Performances
Dec 2, 2011 -
Dec 23, 2011
Cast & Personnel
Director
Music Direction
Cast
Scenic Design
Costume Design
Lighting Design
Sound Design
Prop Design
Stage Manager
Assistant Stage Manager
The Play
Described as “a ghost story for three bodies with three voices,” Anna Bella Eema is the story of a mother, her girl and her girl’s girl: a twin she crafted from the mud outside their trailer park home. D’Amour presents the tale in a profoundly theatrical style in which words and actions become music and music becomes story. The production continues the Catastrophic tradition of introducing Houston audiences to the most original voices writing for theatre today. Ms. D’Amour’s work has been performed extensively throughout the country and in Canada and she was the 2008 recipient of the Alpert Awards in the Arts in Theatre. The New York Times called Anna Bella Eema “A skillfully stylized…wise comment on identity, the violence and inevitability of separation, and the value of both adaptation and detailed self-awareness.”The Playwright
LISA D'AMOUR is a playwright and interdisciplinary artist. She received her M.F.A. in playwriting from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a core member of the Playwrights' Center and a recent is a playwright, educator and interdisciplinary collaborator from New Orleans. Her plays have been produced across the US and the Globe , including at Manhattan Theater Club (NYC - Broadway), Playwrights Horizons (NYC), Steppenwolf Theater (Chicago), ArtSpot Productions (New Orleans), The National Theater (UK) and of course Catastrophic Theatre. In addition to writing plays, Lisa is co-Artistic Director of PearlDamour, a company that creates interdisciplinary, often site-specific performances that range from intimate to large scale. Recent work with PearlDamour includes Ocean Filibuster, a genre-crashing human-ocean showdown (currently touring), and MILTON, a performance and community engagement experiment rooted in 5 U.S. towns named Milton. Lisa’s play Detroit was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the 2011 Susan Smith Blackburn prize. She is the recipient of the 2008 Alpert Award for the Arts in theater, the 2011 Steinberg Playwright Award and a 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. Lisa received an MFA in Playwriting from UT Austin is currently the Distinguished Lecturer in Playwriting at the University of Houston. She lives in New Orleans where she is on the co-leadership team for Trinity City Arts.
The Composer
In the Media
The Catastrophic Theatre – “Anna Bella Eema” by Lisa D’Amour
December 14, 2011 |
KUHA The Front Row
| Chris Johnson
Anna Bella Eema from Catastrophic Theatre: A Startling Piece of Theater
December 7, 2011 |
Houston Press
| D.L. Groover
Catastrophic Theatre keeps it wonderful and weird with ‘Anna Bella Eema’
December 6, 2011 |
Houston Chronicle
| Everett Evans
Finding Mythic Spaces: Q + A with Lisa D’Amour
December 1, 2011 |
Arts + Culture Texas
| Zachary Doss
