This weekend on the City Garage YouTube channel, we’re happy to present “The Ann Bronston Story Project,” a selection of stories written by company member Ann Bronston and performed by Troy Dunn, Lindsay Plake, and Martha Duncan. They are stories of love, loss, sex, and family that unravel the secret longings and conflicts that can both torment and transform us. I hope you will check them out. And on our web series “Animal Farm: Conversations on Theater and Politics with Steven Leigh Morris and Guests,” Steven talks with Gary Grossman, Artistic Director of the Skylight Theater about the continuing lobbying efforts to pass California Senate Bill 805 to help small nonprofits adapt to the requirements of AB5—especially LA’s alternative theaters.
Correction: In last week’s episode we incorrectly identified our guest Angela J. Davis as a prosecutor for the LA County Superior Court. Our apologies. She was formerly a Federal Prosecutor for the Central District of California, and is now serving as a Commissioner for the LA County Superior Court’s Family Division.
And here is a link to “The Ann Bronston Story Project.” It will be showing on our City Garage YouTube channel from 8:00pm this Friday, June 11th, through noon on Friday, June 18th.
We’re also excited to announce a new project we’ve created just for streaming! Four monologues from “10 x 10” by Neil LaBute. LaBute is one of our favorite playwrights, someone who is willing to take an unflinching look at the truth of things. Not afraid to shock or offend. He pulls no punches and is always after the hard truth of what people do and why they do it. Make sure you mark next Friday, June 18th for the debut of our first original streaming project! More information to come in next week’s newsletter.
“An eerie, atmospheric staging at City Garage in Santa Monica revisits Havel’s absurdist 1986 portrait of Iron Curtain paranoia…The material is well suited to the stylish City Garage aesthetic, as director Frédérique Michel and designer Charles A. Duncombe lean into Havel’s extensive use of repetition to evoke a visceral sense of Leopold’s paralysis…. in an authoritarian state, the only thing worse than being a perceived threat is to become irrelevant.” — By Philip Brandes, LA Times
“As ever, City Garage surprises and haunts. Every cast member of Largo Desolato is a veteran of the company now, and deliver performances with power as well as precision. The direction continues to use the (seemingly) simple presence of being in the same room with another human being to vast effect. The result feels raw, and terribly honest.” — Zahir Blue, Night Tinted Glasses
City Garage stages a timely revival of Havel’s classic piece about totalitarian regimes, censorship, and the price of integrity. In this semi-autobiographical play, translated by Czech-born playwright Tom Stoppard, a dissident intellectual, Leopold Nettles, is dogged by the secret police, pressured by his friends, and nagged by his housemate to just shut up and go along. Shadowy figures arrive to offer him a deal to stay out of prison but Nettles can’t get himself to accept. His world starts to dissolve in a hallucinatory battle of conscience but will he ultimately have the courage of his convictions?
Havel wrote the play when he had just emerged from prison in 1984. He went on to play a major role in the Velvet Revolution that toppled communism in Eastern Europe, as well as serving as the first President of the Czech Republic. What would he make of the frightening resurgence of so many of the ideas he sacrificed so much to eradicate?
Fourth Sunday Q&A
After the Sunday, February 16 matinee, please join us for an informal discussion with the director, producer, and cast of Largo Desolato.
This project is supported by the California Arts Council; LA County Supervisors through the LA County Arts Commission; the City of Santa Monica and the Santa Monica Arts Commission
The world premiere of Kosovar playwright Jeton Neziraj’s nightmarish, Orwellian comedy of an autocratic government that demands its citizens deposit their dreams in a central, bureaucratic depository so that it can exert the fullest possible control of their imaginations. In this vast, underground complex, civil servants like Dan, a new hire for the prized job of Interpreter, sift patiently through the nation’s dreams looking for threats to the government’s authority and its version of “truth.” If order is to be maintained, deviance must be extinguished and imagination co-opted. Dan works hard and tries stubbornly to survive in this strange dream world but finds nothing is as it seems to be except the authority that rules it. Don’t miss the world premiere of this new play from one of Europe’s most remarkable playwrights.
“Theatre should side with the victims” feature on Jeton Neziraj — Stage | The Guardian
“The premiere represents a coup for City Garage’s founders, artistic director Frédérique Michel and producing director Charles A. Duncombe, whose company has been presenting edgy theater for more than 30 years. Michel, who also directs, and Duncombe, whose typically stunning production design is a highlight, do full service to Neziraj’s savagely topical, darkly funny piece.” — F. Kathleen Foley, Los Angeles Times
“The cast entire does the fine job I frankly have come to expect from City Garage, with Frederique Michel’s direction showing wonderful insight…” — David MacDowell Blue, Night Tinted Glasses
Special Events: Weekend of November 8 – 10th, 2019
City Garage is thrilled to announce that playwright Jeton Neziraj will be traveling from Kosovo to join us for a weekend of special events around this world premiere. Support City Garage and help us meet our goal of $25,000 for this fall by being part of this exciting weekend. Tickets for all events are $50 each. Or pick a performance of your choice, then attend as many of the after-show events as you like—up to all three—for $100. Book your tickets through this link:
Friday, 11/8: Champagne Reception and Book Signing: Meet the author, mingle with cast and crew, and have your script signed (copies of “Department of Dreams” available at $25).
Saturday, 11/9: Catered Reception: Join us for dinner after the show, along with the playwright and other special guests of honor.
Sunday, 11/10: Panel* Discussion: Steven Leigh Morris, editor of Stage Raw, will moderate a discussion on “Theatre and Politics.” How can—or should—theatre address the urgent political realities of its moment? The particular focus is on the rise of autocracies in Europe, the Balkans, and the west in general, and the role of the arts in contemporary politics. Q&A with the playwright and panelists to follow.
*Panelists: Steven Leigh Morris, Moderator, Editor Stage Raw; Dr. Mietek Boduszynski, Assistant Professor of Politics at Pomona College; Viktorija Lejko-Lacan, Department of Slavic East-European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures UCLA; Lauren Murphy Yeoman, Assistant Professor of Theatre, USC School of Dramatic Arts.
There will be a reading of “Macbett” by Ionesco on Sunday, August 25 at 6:00pm.
Directed by Ann Bronston. Free.
“Eurydice” by Sarah Ruhl
Champagne Preview August 9
Opening Saturday August 10
Pulitzer-prize nominee Sarah Ruhl stands the Orpheus myth on its head and retells it from Eurydice’s point of view. Comic, tragic, silly and poetic in turns, this inventive play follows Eurydice as she does her best to adapt to life in the underworld.
Abandoned by her self-absorbed poet-lover, she rides elevators, has long conversations with stones, defends herself against suspicious men, and finds comfort in the companionship of the ghost of her dead father, though, to his sorrow, she cannot remember who he is. She struggles to recall what it was to be alive and who she was. At last, her easily distracted lover arrives to deliver her. Or will he?
“There’s a sort of beautiful simplicity to the production which makes it feel like a story of a couple who just happen to be dealing with the underworld. Rather than epic, it feels oddly, awkwardly human. It’s a Greek myth scaled down to human proportions. Instead of an all too perfect tragic love story between an untouchable young couple, it becomes the story of a woman who has a creepy guy hit on her on her wedding day. It’s simple, it’s quiet, it’s deeply personal. While this “Eurydice” sidesteps the grand gestures what it gains is simpler story of a woman who’s facing a hostile world with a husband who’s distracted, a man who keeps harassing her, and a world filled with rules to keep her life small. City Garage’s take…lets you hear the play and taps into a vein that feels honest and a bit raw.” — Anthony Byrnes, “Opening The Curtain” KCRW
“What Ruhl does, and this wonderful cast does under the direction of Frederique Michel, is focus not upon Orpheus but what this story means from Eurydice’s point of view….Words alone by a playwright rarely haunt or move. They are meant to be acted out, and this cast captures the eerie and quietly human voyage of these characters. City Garage can and often does perform outrageously stylized works. They do these so very well. But my favorites have always been when the simple life of the characters shine through, the decisions and consequences and experience of what is happening. Eurydice counts as one of my favorites from this company, because even a Stone, even a God, still seem somehow human. The humans meanwhile make me ache for them. Especially the title character, due in larger part to the actor who portrays her.” — David MacDowell Blue, Night Tinted Glasses
“Director Frederique Michel, designer Charles A. Duncombe, and videographer Anthony Sannazzaro—and of course the gifted cast—work considerable stage magic with Ruhl’s slight, whimsical, but (at times) charming play. I came away feeling glad I had seen it.” Will Manus, Total Theatre
“Eurydice is a whimsical, often thoughtful exploration of memory as life and loss of memory as death. There’s much more than a tragic love story here. Ruhl’s combination of Becket and Alice in Wonderland leaves a stream of thoughts trickling through your brain long after the flood of images has subsided.”
-Oakland Tribune
Fourth Weekend Q&A: Informal discussion with the cast, crew and director Sunday, September 1st, after the 3:00pm performance.
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the California Arts Council, and by the City of Santa Monica and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
New Play Reading
War in the Times of Love
by Jeton Neziraj
Sunday, May 19 @ 7:00pm
“Pay-what-you-can”
Directed by Ann Bronson
City Garage is excited to begin introducing its audience to the work of one of Europe’s most important new playwrights, Jeton Neziraj.
This play, set in an imaginary beauty parlor—within an insane asylum—is the scene of mesmerizing confessions, as four “odd” women evade the traumas of their past by escaping to a shared imaginary world in which they take refuge as in a dream. Neziraj creates a disturbing and cathartic play, blending the mundane and the fantastic, to wrestle with the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.
Neziraj, author of more than twenty-five plays that have been performed all over the world, was voted “European of the Year” in 2018” for his promotion of progressive ideas and values, and has been called “the Kafka of the Balkans.”
Join us for this special reading, the first in a series of readings of new plays this year, and an introduction to our production of Neziraj’s newest work “Department of Dreams” coming to City Garage this fall.
Please let us know you’re coming! Call 310-453-9939 or email citygargage@citygarage.org to RSVP (not required, but much appreciated).
Translated by Frederique Michel &
Charles Duncombe
Champagne Preview May 31
Opening Saturday June 1
A deluded king. A failing kingdom. Two squabbling queens vying for his attention. An obsequious doctor. A dim-witted but loyal guard and a mouthy servant.
In Eugene Ionesco’s darkly comic masterpiece we witness the final hours of megalomaniac King Berenger the First. His monstrous ego has kept him alive for four centuries, but now, Queen Marguerite calmly informs him, the time has come to die. Berenger fights tooth and nail. He rages, pleads, denies, bargains, supported by the lovely and loyal Queen Marie. But Queen Marguerite, coolly efficient, aided by her henchman, the doctor, draws the king relentlessly closer to his final moment on earth.
At once broadly comic and deeply unsettling, the play alternates between Monty Python-style slapstick and haunting echoes of Shakespearean tragedy. In this, the most Beckett-like of all Ionesco’s work, we follow an existential journey into the most terrifying landscape of all: our own mortality.
In a new translation by City Garage founders Frederique Michel and Charles Duncombe.
“Why this? A once powerful, now collapsing civilization in the grip of a deranged megalomaniac? Obviously, it’s a scenario so implausible today, so far beyond the imaginative capacity of contemporary American audiences that we must treat it as a historical curiosity rather than, say, an urgent and eerily relevant warning.” — Read Margaret Gray’s “essential” listing in the Los Angeles Times
“Such a wild emotional roller coaster works, even amid the absurd details … because the cast under the direction of Frederique Michel breathes vivid life into what might easily have come across as utter chaos. Every detail makes sense.” — Read Zahir Blue’s full review at Night Tinted Glasses
“City Garage impressively pulls off a metaphysical play without any special effects other than Michel’s staging. Her direction is simple yet stylized, with a sprinkling of heightened movement and gesture. And while Exit the King’s technical design is minimal throughout the show, its final image is arresting and haunting thanks to Duncombe’s lighting.” — Read Taylor Kass’s full review at Stage Raw
“The final scene between the resonant Dunn and cool, elegant, swan-necked Natasha St. Clair Johnson … is one of those theatrical moments that … leave[s] audiences holding their collective breath before a well-deserved exhale and wild applause.” — Read Ravi Narasimhan’s full review at Backscatter.
“Their new translation (and adaptation) is crisp and colloquial, easy on the ear. And they have mounted the play in equally vibrant fashion… As performed with heart-breaking power by Troy Dunn, The King is vain, confused, self-centered, yet all too human and likable…” —Will Manus’s full review atTotal Theater
Translated and adapted by Frédérique Michel and Charles Duncombe
Extended! Now through April 14th!
February 22 – April 14, 2019
City Garage revives its smash-hit production of Molière’s classic comedy The Bourgeois Gentleman. A Critic’s Choice in the LA Times, a Pick of the Week in the LA Weekly and nominated for numerous awards! Don’t miss the return of this madcap, silly send-up of upper class pretenstions and noveau riche aspirations!
Wealthy and foolish Monsieur Jourdain is in love with the Countess Dorimène and aches to be what he is not — a member of the aristocracy. Determined to overcome his low birth with an education in high style he unwittingly surrounds himself with charlatans and swindlers who gleefully take his money and prey on his innocence. Ingenious servants, pedantic masters, devious nobles, and earnest young lovers all propel this delightful satire of nouveau riche social climbers. And, in the end, is the “nobility” to which Jourdain so ardently aspires all that admirable?
In this acclaimed translation by Frédérique Michel and Charles Duncombe the play is re-imagined for contemporary audiences, transporting us into an extravagant fantasy world of song, dance, and upper class nonsense.
“THE BOURGEOIS GENTLEMAN had the audience laughing from start to finish… This witty tale about the nouveau riche is bound to continue to make audiences gasp for air.” — Ilana Lifshitz, Broadway World.
“Molière’s equal-opportunity satire skewers nouveau riche pretension and aristocratic snobbery in this revival of City Garage’s acclaimed 2008 production. Featuring choreography and music inspired by the original 1670 staging but adapted and re- imagined for the present by director Frédérique Michel and designer Charles Duncombe, the piece charts the risqué antics and misadventures of a social- climbing fop manipulated by con artists and ne’er-do-wells.” — Philip Brandes L.A. Times, The 99 Seat Beat
“This sleek City Garage take on Molière’s satire of nouveau riche pretensions in nominally avante-garde but mainly an ungaurded hoot. Director Frederique Michel and Designer Charles Duncombe slyly tailor our times into their tart adaptation….a gracefully loopy soufflé.” Critics Choice, LA Weekly (2009)
Joins us for a special Champagne Preview on Friday, February 22th with complimentary champagne, or for the Opening Night Gala, on Saturday, February 23th with buffet. Buy your tickets for any night of the run before February 22nd and get 30% off!
This project is supported by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the LA County Arts Commission, the City of Santa Monica and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
(Click on images to enlarge)
The West Coast premiere of Winter Solstice by Roland Schimmelpfenig.
translated by David Tushingham
Oct. 19 — Nov. 25, 2018
Q & A with the director and cast, Sunday November 11th, following the 4:00pm performance.
For a long time the far right hid in the shadows. Now it no longer needs to. This witty, incisive and ultimately chilling new new play looks at the seductive re-emergence of fascism from the German perspective — a perspective few can share with such dread.
Five people gather on Christmas Eve in a bourgeois, intellectual household. Albert, a writer, is engaged in a ferocious spat with his wife Bettina, a film-maker, over the arrival of her mother, Corinna. But it is Corinna who sparks the dramatic crisis by inviting a man she met on the train, Rudolph, to stay with the family. Rudolph is urbane, civilized, and polite—the essence of cosmopolitan charm. He entertains everyone by playing Chopin and Bach on the piano, but when he reveals that he is a doctor with Paraguayan connections, we realize that he is the silken embodiment of a Nazi past Germany has long thought buried.
The West Coast premiere of this transfixing, razor-sharp new comedy from acclaimed German playwright Roland Schimmelpfenig powerfully demonstrates the unnerving logic of the new right and the seeming impotence of liberalism to combat it. Highly cinematic in style, naturalistic and surrealistic by turns, the play exerts the same hypnotic spell as its menacing visitor—an insidiousness that makes him, in Schimmelpfennig’s eyes, a lethal threat.
“As choreographed by director Frederique Michel, it succeeds, adding not only a lot of dark humor but a mounting suspense….cool, acerbic humor….a familiar, chilling ideology. How is it that fascism, so easy to dismiss in theory, leaves its opponents so helpless when it knocks on the door, smiling and cultured and reasonable? It’s a question we’ve all had plenty of opportunities recently to ask, and fail to answer, and it lends a gripping urgency to this well performed dark comedy.”
— Read Margaret Gray’s full review at LA Times
“A subtle political allegory….Superb acting….Frederique Michel’s clockwork-like direction of Schimmelpfennig’s tricky, provocative play and Charles Duncombe’s atmospheric stage design also deserve the highest praise possible.” — Read Will Manus’s full review at Total Theater.
“To be topical, yet subtle. Intensely focused on an issue yet without preaching. On top of that, to achieve the surface below which boils and dances currents of dangerous passions–doubt, loneliness, love, hate, guilt, lust, horror, fear.” — Read Zahir Blue’s full review at Night Tinted Glasses
“Why this?: …City Garage specializes in provocative, challenging material that would rarely be attempted elsewhere in L.A. … the company’s typically artful design sensibility [is] well-suited to the play’s sharp pivots between naturalistic dialogue and surreal narration.” — Read the full preview at the LA Times!
“The timing is perfect…. The idea that we show hospitality to our destroyers is as old as drama itself…. Schimmelpfennig, in portraying the failure of liberal intellectuals to confront the hideous legacy of the past, has written a potent play for today.” —The Guardian
“A rare and delightful play… the family drama, richly comic, accurately skewers a wide spectrum of human behavior… Schimmelpfennig’s ominous underlying message [is] Who – or what – has taken up residence in our lives without our really noticing?” —The Evening Standard
Join us for a special preview with complimentary champagne, Friday October 19, or for the opening night gala, Saturday, October 20 with buffet.
A 1940s Christmas at Club Sweet Lorraine’s
Join us at a Christmas Eve after-hours 1940s nightclub where celebrity guests Billy Eckstine, Eartha Kitt, Marlene Dietrich, Peggy Lee, Dorothy Dandridge, the Mills Brithers, and many more are coming to celebrate Christmas Eve and Sweetie’s second year as owner of Club Sweet Lorraine’s. Come sing Christmas songs with the stars in Sharon L. Graine’s nostalgic 1940s cabaret musical. One day only! December 9th at 3:0pm and 7:00pm.
The Great Depression in 1930s Chicago. Unemployment. Fear. Graft and corruption at City Hall. What do you need when society starts to fall apart? A strong man who steps in to take control. Arturo Ui, a small time gangster with an insatiable appetite for power, convinces a panicked population that no one has the answers but him. He and his cronies will provide the protection you’re looking for: even if you don’t know you’re looking for it. Brecht’s 1941 satirical masterpiece classic about Hitler’s rise to power in 1930s Germany demonstrates, with a savage blend of comedy and pastiche, how demagogues take power and how easily—and willingly—democracies become autocracies.
“City Garage.. is the ideal local company to revive this infrequently done, disturbingly timely play.”
‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ at City Garage
The essentials: Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 satire, which he wrote while in exile from Germany and waiting for an American visa, has been described as “the American gangster movie meets Richard III.” The play’s account of a buffoonish, small-time Chicago racketeer who takes over the city’s cauliflower market is a thinly veiled and often savage parody of Hitler’s rise to power.
Why this? As Charles Isherwood wrote in Variety about a 2002 New York production, “ ‘Arturo Ui’ paints a blunt picture of a smug society easily corrupted and ultimately overtaken by a low-level hoodlum and his gang of thugs.” Does this sound at all familiar? Is it too soon? Or maybe too late? City Garage, known for daring, highly stylized sociopolitical theater, is the ideal local company to revive this infrequently done, disturbingly timely play.
— Margaret Grey, The Los Angeles Times
“Is there a through line from Capone’s Chicago and Hitler’s Germany to the current Washington interregnum? Director Frédérique Michel and producer Charles Duncombe make a good case in their City Garage production of Bertolt Brecht’s THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI, featuring a very strong performance by Andrew Loviska in the title role.”
— Barlo Perry, ParisLA
“There are plays that are both timeless and timely and The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui is the best possible choice The City Garage could have made of the lot of them….City Garage makes good use of Wise’s rapid-fire and engaging translation with a cast that embodies all things 1930-40s Gangster with strong physical choices and a bevy of accents that are impressive and delightful.”
— The Theater Times
“Arturo Ui shows us precisely how yes It Can Happen Here. Worse (in some eyes) how it already has. More than once…
City Garage’s production captures many of the tricks and skillful theaticalities Brecht worked into his plays.” — David MacDowel Blue, Night Tinted Glasses.
Schedule:
Runs:
Fridays, Saturdays 8:00pm; Sundays 3:00pm
Bergamot Summer Day on July 21st. Special 4:00pm show. Pay what you can at the door or regular prices at Brown Paper Tickets if you want to reserve ahead of time. Food trucks, music, and art events all day.
Closes:
August 12, 2018
Admission:
General Admission: $25; Students/Seniors $20
Group Rate:
(Groups 10 and over) $15.
For more information: Contact Charles Duncombe, Producing Director Charles@citygarage.org
February 23 – April 1, 2018
(No show Saturday, March 10th) Extended! Friday April 6th, Sunday April 8th, Friday April 13th, Saturday April 14th, and Sunday April 15th!
By Molière, translated by Frédérique Michel and Charles Duncombe.
In Molière’s comic masterpiece Arnolphe, a rich merchant, is under the delusion that he can create the perfect marriage for himself by creating the perfect wife. He raises a young orphan, Agnes, from infancy, determined to keep her ignorant of everything except what he teaches her. As the play begins, he is about to marry her at last, or so he thinks, until the young woman skillfully turns the tables on him. In this award-winning translation by Frédérique Michel and Charles Duncombe City Garage remounts its acclaimed 2009 production with a contemporary twist that speaks to the issues of patriarchy, gender, and power in the “Time’s Up” headlines of today.
“Delightful…almost dance-like…the humor is nonstop…Roberts’s performance touches our hearts.”
— David MacDowell Blue, Night Tinted Glasses
TOP TEN – Recommended!
“Director Frederique Michel relies on an elegant new translation she’s written in collaboration with producer and designer Charles Duncombe, with a staging that emphasizes the artificiality of Moliere’s comedy with balletic, stylized movement. The result is crowd-pleasing and consistently funny. As Arnolphe, Roberts captures the quintessence of male arrogance, egotism and insensitivity, which makes his growing desperation hilarious and leaves us longing to see him get his comeuppance. Pida brings the asset of real youth (she’s a high school senior) to the ingénue role of Agnes….Jaime Arze and David E. Frank score as a pair of dimwitted servants, and Troy Dunn is smoothly insinuating as Arnolphe’s friend, Chrysalde. The handsome set departs from the play’s 17th century time period; Duncombe chooses instead to set the action in “a time when such things happen,” using a modernistic flavor. Josephine Poinset provides the clever and stylish costumes.” — Stage Raw
WEEKEND PICK! – LA TIMES
“This comedy, considered by many to be Moliere’s greatest, concerns a controlling guardian who has carefully cloistered his decades-younger ward in the hope of transforming her into the “perfect” (and perfectly ignorant) wife who will never stray. Controversial in its day, the premise seems abhorrently timely now. Dedicated avant-gardists Frédérique Michel and Charles Duncombe have devoted their theatrical careers to defiantly alternative theater. Their well-regarded translation of “Wives,” first produced at their theater in 2009, brings an invigoratingly revisionist perspective to Moliére’s classic.” — Los Angeles Times
“The central character in Molière’s comedy, newly translated by Frederique Michel and Charles Duncombe, could be and often is a punching bag. But not here…. The play emerges less as a clown show and more as a wistful, almost elegiac rumination on aging and folly.”
“Go!” — LA Weekly
“This new translation/adaptation of Moliere by director Frederique Michel and Charles A. Duncombe is clever, colloquial, and far more actable than most recent versions.”
— Backstage
Buy the Book!
This best-selling translation is available from Amazon.
Moliere’s The School for Wives: A New version in English by Charles A. Duncombe and Frederique Michel **CITY GARAGE BEST SELLER** This translation is being used in university courses. Purchase the book from Amazon
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
