World Premiere
Performances
Feb 9, 2018 -
Mar 4, 2018
Thu 7:30p
Fri & Sat 8p
Sun 2:30p
“People aren’t meant to be alone.”
Cast & Personnel
Director
Dramaturgy
Music Direction
Cast
Band
Fight Choreography
Scenic Design
Costume Design
Lighting Design
Assistant Lighting Design
Sound Design
Prop Design
Stage Manager
Booth Crew
Deck Crew
The Play
Margie was raised to be a good girl, but Margie has a secret: she wants to be a lion. LEAP AND THE NET WILL APPEAR traces one woman’s highly theatrical, time-hopping search for adventure, for love, and for her true self. Packed with wildly eccentric family members and unpredictable lovers, Margie’s journey is at turns uproariously funny and probingly melancholic. Her fierce insistence that she can discover her most fundamental nature takes her across the globe in a romantic and bewildering whirlwind.
Two time Obie Award-winning playwright and director Craig Lucas says of LEAP AND THE NET WILL APPEAR: “No one else is doing what Chana Porter is doing—unhinging logic and time from their outward solidity, revealing enduring landscapes within the scenes resembling life but doing it one better each time.” The Catastrophic Theatre’s world premiere production will be directed by Porter’s collaborator, New York City-based director Tara Ahmadinejad.
LEAP AND THE NET WILL APPEAR is the first of Chana Porter’s plays to be produced by The Catastrophic Theatre, but it’s unlikely to be the last. Catastrophic artistic director Jason Nodler sees Porter as an emerging powerhouse among contemporary avant-garde playwrights: “I am an unabashed fanboy. When I fall in love with a playwright’s voice I fall hard and I don’t just want to produce the work that made me fall in love; I want to produce everything they ever write. It’s a rare and glorious thing when that happens, and I am head over heels in love with Chana Porter’s voice as a writer and with the play, LEAP AND THE NET WILL APPEAR. It is one of the strangest, most imaginative, hilarious, ‘pataphysical, and moving things I have ever read. And I can’t wait to see what the extraordinary director Tara Ahmadinejad will make out of it. Plays like this one and artists like Chana and Tara are why I make theatre.”
The Director
TARA AHMADINEJAD is a New York City-based freelance director and a core-founding member of the theater collective Piehole. Their most recent work, Ski End, premiered in 2017, and was developed through the New Ohio/IRT’s Archive Residency and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency. Other recent projects -- Hand Foot Fizzle Face at JACK and Old Paper Houses at the Irondale Center -- have been developed at the Drama League, New York Theatre Workshop and the Prelude Festival. Tara recently directed Caryl Churchill's Love and Information at LSU, and is collaborating with Daaimah Mubashshir on a new play through the New Georges Jam. Tara leads workshops in collaborative theater-making, including recent work with undergraduates in Tehran, Iran. She is an NYTW Usual Suspect, a New Georges Jam member and affiliated artist, and a graduate of Columbia’s MFA Directing program.
The Playwright
CHANA PORTER is an emerging playwright, speculative novelist, and education activist. Her plays and performance pieces have been developed or produced at Playwrights Horizons, The Catastrophic Theatre, La MaMa, 3LD, Rattlestick Playwright’s Theatre, Cherry Lane, The Invisible Dog, Movement Research, PS122, and The White Bear in London. She is a MacDowell Fellow, a New Georges Audrey Resident, and 2018 nominee for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She is currently writer-in-residence at The Catastrophic Theatre in Houston (while living in New York and Los Angeles.) Chana is the co-founder of the Octavia Project, a free summer writing and STEM program for Brooklyn teenage girls and nonbinary youth, now in its fourth year. Her play LEAP AND THE NET WILL APPEAR, which BroadwayWorld calls "exhausting and exhilarating, disturbing and amazing" will be produced by New Georges in NYC in June 2019, directed by Tara Ahmadinejad. www.chanaporter.
The Composer
ANDREW LYNCH is a Brooklyn based composer and performer. He recently contributed the music and performed in Split Knuckle Theatre Company's The Curious Case of Phineas Gage at the New York Fringe Festival, which received the 2015 Fringe NYC Overall Excellence award for Best Ensemble. His original music theatre has been presented at numerous NYC venues such as Ars Nova, Music Theater Factory, and Dixon Place. The New York Times describes his work in Le Gourmand or Gluttony as "rich in musical abundance... so pleasing to the palate, it deserves a bigger table." Recent performance credits include, Cadence Dakota Begbick in Bread's Rise and Fall, Paul Bradley in 3 Sticks' Vesige, and Lloyd in Jahn Sood's The Disappearing Man. He also performed as a Blue Man in New York and Chicago. He is a Co-Artistic Director of 3 Sticks, and a founding member of the Brooklyn arts space Cloud City.
In the Media
BWW Review: LEAP AND THE NET WILL APPEAR at Catastrophic Theatre
February 16, 2018 |
Broadway World
| P’nina Topham
A weird ‘Leap’ is the perfect Catastrophic play
February 15, 2018 |
Houston Chronicle
| Wei-Huan Chen
Take Risks, and the Audience Will Appear: Catastrophic Theatre Premieres Brave Queer Play
February 12, 2018 |
Spectrum South
| Josh Inocéncio
Leap And The Net Will Appear Roars At Convention With Catastrophic Theatre
February 10, 2018 |
Houston Press
| Jessica Goldman
When a Woman Wants to Be a Lion…
February 9, 2018 |
Houstonia
| Holly Beretto
Videos
I am head over heels in love with Chana Porter's voice
as a writer and with the play, LEAP AND THE NET WILL APPEAR. It is one of the strangest, most imaginative, hilarious, ‘pataphysical, and moving things I have ever read.
— Jason Nodler, Artistic Director, Catastrophic Theatre
