NCTC Spring 2018 Newsletter

H. Adam Harris and Michael Hanna in This Bitter Earth.

Photo by Lois Tema.

BEHIND-THE-SCENES SPRING 2018

Steve Rhyne and Ryan Vásquez in Le Switch. Photo by Lois Tema.

Table of Contents Newsflash!……………………………………………………………..………………………….3 Announcing: The 18-19 Season……………………………………………..………..6 Join us for our 3rd Annual Gala: Fête Fatale!……………….……….……..…8 Del Shores’ Six Characters in Search of a Play.................………….…..10 Ready, Set, Raise! Give OUT Day is April 19th…………………………..…..14 Spotlight on Youthaware & Identity Matters.………………………..……..17

Newsflash!

J. Conrad Frank and Scott Cox in Still at Risk. Photo by Lois Tema.

o Thanks to a special matching challenge grant from Mr. Ted Tucker and the generosity of our patrons, over $100,000 was raised during the holiday season to support theatrical programs for children, youth, and adults. Thank you for helping us raise the bar ever higher! o In November, we welcomed Leah A. Hofkin to NCTC’s Board of Directors. Leah is the Director of Development for the National Employment Lawyers Association/The Employee Rights Advocacy Institute for Law & Policy, and brings her fundraising expertise to our stellar group of Board Members. Sadly, we’re also saying goodbye to Chris Yaros, who completes his second consecutive and final term on the Board this April. Thank you for your six years of service to NCTC!

o Give OUT Day is fast approaching on April 19, 2018! Join us for a national day of giving to the LGBT non-profits. For more info on how to support NCTC on Give OUT Day, visit pg 14. o Since our last newsletter, we’ve welcomed April Culver as our new Marketing & Press Manager. In addition to being a social media maven (you many have seen her posts on our Facebook page or Instagram!), April is an accomplished actress. She’ll be appearing in Moliere’s Tartuffe at B8 Theater in Concord through April 22. We’ve also brought on Lindsay Krumbein to the NCTC team in our YouthAware department. For more info on Lindsay & YouthAware, check out pg 17.

Leontyne Mbele-Mbong as Lettie and Desiree Rogers as Alberta in Leaving The Blues. Photo by Lois Tema.

o NCTC has also hired a new Development Director, Shannon McDonnell! Many of you may have met her already, either in the Donor Lounge at the theatre or at one of our special events. Shannon comes to us most recently from Ubuntu Theatre Project, where she was managing director. We are so excited to have her expertise on our team. Shannon is looking forward to getting to know all of our wonderful supporters better.

If you see her in the Lounge, please say hello! o Save the date for our upcoming Gala! On August 25, 2018, NCTC will host our 3rd annual Gala, Fête Fatale, honoring the camp comedy genius of Charles Busch. More info on pg 8. o All of our productions thus far in the 2017-18 Season have been awarded TBA Recommended status! Thank you to the incredible creative teams behind this season. Also, NCTC received a whopping 14 nominations at the TBA Awards for the previous 2016-17 Season, including Outstanding Ensemble of a Play for Daniel’s Husband, Sons of the Prophet, and Sordid Lives, and Outstanding Production of a Play for Daniel’s Husband and Sordid Lives. Congratulations to everyone involved!

o We held our annual Season Announcement Party and presented a sneak peek into our upcoming 2018-19 Season on Monday, March 26. We had a full house of dedicated supporters at the event. You can find out more about the shows on the following page, and you can also view photos from the event here.

Announcing: The 2018-19 Season!

New Conservatory Theatre Center is proud to announce, in Ed’s words, a “smorgasbord of enticing offerings for our LGBT and Allied audiences”. On Monday March 26, we revealed the new season to a standing-room only crowd of dedicated supporters at the annual Season Announcement Party, and the excitement for the new season of regional and West Coast premieres filled the Decker Theatre. For more information on the shows, click the page to the right to view our Season Brochure!

We hope you will all join us for another fantastic season that gives a voice to our community through theatre that challenges us to think, to give space for empathy to flourish, and to explore our shared humanity. It is with your support that we continue to raise the bar ever higher at NCTC. Thank you!

For questions about subscriptions, contact Box Office & Patron Services Manager Ari Rice at boxoffice@nctcsf.org or 415.861.8972.

Special thanks to Cole Hardware for sponsoring the Season Announcement Party.

San Francisco’s Favorite Hardware Stores!

Charles Busch photographed by Michael Wakefield.

Fierce.

Fabulous.

Fête Fatale. August 25, 2018.

Save the date for the most scintillating Gala event in NCTC’s history! On the evening of Saturday, August 25th, we’ll be celebrating the legendary comic genius of award-winning actor, writer, long-time friend of NCTC and fabulous femme fatale. Mr. Charles Busch! Many of you might remember our riotous production of Die, Mommie, Die! from a few seasons ago, written by Mr. Busch. Other credits include The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, which enjoyed a successful run on Broadway, Psycho Beach Party, and of course, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.

Not only are we honoring Charles’ illustrious career, we’re also celebrating the fact that the 2018-19 Season opens with the San Francisco Premiere of his 1991 play Red Scare on Sunset. Mr. Busch himself originated the starring role of Mary Dale in his classic vintage Hollywood style. Inspired by his killer glamour, we have named this year’s Gala “Fête Fatale”. Charles will be joining us in person for the evening, and guests will enjoy a sumptuous array of delicious bites and libations from local restaurants, a silent auction with to-die-for prizes, and of course our signature surprise pop-up performances throughout the evening featuring some of the best and brightest local talents.

We hope you will join us for what is sure to be our most glamorous gala yet! Start planning your drop-dead-gorgeous outfits now and get ready to spend an evening in the heart of San Francisco with a legendary, boundary-breaking artist whose work reflects all we hold dear at NCTC. Invitation to follow in early Summer!

Charles Busch as Mary Dale in the original production of Red Scare on Sunset, the first production in our 2018-19 season.

Photo by T. L. Boston.

A Del Shores Limited Engagement Comes to NCTC this June!

Six Characters in Search of a Play, from first glance at the title, is a show about “borrowing”. It recalls Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, both obviously and subtly. Where Pirandello’s play explores the relationship between playwrights and the characters they create, Del Shores’ one man show explores the real-life characters that inspire him as a playwright, particularly the ones who don’t make it on the page (or stage).

Del Shores is far from a stranger on the NCTC stage, with Sordid Lives being produced last year, Yellow being produced in the 2013-14 Season, Southern Baptist Sissies in 2003-04, and he appeared in 2015 with his highlyacclaimed one-man show, SINgularly SORDID. Six Characters in Search of a Play continues to build upon the relationship between NCTC and Shores, and in doing so expands the contributions NCTC can make to both fans of Del Shores and to the community in general.

Del Shores is probably best known for his play (and the later film adaptation) Sordid Lives, which later ran as a prequel series on Logo. When NCTC hosted Sordid Lives, Shores’ film sequel, A Very Sordid Wedding, premiered in Palm Springs, where the cult-classic film adaptation of Sordid Lives played for a record ninety-six weeks. The timing served to make NCTC a destination for fans of Del Shores hoping to see the play that sparked a sensation.

Now, with Six Characters in Search of a Play, NCTC’s Theatre 3 will play host to some of Del Shores’ encounters with eccentric individuals and the characters they inspire. You’ll learn about “Yvonne”, a vegetarian-hating waitress; “Sarah”, an aging actress who vows to smoke and drink herself to death if Trump is elected; “Jimmy Ray”, the evolving Georgia redneck; “Loraine”, the once brilliant drama teacher who has lost her mind and is now obsessed with porn; “Aunt Bobbie Sue”, the blue-collar Republican who does not care for “Mexkins” or Obama; and “Marsha”, the monkey-hating lesbian with COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease).

Photo by Jason Grindle

Shores has built this successful one-man show with the experiences he had creating Del Shores: My Sordid Life, Del Shores: Sordid Confessions, and Del Shores: SINgularly SORDID, which all played to packed houses and high praise for the stand-up and acting of Shores himself, as well as his writing. As he has often been called the “master of the Texas comedy” (LA Times) and “the grand master of Southern lowlife sensibilities” (Daily Variety), it comes as no surprise that many of the Six Characters in Search of a Play are Southern. Shores is of course from Texas, and many of his plays have a semiautobiographical feel. Ty, the young gay man in Sordid Lives, is an actor trying to make it in Hollywood. In Yellow, Kendall (a gay theatre lover) is constantly at odds with his fundamentalist mother, Sister Timothea, though Shores has stated Kendall also serves as a tribute to a friend, Kendall Moore, who was from a fundamentalist family in Mississippi. The same theme is explored in Southern Baptist Sissies, with the storyteller character of Mark trying to make sense of his relationship with religion and his sexuality.

Shores explores his own journey with religion and his sexuality in My Sordid Life, along with the exploits of being a Hollywood writer.

In that sense, Six Characters in Search of a Play is a continued exploration of the writer’s edict of “write what you know”, where the wildly-colorful people Shores has met are gleefully-inspiring and easily exaggerated for the stage, but don’t quite make their way into his other work. The thematic explorations of politics, religion, sexuality, and Southern identity all live in this piece, and Shores gets to bring them to vivid life, with all the warmth, humor, and catharsis that only he can so thoroughly deliver.

“Six Characters in Search of A Play” runs June 6-10 in NCTC’s Theatre 3. Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 8pm, Sunday at 2pm. We hope you can join us for this special limited engagement! Click here to buy tickets, or contact our Box Office at 415.861.8972.

Ready, Set, Raise!

Give OUT Day is fast approaching: Thursday, April 19th Schedule your donation for Give OUT Day! New Conservatory Theatre Center is proud to once again participate in Give OUT Day! Give OUT Day is the only nationwide 24-hour online fundraising event, unifying the LGBT community in the United States in a way only technology can. A project of Horizons Foundation since 2013, Give OUT Day has provided a unique opportunity to raise funds and awareness for LGBT nonprofits through the power of social media. According to Horizons, this has resulted in over 33,000 individual donors contributing over $4 million to support 600+ organizations across the country.

Horizons Foundation President Roger Doughty

Roger Doughty on Give OUT Day: “This year, in these continued challenging political and cultural times, local services and advocacy are needed now more than ever.

Give OUT Day will raise funds and visibility for hundreds of participating organizations. Few would have predicted the challenging climate we now find ourselves in, after several years of rapid progress on LGBTQ equality and increased visibility and public education. This year on Give OUT Day, we hope to reach thousands of LGBTQ individuals and our allies to engage in supporting the organizations at the front lines of pride, dignity, justice, and joy.”

By supporting NCTC on Give OUT Day, you take a stand for LGBT arts advocacy in your community. With your support, we can continue to produce theatre that provides this community with an artistic home, reaffirms the validity of our stories, and champions our values. With the help of our supporters, we raised over $4,000 for Give OUT Day, which provided funding towards our diverse theatrical programming for children, youth and adults. This year, we hope to improve by raising over $5,000 in just one day!

You can help us by scheduling your donation here.

You won’t see a charge until the 19th, but you’ll know you’ve gotten NCTC off to a great start on this special day of fundraising!

This Give OUT Day, it’s not just about how much we raise, it’s also about how many individual donors will join us. By making a donation for Give OUT Day, you put us one step closer to winning a Leaderboard prize, which is awarded based on number of donors. This year, there is more Leaderboard prize money than ever before: $125,000! NCTC qualifies for the Large San Francisco Bay Area Leaderboard, for LGBT nonprofits in the Bay Area with budgets between $500,000-$4 million. We’re in the running for an additional $5,000 if we get the most donors in this category! This would more than double the amount we hope to raise for the day.

We hope that we can count on you, our community of supporters, this Thursday April 19th for Give OUT Day. If you have any questions, or would like assistance in making your Give OUT Day donation, please contact Development Manager Andrea Partridge at andreap@nctcsf.org or 415.694.6158.

Spotlight on YouthAware &

New Conservatory Theatre Center’s YouthAware program is truly at the core of the organization’s ethos. In 1986, Ed Decker created YouthAware as an educational program to combat misinformation regarding HIV & AIDS. Since its conception, NCTC has provided educational theatre productions to more than 500,000 students at no cost to them or their schools, thanks to local government funding and the support of our individual contributors. Using theatre as a platform to help schools and communities dialogue about issues that might otherwise be difficult to approach in a classroom setting, YouthAware has expanded to cover topics such as peer pressure, homophobia, substance abuse, dating violence, gender expression, and many more.

Nicole Apostol Bruno and Lorenz Angelo Gonzales in YouthAware’s most recent tour of Let’s Get Galactic.

Students participate in an exercise for Identity Matters (IM) at Gritty City Repertory.

Most recently, the YouthAware team has been preparing for the new tour of Outspoken by Prince Gomolvilas. The cast and crew will tour from April 9 – May 4, with 22 performances booked so far. This tour alone is anticipated to reach over 7,000 middle & high school students in the Bay Area. While a majority of the performances will take place at San Francisco schools, there are performances scheduled for both East & North Bay schools. In fact, their first performance on tour took place in Windsor, CA, north of Santa Rosa in beautiful Sonoma County.

A typical day on tour involves the whole cast and crew, which includes stage manager Kaitlin Rosen (who also stage manages for our mainstage productions, most recently Avenue Q and This Bitter Earth), the cast of 5 actors which includes Gabrielle Boyd, Jordan Don, Ely Orquiza, Brennan Pickman-Thoon, and Kaylamay Suarez, and our YouthAware Programs Manager Nikki Meñez, who serves as an on-site liaison for the performances and also directed this production. Everyone arrives at 25 Van Ness, sometimes as early as 7:00am, to load both of our company cars with set pieces, props, sound equipment, and all personnel. Then, the group arrives at the school 1 hour before the show. Load-in is a full team effort, with the cast sharing in the responsibility of setting up all necessary equipment. Then the cast performs the show, which runs about 40 minutes, followed by a post-show discussion facilitated by Ms. Meñez, where students are encouraged to continue to dialogue about the issues presented and take lessons back into the classroom.

Outspoken is a continually evolving script featuring a series of vignettes with high school aged characters. Each scene explores a variety of topics, from identity to body image, political & religious beliefs, gender presentation & sexuality, and racial stereotyping. The goal is to aid students with tools they can use to examine their own changing identity in a transitory period in their lives. Although the actors are all in their 20s, they also find the production artistically challenging in that their identities are also in flux. Director Nikki Meñez says this is very helpful to demonstrate to the students during post-show discussions. She says, “The actors model characters that are open to learning about themselves, because that is how they come to learn about others, and ultimately that is how we teach empathy.”

With the support of our donors, YouthAware is developing beyond the touring performance model with an emerging program known as Identity Matters. To advance this program, we’ve brought on Lindsay Krumbein, who is also the Executive Artistic Director of Gritty City Repertory Youth Theatre in Oakland, which hosted an early residency of the Identity Matters program in July of 2016. With her firsthand knowledge of the program, and her background in theatre education, Lindsay is developing a structure and curriculum for Identity Matters that can then be tailored to specific school sites based on their needs, under her direction. The curriculum will be based around devised theatre practices, wherein the script or performance is generated through a collaborative and improvisational process by the ensemble of students with their instructor. For example, students might be asked to take the text from news articles and create theatrical pieces that relate to how those stories apply to their identities or communities, and the greater world around them.

YouthAware is about starting conversations among those we serve, and turning a critical eye on how and where they exist. Through participatory theatre, students will engage in learning creative ways to express those ideas and the connections to their own identities. In utilizing the empowerment that comes with theatre making, with an expanded structure, we’ll reach a much greater number of students with innovative programming that centers their experiences and identities. It’s only with your unwavering support that Ed and the YouthAware department have been able to move forward in the cultivation of Identity Matters. We are so proud to share this progress with you.