WEST COAST PREMIERE
Three Seconds in the Key
By Deb Margolin
Directed by Leigh Fondakowski
Opens: January 13 through February 17, 2007
Previews begin January 10th
Press Night is Saturday, January 13th!
San Francisco, CA (December, 2006) – The SF Playhouse is pleased to announce the West Coast Premiere of Deb Margolin’s Three Seconds in the Key will be directed by Leigh Fondakowski, (Peoples Temple, Laramie Project). With Three Seconds in the Key, Leigh combines her all-state first team high school basketball career as point guard with her success as a director to bring this West Coast Premiere to life.
The cast features Amy Resnick*, Gideon Lazarus, Paul Stovall*, Skyler Cooper, Ahmad Russ, Casey Jackson, Daryl Harper and Chris Walsh. The creative team for Three Seconds in the Key will include Bill English (Set Design), Matt O’Hare (Sound Design), Michael Palumbo (Lighting Design) and Brian Degan Scott (Video Design), Vincent Avery (Costume Design).*Appears Courtesy of Actors Equity.
The production will open January 13th and run through February 17th at the SF Playhouse in San Francisco at 533 Sutter Street and previews will begin January 10th.
Three Seconds in the Keyis a meditation on love, illness and basketball. It is the story of one mother's fall and rise as she competes with Hodgkin’s disease for her son and her body.
In Three Seconds in the Key Mother (Amy Resnick) is battling Hodgkin's disease and a bad attitude. She yearns to live and raise her young son, but her body and will are weak. Luckily, her passion for the Knicks—which she shares with her boy—never lets up. In a zany dreamscape of a story, she receives visits from the team's star player who razzes her and builds her spirit while they bicker, play cards, and exchange Yiddish lessons for court lessons.
The play was inspired by Deb Margolin’s own battle with Hodgkin’s disease. She said, "The way I coped with it was by watching basketball with my son, and we lived from game to game." It was during that period of basketball obsession that Margolin promised her son that she would turn that period of their lives into a play which they performed together off Broadway in 2001. For Margolin, one's writing and one's body are inextricably bound. When faced with serious illness, Margolin said, "I felt like I was living in exile from my body, and what are you then?" The basketball player's job is to pull her back into her body, reminding her that she is first and foremost a mother.
For tickets ($60 Opening Night January 13th, $36 regular, and $18 preview performances) or more information, the public may contact the SF Playhouse box office at 415-677-9596, or visit www.sfplayhouse.org, TicketWeb.com, or the TIX box office on Union Square.
Deb Margolin (playwright) is a playwright, performance artist and founding member of Split Britches Theater Company. She is the author of seven full-length solo performance pieces, which she has toured throughout the United States, as well as numerous plays, and is the recipient of a 1999-2000 OBIE Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance and the Kesselring Playwriting Award for her play Three Seconds in the Key in 2005. Her play Bringing the Fishermen Home premiered at the Cleveland Public Theater in 1999. Deb has enjoyed commissions from the Jewish Museum of New York, the Joseph Papp Public Theater, the Actor's Theater of Louisville and other theaters, has lectured extensively at universities throughout the country, has been artist in residence at Hampshire College and University of Hawaii and Zale writer-in-residence at Tulane University, and served in the fall of 2000 as artist in residence in New York University's Department of Undergraduate Drama. Currently she is a lecturer in Theatre Studies at Yale University. A book of Deb's performance pieces and plays, entitled Of All The Nerve: Deb Margolin SOLO , was published in 1999 by Cassell/Continuum Press.
Leigh Fondakowski (Director) was the Head Writer of The Laramie Project and has been a member of Tectonic Theatre Project since 1995. She is an Emmy nominated co-screenwriter for the adaptation of The Laramie Project for HBO. Her latest work, The People’s Temple, has been performed under her direction at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Perseverance Theater, and The Guthrie Theater. Another original play, I Think I Like Girls, played to sold-out audiences in San Francisco and La Jolla and was voted one of the top 10 plays of 2002 by The Advocate. Other directing credits include: I Think I Like Girls (La Jolla Playhouse and Encore Theatre), The Laramie Project (Berkeley Repertory Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, Perseverance Theatre), La Voix Humaine by Jean Cocteau (Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh), Agatha by Marguerite Duras (French Alliance, New York City), Gwen John adapted from the novel by Jane Warrick (HERE, New York City), and readings and workshops of new plays by Jeff Baron, Stephen Belber, Colman Domingo, and Lisa Ramirez. Leigh is currently developing The Idea of Charlotte with Tectonic Theatre Project and About Face Theatre. She is an associate professor at Naropa University.
Amy Resnick (lead) is appearing with SF Playhouse for the very first time. NY: Cherry Lane, Lincoln Center, Synchronicity Space LA: Mark Taper , South Coast Rep REGIONAL: Orson's Shadow MTC, Brooklyn Boy Theatreworks, Small Tragedy, Old Neighborhood Aurora, Pride & Prejudice, directed by Jon Jory Arizona Rep, San Jose Rep, Alliance of Atlanta, The Laramie Project Berkeley Rep, For Better or Worse Berkeley Rep, Arizona Rep, Tale of the Allergist's Wife ,Aaron Sorkin Hidden In This Picture , Around the World in 80 Days, Boston Marriage B Street Theatre, I Think I Like Girls Encore, La Jolla Playhouse, Why We Have a Body, House of Yes, Magic. Ms Resnick is the recipient of six Drama-logue awards, a Bay Area Critic's Award and a Goodman Award for excellence in acting. TV and Film include Law & Order, Picket Fences, and Haiku Tunnel.
Founded by Bill English and Susi Damilano, SF Playhouse is Union Square’s intimate, professional theatre. Using Equity actors and world class design, the SF Playhouse, which won the Bay Guardian’s 2006 Best Off Broadway Theatre Award and about which the San Francisco Chronicle raved, “San Francisco’s newest theatre isn’t just another tiny stage carved out of a storefront . . . its an enticing introduction to a new company,” has become an intimate theatre alternative to the traditional Union Square theatre fare, garnering 20 Bay Area Theatre Critic nominations in its first year. Providing a creative home and inspiring environment where actors, directors, writers, designers, and theatre lovers converge, SF Playhouse, hailed as a “small delicacy” by SF Weekly and “eclectic” by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, strives to create works that celebrate the human spirit.
