, Managing Director
Charles is a writer, director and designer. He began his partnership with Frederique Michel in 1985, and he has designed all of her work since then. He has won two Dramalogue awards for production design and in 1999 won the L.A. Weekly Theater Award for Best Lighting Design for George Sand: An Erotic Odyssey in Seven Tableaux (1998). He was nominated for two L.A. Weekly awards for MedeaText: Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore (2000): Best Adaptation, and Best Set. He was nominated again for two L.A. Weekly awards for Frederick of Prussia/GeorgeW’s Dream of Sleep (2001): Best Adaptation, and Production Design. His play Patriot Act won the Fratti/Newman Award for Political Playwriting in 2005 and opened in New York at the Castillo Theater as part of their 2008 season. He won the 2006 LA Weekly Theatre Award for Best Production Design for the entire Three by Mee season and was nominated again in 2007 for Production Design for Quartet. In 2009 he was nominated for Best Adaptation for The Mission (Accomplished). At the 2009 LA Weekly Theater Awards, he received (along with Frederique Michel) the “Queen of the Angels Award” for their contributions to Los Angeles theater. Most recently he was nominated for an LA Weekly Theater Award for his adapation of The Trojan Women.
About City Garage
The company at City Garage has been producing innovative, award-winning theater in Santa Monica for nearly 25 years. It was founded in 1987 by Artistic Director Frederíque Michel and Managing Director Charles Duncombe. It creates and presents original works that explore contemporary ideas and issues in a distinctive, strongly physical, highly visual, multi-disciplinary style.
It has had more than two dozen “Critic’s Choice” or “Pick of the Week” productions. It received four L.A. Weekly Theatre Award nominations for its production George Sand: An Erotic Odyssey in Seven Tableaux (1998, four more for MedeaText: Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore (2000), and another two for Frederick of Prussia/GeorgeW’s Dream of Sleep (2001). Its staging of The Empire Builders (2004) by Boris Vian was nominated by the Weekly for Production of the Year, while its revival of Ionesco’s The Lesson (2007) received nominations in both direction and performance categories, winning the award for Best Direction. Heiner Müller’s The Battle: ABC was nominated for Best Direction and Best Ensemble in 2006 and won the Ensemble award. In 2007, its Three by Mee season received four LA Weekly nominations, including Production of the Year for Agamemnon. The season as a whole won in the Production Design category. In 2008, the company received seven nominations in six categories, including Best Ensemble (one-act) and Best Comedy Ensemble, and took home awards for Best Direction (one-act) and Best Performance (one-act). In 2009, the company earned six nominations including one for Best Ensemble and Best Adaptation for The Mission (Accomplished). In that same year, company founders Frederíque Michel and Charles Duncombe won the LA Weekly’s “Queen of the Angels” award for decades of contributions to L.A. theater. Its new versions of the Moliere classic The Bourgeois Gentillhome (2009) and Beamarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro (2010) were both “Critic’s Choice” in the LA Times, as was its recent original work about human rights atrocities in Darfur The Trojan Women: LA/Darfur Dreamscape.
The company’s work with Fassbinder texts has been featured in two German documentaries: Fassbinder in Hollywood, and Fassbinder: Love, Life, and Celluloid. Three of its Heiner Müller productions have been discussed in the book Müller in America published in New York in 2003. In the summer of 2004, in New York, the company received an Otto, a national award for political theatre (past recipients include Laurie Anderson, Bread and Puppets Theater, Steppenwolf Theater, and Heiner Müller). It was honored that year alongside Robert Wilson, El Teatro Campesino, and Charles Mee.