Place/Settings: Berkeley

Place/Settings: Berkeley
By various authors
Sound design by Madeleine Oldham and Lane Elms
Debuts January 12, 2021
10 episodes; 1 episode released weekly
Running time: varies

Stories surround us everywhere, whether we can see them or not. Ten writers, inspired by events in their own personal histories, take us on an aural adventure to specific locations around Berkeley. You will receive, via snail mail, a physical map (or a digital version if you’d like to save a tree) of the locations illustrated by a New Yorker cartoonist, lifting you out of the virtual realm and inviting you to explore the past hidden beneath the present.

Ticketholders will be invited to Live from the Peet’s, a virtual opening night party on January 12 at 5:30pm PT.

Schedule:

The Fundamental Kiss, With Overtones by Eisa Davis
A young oboist kisses a pianist on a street corner. At long last! But the kiss unlocks pressures, expectations, dreams, and fears. Can we learn to live with uncertainty? To ask for what we need?
night fishing by Philip Kan Gotanda, reader TBA
On a chilly autumn night, an old fisherman makes his way to the lake in the dark. He casts a line…and reels in the ghost he’s been seeking.

The Black Mass Sonata by Daniel Handler, read by Lance Gardner
Bored, lost, and lonely, a teenager stumbles into a café. While eating a cup of soup, he hears a wondrously inscrutable sonata, and begins to sense that being lost might not be such a lonesome condition after all.

West Berkeley West Indian by Aya de León
How do you find your people in middle school—especially when you don’t quite fit the mold? A girl experiments, assimilates, adapts, and journeys towards genuine self-love and community.

20 Weeks by Adam Mansbach
Hope, fear, excitement, and a dizzying array of possibilities unspool across an expectant dad’s imagination, as he and his partner navigate medical uncertainties and rediscover each other as almost-parents.

Suicide on Telegraph by Richard Montoya
It’s 1959, and tobacco smoke snakes across the bustling café from its prized corner table, where artists and students debate political treatises, muse on philosophy, and share thrilling new poetry.

The Slide by Itamar Moses
A neighborhood park—its playground, sloping hillside, and basketball court; its tunnel to a rose garden and many paths—bears witness to a boy, growing up and growing old.

The Third Sphere by Kamala Parks, read by Denmo Ibrahim
Straddling the worlds of her divorced parents, Yasmine doesn’t feel fully at home in either. Desperate to see her best friend in San Francisco, she embarks on the voyage across the Bay alone, exhilarated at her newfound independence.

The Character Actor by Sarah Ruhl, reader TBA
From a perch beyond this life, an actor observes as a group of masked people finally return to the courtyard of Berkeley Rep—to the theatre, the place we made to gather, breathe together, and share the stories that remind us of our humanity.

For the Record by Sean San José
Sometimes music becomes indelibly linked to specific memories, invoking the people with whom we shared them. Songs by Isaac Hayes, Peter Tosh, Stevie Wonder, the Doors, the Knight Brothers, and Patti LaBelle conjure a deep friendship, one that began on a hot night in 1986 outside Leopold’s Records.

TICKETS: $10-$50 (click on the blue event Link for more info)