MAGIC NEWS
Winter 2003

Cast Change Announcement for Dr. Faustus
A Conversation with David Mamet
3F 4F - A staged reading of a new play by Victor Lodato
Don't miss December's Special Events at the Magic!
Plenty of Tricks up his Sleeve (SF Chron interview w/Chris Smith)
The Gift of Magic (SF Chron interview w/Edna O'Brien)
The Writer Meets the Director

“I was so looking forward to appearing in the Magic Theatre's world premiere of Dr. Faustus,” said Jay. “It's a remarkable play. In my long association with David Mamet -- six films and ten years of productions on my two one-man shows, both of which were directed by David -- I've never missed a single performance. I'm truly chagrined at disappointing my splendid fellow actors in this production, as well as fans and friends in the Bay Area. I offer my sincere apologies. My partner Michael Weber and our firm, Deceptive Practices, will continue to consult on the magic utilized in Dr. Faustus.”

San Francisco actor Dominic Hoffman is likewise a veteran of collaborations with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Mamet. The recipient of two Ovation Awards for his one man show, Uncle Jacques’ Symphony, Hoffman has recently completed an episode of FX’s hit drama The Shield directed by Mamet. Picking up from Jay, Hoffman will now assay the role of “Magus”, the beguiling Magician who falls under a devilish thrall. Hoffman, well-known to Bay Area audiences, received his theatrical training at American Conservatory Theatre, LAMDA, and NYU Film School. His theatrical credits include work at Berkeley Shakespeare Festival, Williamstown Theatre Festival, South Coast Repertory, Mark Taper Forum, New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, San Diego Rep, New Mexico Rep, and A NoiseWithin. His directing credits include Macbeth, A Soldier’s Play, and the critically acclaimed one man show Ali, starring David Roberson. As a writer he has been produced in many mediums. His radio play The Hidden Hero, chronicled the life of master scout, trapper, and mountain man, James P. Beckwourth. For television, he has penned several episodes of A Different World.

Hoffman will join a cast veteran actors from his stage and screen roles for his version this age-old story of “the danger of pure reason without decent occupation,” including Broadway and movie actor and TV icon David Rasche in the title role; Broadway and West End veteran Colin Stinton as Friend; and newcomer Sandra Lindquist as Wife. Two local kid actors Benjamin Beecroft and Nathan Wexler round out the cast. The two actors will alternate in the role of the Son.

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JUST ANNOUNCED! A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID MAMET:

Mamet has won the Pulitzer Prize for the 1984 play Glengarry Glen Ross. He’s authored such notable and provocative plays as American Buffalo, Oleanna and Speed-the-Plow. He’s also written and directed such films as Heist, State and Main and The Spanish Prisoner. You might think the prolific David Mamet would have said everything he wants to say in his work. Until now.

Expect a lively discussion. Well-circulated Mamet quotes include, “There’s no such thing as talent, you just have to work hard enough.” When asked to comment on adapting his own work for the screen, Mamet once said, “It’s like raping your children to teach them about sex.”

Krasny, host of KQED’s award-winning Forum, a Northern California radio news and public affairs program, is a regular host at City Arts & Lectures events and has interviewed man leading newsmakers and cultural icons including Noam Chomsky, Robert Redford and Cesar Chavez.

Tickets for A Conversation with David Mamet are $18/$25. For tickets, call City Arts Box Office (415) 392-4400 or visit www.cityboxoffice.com.

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What begins as a simple exchange, a downstairs neighbor asks the upstairs neighbor to turn down the music, spirals into a collision of worlds in Victor Lodato's funny, poignant new play 3F 4F. Ken Ruta and Wanda McCadden play a couple sitting tight on 42 years of secrets until the volatile young man upstairs (Gabe Marin), disrupts their delicate balance. Meanwhile, the man's best friend (Ian Scott McGregor) is lured away by a siren on rollerskates (Lisa Hernandez).

Thurs Dec. 18, 8pm
Magic Theater, Fort Mason Bldg D.
No Reservations Necessary.
Donations accepted at the door.

DON’T MISS DECEMBER’S SPECIAL EVENTS AT THE MAGIC!

Dec 14 - PAGE AND STAGE
Magic Theatre, 4:30 pm.
A free panel discussion featuring writers who have published both novels and plays, addressing the challenges of spanning different genres. Irvine Welsh ("Trainspotting," "Porno"), Dorothy Bryant ("Confessions of Madame Psyche"), and Michelle Carter ("The Uncommon Touch," "Hillary and Soon Yi Shop for Ties") will be the guest speakers. Moderated by Oscar Villalon, the Book Editor for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Dec 15,16 - YOUNG CALIFORNIA WRITERS PRESENT
Magic Theatre, 7:00 pm. Free.
Tap into the experience of some of San Francisco’s youngest playwrights, who have spent a semester working with Magic Theatre artists to develop their own short plays. This evening of staged readings performed by professional actors will highlight the work of students playwrights who have participated in a 10 week playwriting class led by professional playwright Michael Sullivan.

Reservations recommended. Call the Box Office at (415) 441-8822. For more information about the YCWP Program, contact Christine Young at (415) 828-1440.

Dec 18 - 3F 4F by Victor Lodato
Magic Theatre, 8 pm.
A work-in-progress presentation of a new play by Victor Lodato, directed by Mary Coleman. A project of the Magic Theatre/Z Space New Works Initiative. Free and open to the public.

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PLENTY OF TRICKS UP HIS SLEEVE
by Robert Hurwitt
SF Chronicle Theatre Critic
This article was published in the SF Chronicle Datebook on Sunday, 11/30/03.

Chronicle photo by John O'Hara

"I'm a kid in a candy store," Chris Smith says with an enthusiasm that makes an old metaphor sound unusually apt. "I really feel incredibly blessed. I mean, this is a gorgeous area. I'm in a nationally renowned theater. And I'm doing the work I love with artists both new to me and familiar in the grandest ways. It's an embarrassment of riches."

Tall and lean, with tousled brown hair and a neatly trimmed goatee, Smith projects a youthful, impulsively articulate optimism that belies his 40 years -- much of it spent in the often wearying, if not disheartening, trenches of directing, producing and championing new plays in New York. That combination of experience and earnest, upbeat energy would seem to make Smith an ideal artistic director for the Magic Theatre, the post he took over late last spring from Larry Eilenberg, who had guided the new play-identified company through much of the past decade.

Smith hit the ground running. Within eight weeks of having been selected by the Magic's board of directors, he'd "read 50 to 60 scripts," secured the rights to the ones he wanted and put together a landmark six-play season entirely composed of world premieres. Four of the plays are by new and emerging playwrights, in keeping with the Magic's long tradition of presenting pioneering new work. But two are the kind of projects guaranteed to make people sit up and take notice.

Now well into his first season, Smith is watching -- "in awe," he says -- major Irish novelist Edna O'Brien ("The Country Girls Trilogy," "In the Forest" -- see profile in today's Living section) attend rehearsals and wrestle with rewrites of her new play, "Triptych," opening Saturday at the Magic. In a short time, no less a leading light of the American theater than David Mamet will arrive at the theater to direct the world premiere of his next play, "Faustus" (opening Feb. 28).

"It's a mix of accomplished writers taking new risks and voices that, as far as I know, are new to the Bay Area," Smith says. "It was important to me, in putting together the season, to plant the flag -- to stay true to the Magic's significant mission of introducing new works to the American stage. And to say, 'This is who I am. This is the kind of work I'm excited about. This is the scope, this is the breadth, this is the depth.'
"New plays aren't born in a breezy manner. It takes a real kind of commitment and a lot of guts to do world premieres. It's incredibly sexy on a certain level, and tremendously exciting if things go as well as everybody always hopes. It really is the same process as giving birth. There's that nine months of anticipation, knowing that in the last few moments it's going to be strenuous and exhausting, and it may be bloody and it may be miraculous. And everybody's going to be in there pushing."

The metaphor comes naturally to Smith, whose wife, Sheri Matteo, gave birth to their second child, a son, just five months ago (they also have a 2 1/2-year-old daughter). It's even more understandable considering that Matteo is a professional midwife. Birthing runs in the family.

Smith was born in Beirut, the child of an American foreign-service worker who was posted in Lebanon at the time. "I'm a diplobrat," he says. "I spent four years of my childhood in Brazil but mostly grew up in the States, in the Washington, D.C., area." He got interested in theater in high school and graduated as a theater arts major from Brown University.

"I decided not to pursue graduate school because I felt that if I was going to make a life in the theater, I needed experience rather than theory. So I spent a year sort of working my way around the world. I worked on a fishing boat in Alaska, on construction in New Zealand, as a waiter in Australia and Singapore."
He was in London when a friend asked him to stage-manage an off-Broadway show in New York, and he soon became immersed in new plays -- selecting, directing and producing for several theaters. At the time he was chosen to direct the Magic, Smith was associate artistic director of Manhattan's Ensemble Studio Theatre, artistic director of the young playwright's group Youngblood and founding program director for the national EST/Sloan Project, where he commissioned and developed about 75 new plays.

Directing the Magic would seem almost a logical next step. Founded in a Berkeley bar in 1967 by John Lion and a group of actors, the Magic has a long history of introducing new works, including Sam Shepard's "True West," "Fool for Love" and Pulitzer Prize-winning "Buried Child," as well as the first plays of this year's Pulitzer winner, Nilo Cruz. Smith plans to build on that past with what he terms "high-octane new play development."

Besides the Magic's continuing series of staged readings of new plays -- Science on Stage, the Young Writers Project -- Smith has started a weekly in-house development series called the Lab "to give artists the opportunity to stretch their muscles between projects" and a workshop series called New Worlds. "I have a big appetite," he says with a grin.

For now, his principal focus is on O'Brien's "Triptych," which he describes as "an incredibly sexy play about three women -- a wife, mistress and daughter -- consumed by an absent and central male figure. There are writing passages that just knock you out. She takes us to some inordinately, brilliantly grotesque places, but that's what jealousy and love and obsession can do to you."

Mamet's "Faustus," Smith says, is exciting to him because it's "a master American artist challenging himself."

"It's not David in his better-known voice. It's the more rabbinical David, contemplating some of the big themes and working in a classical mode and very daring. It's written with the rhetorical flourishes of the 18th century, and it's wonderful and compelling in a very brave way."

But Smith sounds equally excited by "Hot House," his umbrella term ("Every good title should be a triple entendre," he says) for the three new plays by Steven Culp, Cassandra Medley and Stephen Belber that will be presented in rotating repertory -- as a festival of new work -- in April and May.

"There's something remarkable about the communal event that is theater, both in making it and the experience of it, which is rare and valuable," he says. "The live-ness of it. I get teased about this by my staff now. They say, 'Here comes Chris with the Gospel of New Plays.' But there's a passion for exploring the human condition that begins with a writer and moves through the transformative experience of adding designers and actors and directors to shape it, finally to share it with a bunch of people in a dark room. It's like a mythic primal ritual.

"There is, I think, an innate performer in all of us that understands that imaginative leap and that miracle of transformation. Just like there's that little bit in all of us that wants to be told a story. I think it's hard- wired into some ancient little place in the brainstem that says, 'I need this to somehow fathom what I'm doing on a daily basis.' We need stories to shape our lives and to put them in context."

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THE GIFT OF THE MAGIC: EDNA O’BRIEN’S DRAMATIC JOURNEY
by Catherine Bigelow
SF Chronicle Staff Writer
This article was published in the Living Section of the San Francisco Chronicle on 11/30/03.

Photo by Bruce Weber

At first, Edna O'Brien speaks barely above a whisper. The words fall softly, faintly from her lips, blanketing her listener in their rapturous spell. Then like a thunderclap, the words erupt and churn, mutinous and dark like her hero James Joyce's Shannon waves.

Silently, a reporter thanks her lucky stars for remembering to bring a tape recorder. It seems a harbinger, a good omen in the presence of this writer who embraces the mysteries of "things in heaven and earth" more than philosophies.

"I'm a superstitious person," says O'Brien. "I believe in signs and portents. I can't help it, being Irish." Many circumstances in the life of this renowned author and playwright have arrived via some combination of talisman or omen.

This includes her current stint as "Playwright in Residence" at San Francisco's Magic Theatre, where her new play, "Triptych," receives its world premiere on Saturday in a production that also marks the debut effort of the Magic's new artistic director, Chris Smith.

The play is the story of three women and their love, and obsession, for "Henry," a famous novelist. He serves as husband, father and lover to the women. He's the type of man that O'Brien herself says she would "inevitably and lamentably" fall in love with.

Director Paul Whitworth, the longtime artistic director of Shakespeare Santa Cruz (now back after a two-year sabbatical) was recommended to the production in typical O'Brien fashion.

The novelist rang up a friend, Sir Ian McKellen, asking if he knew any good directors in the Bay Area. And McKellen gave the nod to Whitworth, a Royal Shakespeare Company alumnus. "So here I am, just arrived in San Francisco, getting calls from a woman in London giving me suggestions on Bay Area directors," says Smith, laughing.

Unknown to O'Brien at the time, the idea of "residency" actually began to incubate last year during a visit O'Brien made to San Francisco. At dinner one night with her friend Jeannette Etheredge at North Beach Restaurant, its owner,

Lorenzo Petroni, presented O'Brien with a key ring depicting San Francisco Bay. "I put it on my desk when I went home and I thought, 'Why have I been given the key ring to San Francisco? I need the key.' And the key finally arrived in the form of the Magic Theatre."

Known for her dark and disturbing themes, O'Brien's most recent novel, "In the Forest" (Houghton Mifflin), was based on a 1994 triple murder in western Ireland. But she is praised, at least in most quarters, for her fierce, sensuous and lyric prose.

'Twasn't always so. And 'tisn't yet unanimously so in her native Ireland.

After the 1960 publication in London of her first book, "The Country Girls," O'Brien's work was banned at home, and she was decried as "a smear on Irish womanhood."

Her parents remained shocked for most of their lives over their daughter's tale of the sexual awakening of two young convent-educated Irish girls. Her parish priest conducted a book burning. And the nuns at her old convent school prayed the rosary for her nightly.

O'Brien had felt inklings of desire for the writing life since she was a young girl. But at her parents' insistence, she attended the Pharmaceutical College of Ireland in Dublin.

One afternoon, during a rare break from school and work, she was forever changed by a fourpence purchase, T.S. Eliot's "Introducing James Joyce."

"I opened it up at random and fell on the scene in 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' where the Christmas dinner begins with the fire being lit," says O'Brien, seated in the Magic's lobby. She wears a gypsy-like flowing gray velvet skirt and black jacquard scoop-necked blouse. Leaning toward her interlocutor, she pushes her jacket, with its faux-fur collar, back from her neck -- as if she can feel the heat of the fire in Joyce's story.

"The visitors are arriving and the table, beautifully laid: white cloth, beautiful glasses and the blaze of the fire. And everyone so friendly and gushing and welcoming and witty. They sit down for dinner. And two chestnuts, certainly the Irish chestnuts, the two topics that are calculated to raise hackles, sex and politics, are introduced and the whole beauty of the dinner is destroyed, is aborted.

"And as I was reading it, I thought, 'That could be our house at home,' " O'Brien laughs.

At that moment of enlightenment, found in the bin of an outdoor table beneath the awning of a Dublin bookstore, O'Brien became a lifelong, unabashed Joycean.

She calls this book, which travels with her everywhere she goes, the most cherished of her talismans, her "Saul of Tarsus."

In the early '50s, O'Brien scandalized her family by eloping with Czech- Irish writer Ernest Gebler. They had two sons, Carlo Gebler (a writer who lives in Ireland) and Sasha Gebler (an architect in London). The young family moved to London, where, like her hero, she chose self-imposed exile from the land of her birth.

The couple divorced after 15 years of marriage and O'Brien remained in London, raising her sons. This is where she has flourished, producing a body of work that includes 15 novels, four plays, numerous essays and a 1999 biography of Joyce.

Though Vanity Fair once dubbed her the "Playgirl of the Western World," O'Brien never remarried. And, with few exceptions, she does not wish to answer questions about the status of her love life, past or present.
Age is also a topic that O'Brien does not care to discuss. But let it be said: Though her perfectly coiffed hair is no longer the rich flame red of her youth, a fiery passion still burns in her heart.

She remains an unrepentant seductress, an enchanter. A Celtic Scheherazade.

And between rehearsals and "little fiddly rewrites" of "Triptych," O'Brien has been charming the natives and exciting local culturati.

Since her arrival in the city, she's lent a hand to a fellow County Clare native, fiddler Martin Hayes, when she performed a brief reading at his recent concert at the Delancey Street compound. The evening benefitted the Irish Arts Foundation in conjunction with Conor Howard's Anna Livia Books (named for Anna Livia Plurabelle, the famous heroine of Joyce's "Finnegans Wake").

Maryon Davies Lewis, arts patron, a longtime supporter of the American- Ireland Fund and pal to Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, recently threw a rollicking do for O'Brien, introducing the author to more than 100 of her friends at her Pacific Heights digs.

Guests ranged from the social set -- Gordon Getty, Lewis' daughter and son-in-law Lucy and Tom Dreyer, Kathleen Alioto, Dede Wilsey and former Tiffany honcho Charles Dishman, Judge Bill Newsom, father of Supervisor (and mayoral candidate) Gavin, enviro power couple Francesca Vietor and Mark Hertsgaard -- to local artistes, represented by actor Peter Coyote, film director Phil Kaufman, the Magic's Smith, director Whitworth, producer Tom Luddy and West Coast Paris Review editor Blair Fuller.

Irish Consul General Donal Denham was thrilled to catch up with his countrywoman. He had only recently met her but was more than familiar with her works.

"My birth sign is Leo," he said. "My formative years were spent in England, and when I was about 14, I came across a copy of 'August Is a Wicked Month.' As I was born in the month of August, and purely for the intellectual curiosity of it, I read the book," said Denham of the randy novel, which the New York Post called "A Mighty Wicked Book" in 1966. "And I don't think I've been the same since!"

In the salon of Lewis' house, which looks out on the Golden Gate Bridge, O'Brien was swarmed by admirers. But O'Brien is no stranger in a strange land here. She is "in residence" next door to Lewis' house, at the home of Ann and Gordon Getty. Her friendship with Ann dates to 1985, when Ann's Wheatland Corp. joined forces with Lord George Weidenfeld, owner of O'Brien's London publishers, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, to purchase Grove Press.

Of her stay with the Gettys, O'Brien explains: "The work I had to do on my play was essential. The spirit of the play was there, the structure is the same. But there was some enriching, a deepening. I needed to be somewhere very quiet and to be taken care of a bit. I'm taken care of so well here that I've lost the art of housekeeping!"

But she quickly points out that not all her friends are fancy.

"I'm not a snob," she says. "I'm Irish. I am as happy to talk to the boatman as the man who owns the yacht. Often happier. I love people who tell me things. People who really tell me things about their work and what it means. "

So it's no surprise then that on this trip, there have been numerous outings with Etheredge and visits to her famed North Beach boite, Tosca Cafe.

"I was in Jeannette's office the other day and noticed a wonderful photograph of Robert Mitchum. Now I'm not wont to be vulgar or even indiscreet, " says O'Brien. "But as I'm admiring the photo, I did tell Jeannette I had a bit of a romance with Mitchum.

"And Jeannette said, 'Isn't it a great photo? Bruce took it.' And I said, 'Bruce Weber?' She says 'yes.' And I tell her that Bruce took a photo of me as well. And wouldn't it be nice if we could get a copy and put me up there beside Mitchum?''

A print arrives shortly thereafter, along with a fax from the famed photographer: "How can I say no to such a great writer and big flirt!"

During a recent run-through of "Triptych" at the Magic Theatre's Fort Mason headquarters, O'Brien is seated alone, in an empty row in front of director Whitworth. She burrows into the chair, practically motionless, intent upon the action on the stage.

She watches silently, listening to actresses Julia Brothers and Lise Bruneau run through their lines. Her lines, reading her words.

At first stone still, O'Brien's natural intensity begins to betray her. Her right hand begins to move about her face. Her finger touches her cheekbone, moves to trace the outline of her aquiline nose, then alights upon her lips. She cups her chin in her hand. She bites a fingernail.

As the scene builds, Bruneau, playing the part of the Mistress, repeats to Brothers' character, the Wife, the words that the character Henry used to describe the process of writing.

"He said, 'Writing was like tapping a tree for rubber.' " (She mimes it). "Tap tap tap, but no words came -- the words had all deserted him and I said, They'll come back -- they will come back.' "

As the words are spoken, O'Brien mouths along, a silent recitation, in unison with Bruneau. The right hand reaches out again, this time slicing the air in front of her. At the crucial moment she taps her face three times.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

In another scene, Whitworth jumps up and walks to the stage. "I think the line needs to have more of a sense of that female poison at its most attractive," says Whitworth to the actresses.

Turning toward O'Brien he calls out, "Isn't that right, Edna?"

During her first two weeks at the Magic, as O'Brien is shown the lay of the land, various nooks and crannies are reverently pointed out to her.

"People were saying, 'This is where Sam Shepard sat. This is where Sam Shepard rewrote his ending,' recalls O'Brien, referring to Shepard's landmark "Playwright in Residence" tenure at the theater, which heralded an era of great creativity for both Shepard, whose play "Buried Child" had its world premiere here in 1978 and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1979, and the Magic.

"I said," continued O'Brien, " 'I think I'll sit there. It might help me to get to my ending.' "

Writer Edna O’Brien with director Paul Whitworth in rehearsal. Chronicle photo by Liz Hafalia.

Bay Area movie director Phil Kaufman ("The Right Stuff") is participating in a forthcoming benefit "Conversation" for the Magic with O'Brien. The two have known each other for 20 years, after being introduced by Telluride Film Festival founder Tom Luddy at a reading O'Brien was giving at Black Oak Books in Berkeley.

Kaufman recalls casting for a young actor to star in his film "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." He called O'Brien and asked if she'd heard of someone named Daniel Day-Lewis.

"And, of course," says Kaufman, chuckling at the memory, "she knew him!"

"It's a true and deep passion (she conveys) in her writing," the director adds affectionately. "And she writes with a fanatical heart. I hope after our 'Conversation,' people will understand why every dinner with her is such a thrilling time."

The two shared a recent lunch together in North Beach. Afterward, Kaufman thought it would be a good idea to take O'Brien to O'Reilly's Irish Pub & Restaurant on Green Street and show her its famous mural featuring a pantheon of Irish writers.

"She wrote a wonderful biography of James Joyce. That's the key to Edna. She's in the line of great Irish writers. So I wanted to show her the mural. But then I remembered, 'Uh-oh, only the boys are pictured,' " says Kaufman. "Edna should be up there, too!"

So instead they ventured into the shrine of St. Francis of Assisi on Columbus Avenue. In a gesture that might surprise some of the clerical critics in her native land, O'Brien lit candles and prayed for her play's success.

"The journey Edna's taken is extraordinary, considering her family (opposition) and her struggles to be literary," Kaufman says. "She arrived at writing because she loved the word. She was caught in the breath of literature that sweeps across Ireland and a few special people are intoxicated by it."
But O'Brien harbors no illusions about seeing her image painted on the wall of a pub here, let alone Ireland.
"Of course, I would love it if my own people embraced me. But I'm not going to get that. I think maybe when I'm dead, I'll have some statues," she adds, with a wry smile. "But I don't see any going up in my lifetime."

Whether Ireland embraces her or not, O'Brien will never let Ireland go. She has a house in Donegal, built by her son. But living and writing there full time would be too difficult.

"All my stories are from Ireland and they always will be," she says. "I actually truly love the place. I also have fears and many memories about the place that aren't exactly dulcet.

"But it's my roots," she adds. "And when I dream at night, it's the place I go to.

"I have a grave," she says, softly. "A beautiful grave on an island, my mother's family grave. Many people are still angry with me for what I write. And they did not want me to be buried there. But they don't really understand how deep into the soil you have to go to write a book.

"I want to buried in Ireland. There is for me, in my own country, a beauty and a loneliness that is indescribable. And I want, either living or dead, to be part of that.

"Even though," she says, laughing at her own solemnity, "I'll be dead."

She muses on her stay here. It amazes O'Brien how one meets people. How they go out of your life, die or disappear. And then come back again.

O'Brien pauses for a moment, looking around the lobby of the theater. She gestures upward, tracing a slight arc. She smiles brightly, resuming in full voice.

"You know, it's funny, isn't it? How everything is always somewhere in the wings, waiting to catch up with you."

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THE WRITER MEETS THE DIRECTOR
Edna O’Brien (author of novels The Country Girls Trilogy, Lantern Slides, In the Forest, and Magic’s upcoming show Triptych) and Philip Kaufman (director of movies Quills, The Right Stuff, Henry & June, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Rising Sun, and the upcoming Twisted) discuss their process as a writer and a director, exploring the rules, the tensions, and the rewards of the collaborative creative process in an evening entitled “The Writer Meets the Director.” Hosted by Larry Eilenberg, the evening – which serves as a benefit for Magic Theatre -- is billed as “an intimate conversation” and will take place at Fort Mason’s Cowell Theatre, at 7:30pm on Monday evening, December 8th. Tickets are $18 - $22 and may be ordered by phoning (415) 441-8822. A question and answer session will follow the discussion.

O’Brien, who broke ground with The Country Girls Trilogy in 1960, has been a prolific and often controversial chronicler of life in Ireland, illuminating struggles within the Catholic society, spouse abuse, abortion, and priestly infidelities. Philip Roth calls her “the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English.” Her subjects have often been taken from the news, up through her most recent novel In The Forest (2002) about a mad, institutionalized boy and his victims. Also a writer of screenplays and non-fiction work, Ms. O’Brien has received many awards, including the L.A. Times Book Prize for Lantern Slides.

In Triptych, acclaimed award-winning author O’Brien peels back the deepest layers of three women — called simply Mistress, Wife, and Daughter —as they reveal their shared passion for one absent man. Set in and around New York, the play’s characters emerge as each tells her own side of a story concerning Henry, a world-renowned novelist, whom the audience never meets. As the women share parallel journeys from individual perspectives, they begin to discover their relationships to each other: their differences, similarities, and how each one defines the other two, for better or for worse.

San Francisco writer-director Philip Kaufman began his film career with the mystical comedy, Goldstein, which won the Prix de la Nouvelle Critique at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival. His career includes such critically acclaimed movies as The Right Stuff (8 Academy Award nominations, 4 Oscars, Writers and Directors Guild nominations), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (2 Academy Award nominations, British Academy Award, Writers Guild nomination), Henry & June, Rising Sun, and Quills (3 Academy Award nominations, National Board of Review Best Movie 2000). Mr. Kaufman has just completed Twisted starring Ashley Judd, Samuel L. Jackson and Andy Garcia. Twisted is due for release in April, 2004. Mr. Kaufman has been honored with numerous retrospectives including the Sundance Film Festival, the Cambridge, England Film Festival, the American Film Institute and the American Cinemateque (2004).

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