Other Theatre Company announces Chicago premiere THE REALM

The Other Theatre Company (TOTC) and Artistic Director Carin Silkaitis are proud to present the next show in the company’s 2015 - 2016 season The Realm, written by Sarah Myers and directed by Kelly Howe, at The Side Project, 1439 W Jarvis Ave. 
In an underground future not so far from now, teenagers Kansas and James try to escape a terrifying (new?) world order. The regime known as The Realm controls not only water and other natural resources but also the ability of its citizens to remember words themselves. As Kansas and James fight for the right to speak, choose, and desire, their journey overlaps with that of a mysterious woman who refuses to submit to The Realm despite the high price she pays for her resistance. Sarah Myers’ The Realm stages urgent questions about the relationship between language, power, solidarity, and survival.

The Cast for The Realm include: Esme Ayvar-Perez (Kansas), Gay Glenn (Ms. Analyst), Bryson David Hoff (ensemble), Abdu Hytrek (James), Savanna Rae (ensemble), Carin Silkaitis (Laura), Sarah Taylor (Mrs. Mother), and Philip Winston (Mr. Father).
The production crew for The Realm includes:  Sarah Myers (playwright), Kelly Howe (director), Emily Lowney (stage manager), Noelle Humbert (casting director), Stephen Kossak (casting assistant), Lizzie Bracken (scenic designer), Matt Carney (lighting designer), Michael Johannsen (technical director), Ashley Pettit (sound designer) and Olivia Crary (costume designer).

ABOUT SARAH MYERS, PLAYWRIGHT
Sarah Myers is a Chicago native currently living in Minneapolis. Her work has been featured at the Wild Project (New York); the Blue Theater, the Off Center, Hyde Park Theatre (Austin); Columbia College’s Center for Book & Paper Arts (Chicago); and Indiana Repertory Theater (Indianapolis). Her published plays include The Realm, God of the Gaps, and In and Out. She is a recipient of the Waldo M. and Grace C. Bonderman Playwriting Award, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a Heideman Award finalist. Myers is a former company member of Austin-based theater collective Rude Mechanicals, a new company member of Twin Cities-based Workhaus Collective, and a current collaborator with Sod House Theater, a company that creates adaptations of classic plays with communities throughout the state of Minnesota. A graduate of Northwestern University and the University of Texas at Austin, Myers now teaches in the Theater Department and the MFA Creative Writing Program at Augsburg College in Minneapolis.

ABOUT KELLY HOWE, DIRECTOR
Kelly Howe is a theatre faculty member at Loyola University Chicago and Resident Dramaturg at The Other Theatre Company (TOTC). Plays she has directed include Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Ellen McLaughlin’s Iphigenia andOther Daughters, Juan Mayorga’s Way to Heaven, Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, George Brant’s Elephant’s Graveyard, Martín Zimmerman’s Phoenix Unforgiven, and Sarah Myers’ God of the Gaps. Recent dramaturgy for TOTC includes Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 and Daughters of Ire. Howe is a past president of Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed (PTO) and chair of the upcoming 30th anniversary conference of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) in Chicago. As an artist/scholar, Howe focuses on activist performance, particularly Theatre of the Oppressed and theatre as feminist organizing. She collaborated with Julian Boal and Scot McElvany to co-edit Theatre of the Oppressed in Actions: An Audio-Visual Introduction to Boal’s Forum Theatre (2015), and her writing also appears in Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Text and Performance Quarterly, Comparative Drama, etc. She is a graduate of Muhlenberg College and the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the advisory board of the Jana Sanskriti International Research and Resource Institute, West Bengal, India. 

​ABOUT THE OTHER THEATRE COMPANY
The Other Theatre Company is a collective of artists dedicated to telling the stories of those who are "othered" by systems of oppression. Comprised of activists who openly express their opinion on the various issues presented in the media and beyond, The Company engages their audience in a dialogue through performance and educational outreach. The Other Theatre Company believes in and fights for equality and rejects cultural hegemony.