Red Bike - Playbill

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

STAFF

President

Producing Artistic Director Cynthia

Kevin Gabriel

Levin Kralicek Associate Artistic Director Ian R. Crawford Director of Marketing Nathan Gwartney Director of Production Design Em Swenson Literary Manager Hannah Taylor Box Office Manager Daniel Harkins Technical Supervisor Alex Davila Production Stage Manager Tanya Brown Director of Finance Jason

Vice President

Carol Gee

Treasurer

Kirsty Melville Secretary

Heather Hamilton Lydia Butler Winnie Dunn Cynthia Levin Benjamin Mann Paul Milakovich Shannon Neal Michael Nonbello Kimberly Winter Stern Annie Swartz Meredith Webster Amy Wright

UNICORN THEATRE’S MISSION Unicorn Theatre enhances the Kansas City community by developing and producing high-quality, thought-provoking plays that have never been seen in the region. We illuminate social issues by shining a light on diversity and inclusive stories which include race, religion and gender identity. Unicorn creates opportunities for the advancement of emerging and established actors, directors, playwrights, designers, technicians and administrative staff.

VISION STATEMENT By producing provocative new plays Unicorn Theatre fosters the next generation of great American writers and artists, creating innovative and intimate theatrical experiences that transcend the ordinary. We inspire the community to think and feel deeply; to see the world in new and different ways. Unicorn strives to be one of the preeminent homes for new plays in the country.

Opening Night February 3rd, 2021

UNICORN THEATRE PRESENTS

by Caridad Svich Directed by Sidonie Garrett THE CAST The Kid Chioma Anyanwu* PRODUCTION TEAM Stage Manager Tanya Brown* Director of Photography & Editor Conor Tierney Costume Designer Ian R. Crawford Directing Apprentice Kristin Kijanka

* Denotes member of Actors’ Equity Association

SPECIAL THANKS Areli Gil

RED BIKE was first produced as a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere by Pygmalion Productions (UT), Know Theatre of Cincinnati (OH), Simpatico Theatre (PA) and Wilbury Theatre Group (RI). For more information, please visit nnpn.org RED BIKE was developed in association with The Lark, New Dramatists, and Chaskis Theatre (London).

This presentation was produced by special arrangement with Elaine Devlin Literary, Inc. All rights reserved. This performance is authorized for noncommercial use only. By accepting this presentation, you agree not to authorize or permit it to be copied, distributed, broadcast, telecast or otherwise exploited, in whole or in part, in any media now known or hereafter developed.

WARNING: Federal law provides severe civil and criminal penalties for the unauthorized reproduction, distribution or exhibition of copyrighted motion pictures, videotapes, or videodiscs. Criminal copyright infringement is investigated by the FBI and may constitute a felony with a maximum penalty of up to five years in prison and/or a $250,000.

The video or audio recording of this performance by any means is strictly prohibited.

3828 MAIN STREET | KANSAS CITY, MO 64111 | (816) 531-7529 | UNICORNTHEATRE.ORG

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Caridad Svich (PLAYWRIGHT) is a playwright, screenwriter, lyricist, editor, translator, essayist and educator. Her first feature film, as co-screenwriter, Fugitive Dreams, based on her play, receives world premiere at the 2020 Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, and US premiere at the 2020 Austin Film Festival, and European premiere at the 2020 Tallinn Black Nights Festival. Three of her new plays were on the 2020 Kilroys List. Her signature works include Any Place But Here, 12 Ophelias, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls..., Alchemy Of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues, Red Bike (NNPN Rolling World Premiere), Guapa (NNPN Rolling World Premiere), and The House Of The Spirits, based on Isabel Allende’s novel (ATCA Primus Prize). Her second independent film Abilene (as sole screenwriter, based on her play) us currently in production.

THE CAST & PRODUCTION TEAM Cynthia Levin (PRODUCING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR) is in her 42nd season with the Unicorn. Over the years she has served as a director, actor, designer or producer for over 300 productions. At the Unicorn, she recently directed Bernhardt/Hamlet, Bond, Vietgone, Chesapeake, Priscilla Queen Of The Desert: The Musical (co-directed with Missy Koonce), Eclipsed, Hand to God, Heathers: The Musical (again, with Missy), The Oldest Boy, Women Playing Hamlet (world premiere), Bad Jews, Grounded, Venus in Fur, My Name is Asher Lev, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, The Soul Collector (world premiere), Hungry (world premiere), Red, Two Jews Walk Into A War…, Distracted, Green Whales (world premiere), Miss Witherspoon, My First Time, The Clean House, Mauritius, 9 Parts of Desire, The Great American Trailer Park Musical, Bat Boy: The Musical and additionally the world premieres of rightnextto me (both at the Unicorn and Geva Theatre Center, Rochester, NY), How His Bride Came to Abraham, Light:Damage, Mercy Killing, Innocent Thoughts and Jack and Jill. At Coterie Theatre, she has directed Number the Stars, And Then They Came for Me, Frankenstein, Gatherings in Graveyards (I and II), Valley Song and To Kill A Mockingbird. At the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., she directed readings of Occupants, In The Belly Of The Whale, The Friendship Of Her Thighs, The Last Pair Of Earlies, Tigers Be Still and White Devil and Loving Mother for the MFA Playwright’s Workshop. Cynthia is a graduate of Park University which also awarded her an Honorary Doctorate in 2002. She is a founding board member of the National New Play Network, an organization dedicated to the development and production of new works. She has been honored with the Pinnacle Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Human Rights Campaign Equality Award and most recently the Kathryn V. Lamkey Award from the Actors’ Equity Association for her ongoing commitment to inclusion and diversity. She shares her home with Zia (the beagle), Dodger (the cat) and the spirit of the big red dog, Sylvia.

THE CAST & PRODUCTION TEAM Sidonie Garrett (DIRECTOR) is the Executive Artistic Director of the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival where she most recently directed Shakespeare in Love, and the previous five season’s productions, Much Ado About Nothing, The Winter’s Tale, King Lear, Twelfth Night and Hamlet, all awarded Best Play in Pitch Magazine’s BEST OF KC as well as 15 other Shakespeare plays.

Previously, at Unicorn Theatre she directed The Effect, Disgraced, How to Use a Knife, The Whale, I’ll Eat You Last, Other Desert Cities, The Motherf**ker With the Hat, Time Stands Still, In the Next Room: the vibrator play, Faith Healer, Rising Water, Iron Kisses, Retreat from Moscow, Omnium Gatherum, the world premiere of Thanatos, SubUrbia, The Waiting Room, Desert Holiday, Spinning Into Butter, SantaLand Diaries and co-directed Light/Damage with Cynthia Levin.

Sidonie directed A Streetcar Named Desire and ‘Night Mother for Kansas City Actors Theatre. At the Coterie Theatre she directed The Macbeth Project: In Spite of Thunder, the U.S. premiere of After Juliet, Mr. A’s Amazing Maze Plays, Little House on the Prairie, Little House by the Shores of Silver Lake, Of Mice and Men, Playing for Time and co-directed The Hobbit. Sidonie co-directed Tony & Tina’s Wedding (Kansas City and St. Louis) for Fourth Wall Productions. She directed The African Company Presents with the Black Repertory Theatre of Kansas City, Eleemosynary and Gruesome Playground Injuries at the Fishtank Theatre and has directed collaborations with KC Ballet, KC Symphony, Bach Aria Soloists and KC Chorale, and Script-In-Hand readings including The Beard of Avon and The Women, with KC Actors Theatre and The Tempest for JCCC’s Performing Arts Series. In 2020, she co-directed and produced two streaming productions, Shakespeare at Home and William Shakespeare’s Christmas Carol in addition to two live outdoor performances of Shakespeare’s scenes, Yard Bards and ShakesFEAR! Next up, if safety protocols allow, she is planning to direct The Tempest for HASF’s 29th season, summer 2021 in Southmoreland Park.

Chioma Anyanwu (THE KID) is thrilled to back at the Unicorn to work with this team on Red Bike. Some of her previous Unicorn productions include The Revolutionists, The Wolves, Men on Boats, Heathers, BlackTop Sky, The Mountaintop, Ruined, and Hungry. Thank you to the Unicorn Theatre and this creative team for the massive support and extraordinary measures taken to keep us all safe and keep us playing!

Tanya Brown (STAGE MANAGER) is in her fifteenth season with Unicorn Theatre. Some of her all-time favorites have been The Revolutionists, Venus in Fur, Hand to God, Cock, Stupid F##king Bird, and Priscilla Queen of the Desert.

ARTIST STATEMENT BY CARIDAD SVICH Against the roar of asphalt and a set of wheels, a child looks out onto the horizon and tries to discern where they are and how they will live, if the earth is still with us, into old age. The sheer precarity of life tugs at their sleeves. The child, un-named, just the Kid, like the outlaw, the sidekick, the one hitching a ride with a friend, is at the centre of my new play Red Bike. But A friend asks me why I wrote Red Bike. Writers get asked this kind of question all the time. The expected answer tends to be one, I would assume, that has something to do with a particular sense of outrage at something that has happened in the world and/ or in one’s personal life – enough of an outrage to stir up the fires of a play. I would not deny this. The fact of poverty in the United States alone makes me sick. The fact that people go hungry in what is ostensibly one of the richest countries in the world and where billions of dollars are spent on building up not only the military industrial, surveillance, technological complex, but also on another Marvel action movie, for instance, is enough to make one scream in despair.

We will never get to the bottom of the structurally racist, socio-economic and political structures that keep the haves and the have-nots, the middle and the working poor, the rich and the indigent at systemic odds. We would have to dismantle so much to redefine how we live and what we value, moreover, that it would take several lifetimes, if at that, to truly start over. However, if we think of the field as one of potentiality – the field of theatre, let’s say – then maybe one of the things we can offer as artists is a view of the world that both contains its despairing truths, and yet also celebrates the sheer joy of living. Because if we can’t locate that, then potentiality, and its attendant spiritual rewards, however fleeting, may not even be possible. And therefore, active resistance, one that is actually able to articulate, express and manifest a non-essentialised way of being (in the fullest sense of the word) will simply snag and tear away at the fabric of an already torn culture, rather than create, instead, a vibrant, transformative “pocket.”

Red Bike is about a child, poised on the brink of adolescence. Someone living in precisely one of those towns in the middle of this country for whom precarity is the norm. Someone too that did not have much history about where they’d been and how things got the way they are. Someone, in effect, innocent to the ways of the world and yet seeing enough of it to know that the kind of choices being made for them and to them on a daily basis might not be exactly in their best favor, and yet, for whom such choices seemed strangely, paradoxically alluring in their “absoluteness,” but also ones that could be contested and rebelled against. There’s that inkling of rebellion that stirs up when children are locating their agency and position in the world that is full of exactly the kind of possibility that resistance taps into. I also wanted to touch the skin of a kind of warrior-like vulnerability that a child that has some means to travel, if only with a bike (and all of the complications surrounding its ownership) entailed, because once one travels, even just a few feet beyond one’s confines, the field shifts, the frame changes, and the mind and heart expand.

How do our children – navigate the contradictory, confusing terrain of this historicalsocio-political time? What lessons are they learning? What will they carry on into their adult lives, and, in turn what kind of future will their children leave the world?

Sunday, February 21, 2021 7:30 PM CST | Live Stream unicorntheatre.org FINANCIAL SUPPORT FOR UNICORN THEATRE THIS SEASON HAS BEEN PROVIDED BY:

EMPLOYEE SHARE COMPANIES

These companies pay up to 50% of employees’ season subscription and single tickets.

American Century Companies

TravelPlus!

State Street

Hallmark Cards, Inc.

DST Systems, Inc.

Stillwell Financial, Inc.

Peruvian Connection

The Lee Company

V.W.I. Productions

Pioneer Services

Zahner

Ask your employer to join Unicorn’s Employer Share Program.

Contact Jason Kralicek at 816-531-7529, Ext. 13 for more details.

AFFILIATIONS & MEMBERSHIPS Unicorn Theatre is a constituent of Actors’ Equity Association; Theatre Communications Group, Inc.; The National New Play Network; Missouri Citizens for the Arts; The Downtown Council; Main Street Development Corporation; Nonprofit Connect; Urban Core Group; and The Kansas City Convention and Visitors Bureau.