City Garage presents the World Premiere of
Cinema Stories:
Ceremonies of Unendurable Bondage
Stories by Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.

October 25 — December 15, 2002

Directed by Frederíque Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Assistant Director Paul M. Rubenstein

Milton and the Goddess
Laurence Coven	Milton
Kathryn Sheer 	Goddess

Sophia
Laurence Coven	Narrator
Cynthia Mance	Sophia
Jason Piazza	Eddie

1905
Mathew Gifford	Man

Jenny Greenfield Gets Even With God
Maia Brewton	Jenny
Jason Piazza	God

The Labors of Correspondence
Mathew Gifford	Man
Kathryn Sheer	Woman

Barracuda
Maia Brewton	Girlfriend
Jed Rowen	Man

Understanding
Laurence Coven	Man
Mathew Gifford	Man
Cynthia Mance	Woman
Jason Piazza	Man
Jed Rowen	Man

Production Staff
Set, Sound, & Lighting Design	Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Assistant Director	Paul M. Rubenstein
Costume Design	Teckla de Bistrovlnovska
Light/Sound Operator	David Frank
Videography	Paul M. Rubenstein
Video Editing	Cristian YoungMiller
Photography	Rick Pickman, Paul M. Rubenstein

Time and Place: Here & Now

The play runs approximately 75 minutes
and is performed without intermission.

About The Texts
	Six of these seven pieces come from a book of my stories called Ceremonies of Unendurable Bondage. The seventh, "Barracuda" comes from a collection of monologues I wrote for the company called Love Stories for One. Although they vary greatly in approach, they share a common theme: the pain of love and loss. 
	Nothing in the texts has been changed. Nonetheless, putting them onstage changes how they are experienced. Frederique is responsible for what they are now. They constitute the latest step in something she’s been experimenting with for the last year, which is exploring different ways the languages of theater, film, visual arts, and narrative fiction can be combined. She’s done this with the last four projects at City Garage: The Gertrude Stein Project (which she created from Stein’s prose writings) The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (which she adapted from short stories by Aimee Bender), Titus Tartar (which used extensive interplay between actors onstage and videotaped performances) and now this. It’s a worthwhile experiment, I think, one that encourages us to reexamine those languages out of their familiar context. I find it particularly interesting how, in the case of fiction, it violates the way we ordinarily experience a text, the essence of which is the enforced solitude of the act of reading—that intimate exchange between author and reader that takes place in some uniquely private place in the reader’s imagination. When you read, author and reader collaborate to create a set of images that no one else will ever see. There’s something almost secret about it, something that by its nature cannot be shared even if you wanted to. Put it in onstage and it becomes a public act. The nature of the dialogue between the person who writes and the person who experiences has been radically changed—and that, to us, is a useful and revealing experiment. We hope you agree.
—C. Duncombe

About The AUTHOR
	Charles Duncombe has collaborated with Frederique Michel for the last fifteen years as designer and dramaturg. In recent years many of their works together have been based on texts by Duncombe, both adaptations and original works. Some of the more noteworthy have been Medeatext: Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore, based on texts by Heiner Müller (LA Weekly Pick of the Week; LA Times Critic’s Choice; four LA Weekly Theater nominations, including Best Adaptation); Atrocities: Meetings With Monstrous Men, an original work about human rights violations in Chechnya; and Frederick of Prussia: GeorgeW’s Dream of Sleep, an adaptation of a text by Heiner Müller (Four LA Weekly Theater nominations, including Best Adaptation).