Playhouse Announces Without Walls Festival for October 2013

By Bill Eadie | January 11, 2013 |

We Built This City
Photo by Wendy Kimpton

The La Jolla Playhouse announced at a press conference today that its inaugural Without Walls Festival will be staged October 3 – 6. The Playhouse portion of the University of California, San Diego, campus, will serve as a festival village for a series of performances and events presented in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and the UCSD Department of Theatre and Dance.

Designed to “break the barriers of traditional theatre,” the festival aims to be low cost, with no admission charge for the festival grounds and many individual performances costing $25 or less.

Performances announced at today’s press conference include:

Platonov, the Chekhov play in a multi-media adaptation by MIT faculty member Jay Scheib.

100% San Diego, a piece created by Rimini Protokoll, a German theatre company, that will cast 100 local residents in a manner designed to create a demographically-accurate representation of San Diego’s population.

We Built This City, where Australian company Polyglot will engage children and adults in building (and then destroying) a cardboard city in one day.

Puppeteer Basil Twist (see featured picture) will create a new work designed to be staged at the beach.

Kamchatka, will be performed by eight actors moving about La Jolla trying to discover the city as if seeing it for the first time.

Our Town will be staged as a community meal by UCSD alum Tom Dugdale.

The Car Plays, pieces performing inside of vehicles, will make a return after a wildly successful run in 2012.

The Car Plays
Photo by J. Katarzyna Woronowicz

The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, will present works by American Indian storyteller James Luna and by visual and performance artists Kate Gilmore and Jacolby Satterwhite. The museum will also open the festival with a version of its successful TNT (Thursday Night Thing) series. TNT brings together art, artists, and art patrons for activities, music, and cocktails. The UCSD Department of Theatre and Dance will announce its contributions to the festival at a later date.

Playhouse Artistic Director Christopher Ashley said that performances will be staged at least once each day during the festival and that some would be staged multiple times. He also said that it would be possible for a fan of the festival, with careful planning and early ticket purchases, to see everything being presented.

Tickets for festival activities are set to go on sale in the spring.

Regarding subscription shows, which aren’t set to resume until June, the Playhouse confirmed that director David Cromer will stage this summer’s production of Tribes. Mr. Cromer directed the off-Broadway production of Nina Raine’s play. Mr. Ashley will direct John Guare’s His Girl Friday, and Des McAnuff will direct a stage version of the film, Sideways, written by Rex Pickett, the original novelist. In the fall, Bill Condon will direct a re-imagined version of Bill Russell and Henry Krieger’s musical, Side Show. Side Show will be produced in association with Washington, DC’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.