Événement

Sea Turtles

GenerationTheatre will stage its original play, Sea Turtles, on three weekends from April 15 to April 30 at the Exit Theater. Curtain time is 8:00pm on Friday and Saturday and 3:00pm on Sunday, with a performance on Thursday, April 28 at 8:00pm.

With its all-woman cast, GenerationTheatre's newest production fulfills the local theater company's triple mission: bring new stage works to life, offer high quality theater to the San Francisco Bay area community, and appeal to a multi-generational audience.

"Sea Turtles is about three generations of women migrating between Tunis and Paris," says author-director David Valayre. "My own family is a Parisian mix of Berber and Sephardic Jews from Tunisia, so you could say it's close to home." The play is about finding one's home, and about being a mother, a daughter, a sister, or a grandmother. It's a story of love given and love denied.

Like GenerationTheatre's previous San Francisco productions (4Soldiers in 2008, DiTCH and BooKKeepers in 2009), Sea Turtles challenges the notions of chronology and distance. Seven actresses interpret four characters at different ages; Tunis, Paris, a beach, a garret, a train and a road are evoked simultaneously on a single stage. Paris 1942 talks to Paris 1968. A grandmother sees the younger woman she once was.

"This is realistic theater because that's exactly what happens in reality. The Paris of 1942 is present in the Paris of 2011 anyone who tells you otherwise never lived in Paris. And we all live with our younger selves anyone who tells you otherwise was never young. This doesn't mean your past should devour you, but you can't stop it from nibbling at your present, now and again," says Valayre.
The women of Sea Turtles are looking for a beach they lost or never knew "just as we 18-year olds were looking for a beach under the cobblestones of chaotic 1968 Paris," says Valayre. Shuttled by history between Tunis and Paris, they are searching for their own identity. "Call your brothers by their French names," says one of the characters, "David, Salomon, those are your father's choices. We're in France now, we don't want to stand out. From now on, it's Clovis and Charlemagne."

Sea Turtles, written and directed by Roland David Valayre, interpreted by Erica Andracchio, Lisa Drostova, L. Margarita Galindo, Joanne Grimm, Dascha Inciarte, Raymonde McCoy and Andrea Satin.
Music by Judy Frankel and the Baermann Clarinet Sextet