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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PHILADELPHIA PREMIERE OF ZAYD DOHRN’S SICK

PHILADELPHIA, PA – April 7, 2010 – Luna Theater Company concludes their ‘Psychosomatic Season’ with the Philadelphia Premiere of SICK by Zayd Dohrn.  SICK will be performed at the Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5 located at 825 Walnut Street in Philadelphia, previewing April 9; opening Saturday, April 10 and running through May 2, 2010.  Tickets range from $10 to $35 and can be purchased by calling Luna Theater Company’s Box Office at (215) 704-0033 or by visiting www.LunaTheater.org  Media interviews, actor bios and digital photos available upon request. 

Story Summary

A dark comedy about one family's attempts to keep out the "sickness" of the world by isolating themselves in a house where all the windows are covered with plastic, where the air-purifiers hum constantly, and where visitors are unwelcome.  

About the Playwright

ZAYD DOHRN

A Playwright’s Glimmers of a Fugitive Childhood (from New York Times; Sept 2009)

By Patrick Healy

When Zayd Dohrn began writing "Sick," a play about a Manhattan family going to extremes to shield themselves from pollution, he tapped into anxieties around him: he was living in Beijing at the time, during the height of the SARS epidemic, and he had moved there from New York, where environmental fallout from the Sept. 11 attacks was widely feared. But Mr. Dohrn, now 32, had even more personal experience to draw on. Until he was almost 4 years old his parents, the former Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, were living with him in hiding in Morningside Heights, and using assumed names — even for Zayd, who was known simply as Z. Only a handful of memories remain with Mr. Dohrn from that young age, and yet those years on the run from the police — followed by his mother’s brief time in jail after she and Mr. Ayers turned themselves in — have fueled an abiding fascination with living under extreme conditions and pressures.

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His work is drawing attention from a growing number of theaters across the country, with “Sick” running at the Berkshire Theater Festival through Sunday. Another play, “Reborning,” involving a woman trying to recreate and rewrite her past, was produced for the Summer Play Festival at the Public Theater in July. “A lot of what I think and write about deals with constraints and looking for a way out, especially in family situations, when the struggle to live free of constraints can take an emotional toll,” Mr. Dohrn said recently over coffee near –

Columbia University, a few blocks from the 123rd Street apartment where he and his parents lived in hiding. “It may sound strange, but I didn’t feel especially smothered by my family’s constraints, even though I was aware of them,” he continued. “They were simply something I was aware of. The worst year for me was when my mother went to jail. It was so sad and scary. I remember visiting her and sneaking in ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ and ‘Charlotte’s Web’ through the metal detectors so that she could read to me.”

An earlier play of Mr. Dohrn’s, "Haymarket," is his most overtly political and historical work, about a real-life 19th-century gathering of radical demonstrators in Haymarket Square in Chicago. A bomb goes off during their rally, and some of the radicals go into hiding afterward. The incident evokes an experience of Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin, who fled a Greenwich Village town house in 1970 after the accidental explosion of a bomb killed three fellow members of the Weather Underground, an organization that conducted a campaign of bombing public buildings in the 1970s as a form of protest. Mr. Dohrn does not include any explicit echoes of his parents in “Haymarket,” though, and he said that in general he tried to avoid heavily reflecting his own life — or theirs — in his work so far. “For me it’s not very interesting to write about myself or my parents,” he said. “That doesn’t create any special friction for me.”

Still, Mr. Dohrn said he could imagine writing a play someday about the experience of his father during the 2008 presidential election. Mr. Ayers, now an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, became a lightning rod for opponents of the candidate Barack Obama because the two men were acquaintances and neighbors in Chicago. Leading Republicans attacked Mr. Obama for having ties with, in Mr. Dohrn’s words, “this extreme caricature of my father as a so-called unrepentant terrorist.” (Mr. Dohrn’s mother is an associate professor of law at Northwestern University.) “It was a very weird experience, sitting down with my dad and watching CNN and Fox News and ‘The Daily Show’ describing him as this wild symbol of extremism rather than as a human being,” Mr. Dohrn said. “While it wasn’t particularly painful — my dad and I would laugh about some of the coverage — it was surreal and at times quite ominous. I could certainly see creating a play out of the experience.”

 “Sick,” meanwhile, was inspired foremost by Mr. Dohrn’s observations of residents of Beijing wearing surgical masks, closing their shops and staying indoors during the SARS crisis. (This year’s swine flu epidemic gives the 2003 outbreak of SARS, also a respiratory illness, a particular relevance.) Mr. Dohrn was living in Beijing with his wife, Rachel DeWoskin, a writer and actress, who had a starring role in a television soap opera, “Foreign Babes in Beijing.” In the play the mother in the family — played by Lisa Emery in the Berkshire

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 production — first enters the stage wearing a surgical mask, and uses air filters, oxygen tanks and other means to purify the air for her two teenage children.

The director of the Berkshire production, David Auburn, is himself the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “Proof,” which also explored the bonds and tensions of a close-knit troubled family. (“Proof” ran for more than two years on Broadway, winning the 2001 Tony Award for best play, and was later made into a film.) Mr. Auburn said he was recruited to direct “Sick” by one of its Berkshire cast members, Greg Keller, who put him in touch with Mr. Dohrn. Mr. Auburn said that while he recognized themes in “Sick” that might reflect Mr. Dohrn’s experiences with his own parents, he added that he never spoke at length with Mr. Dohrn about living underground as a child. “It’s not something we ever really went into, in part because I tried to keep my focus on the text,” Mr. Auburn said. “I’m always interested in what the playwright intends, what they are trying to express, and usually that comes down to figuring out each moment with the actors in a given scene. But I didn’t see a need to dwell on Zayd’s past.”

Mr. Dohrn added that as much as his plays may have echoes from his own past, “Sick” also reflected his own experiences as a new father himself. “My wife and I had also just had a baby when I was working on ‘Sick,’ and I was thinking a lot about how to raise this fragile newborn,” he said. “Relatively normal, sane people can really go kind of crazy when it comes to protecting their children.”

About the Producing Artistic Director

GREGORY SCOTT CAMPBELL

Gregory is Founder and Producing Artistic Director of the Luna Theater Company.  Previously with the Luna, Gregory directed Fool for Love, The Turn of the Screw, Burn This, Agnes of God, Unwrap Your Candy, Lebensraum, True West, Breathing Corpses, Grace, Line and Orange Flower Water, Hot ‘n Throbbing and Slasher. Gregory is a past board member of the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia and chair of the Spark Small Theatre Committee.

About Luna Theater Company

Mission: Luna Theater Company is dedicated to producing intimate, intelligent, and intense work that delves into the human psyche. We seek to become the destination for today’s provocative voices, which share our aesthetic for the darkly tragic-comic.

Funding for Luna’s 2009-2010 season has been provided in part by the Wyncote Foundation, The Philadelphia Cultural Fund, The Samuel S Fels Fund and The Charlotte Cushman Foundation.  For more information on Luna Theater and its upcoming performances, please visit www.LunaTheater.org.

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SICK

by Zayd Dohrn

FACT SHEET

Media Contact:

Gregory Scott Campbell

Producing Artistic Director

Luna Theater Company

215.704.0033

lunatheater@ymail.com

Creative Team                                                    Cast

Zayd Dohrn                             Playwright                                Bethany Ditnes                       Sarah

Gregory Scott Campbell         Director                                    David Hutchman         Sidney

Caitlin Reed                            Production Stage Manager          *Sally Mercer                        Maxine

Dirk Durosette                                   Scenic Design                           Gregg Pica                  Jim

Andrew Cowles                      Lighting Design                         Michael Tomasetti     Davey 

Alison Johnson                                   Costume Design

*Member of Actors Equity Association; the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States

Performance Schedule (April 9 – May 2, 2010)

Preview

Friday, April 9, 8:00pm

Regular Run

Opening Night – Saturday, April 10, 7:00pm

Sunday, April 11, 6:00pm

Wednesday, April 14, 7:00pm

Thursday, April 15, 7:00pm

Friday, April 16, 8:00pm

Saturday, April 17, 8:00pm

Sunday, April 18, 2:00pm

Wednesday, April 21, 7:00pm

Friday, April 23, 8:00pm

Saturday, April 24, 8:00pm

Sunday, April 25, 6:00pm

Wednesday, April 28, 7:00pm

Thursday, April 29, 7:00pm

Friday, April 30, 8:00pm

Saturday, May 1, 8:00pm

Sunday, May 2, 2:00pm AND 6:00pm

FINIS