SF Olympians

Join No Nude Men Productions and director Tore Ingersoll-Thorp for the world premiere of Bennett Fisher‘s new play about four derivative traders seeking to benefit from the Greek financial meltdown. Their acts of greed and deceit bring unforeseeable consequences and an unexpected visitor Hermes, god of commerce and thieves, the physical manifestation of fraud, who goads the group into bolder action through slippery logic, tantalizing visions of immense wealth, and the occasional punch in the balls.

Inspired in part by Lehman Brothers’ role in the current Greek economic collapse, HERMES paints an impishly comic and glorifying portrait equivocation, exploitation, disinformation, misappropriation, deregulation, ruination, large corporations, financial machinations, and the age of globalization exploring man’s godlike ability to profit off what is truly worthless.

Starring Juliana Egley, Geoffrey Nolan, Carl Lucania, Brian Markley, Lauren Spencer and Brian Tryborn.

The play runs Thursday, Friday and Saturdays from March 3rd to the 26th, 8 PM curtain, at the Exit Stage Left (156 Eddy Street) in San Francisco.

Ticket range:
$12.00 March 3, 4
$15.00 March 10, 17
$18.00 March 5, 24
$20.00 March 11, 12, 18, 19
$25.00 March 25, 26

Tickets can be purchased at https://beta.brownpapertickets.com/event/144160

Reservations strongly encouraged. Tickets sold at the door are $20.00 ALL DATES.

For press/industry comps e-mail [email protected].

San Francisco Olympians is happy to say that our first festival was such an enormous success, we have no choice but to return in 2011. Ten out of twelve nights of the festival were sold out and three had to bring in extra chairs! Press coverage included articles in the San Francisco Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner. All said and done, it is estimated over 700 people attended the Festival and over 100 participated as actors, designers, crew, directors or writers. We’d be fools not to take this crazy journey again, so…

New (bigger!) venue, new line-up of gods and authors, new art and more divine entertainment coming your way in October of 2011 at the Exit Theater in San Francisco!

Keep your eye on this page for updates, including chances to submit proposals to be part of next year’s writer line-up!

In the month of July in 2010, No Nude Men Productions, one of San Francisco’s longest running indy theater troupes, will roll out twelve new full-length plays written by fourteen local writers, each one focusing on one of the twelve Olympian gods of Ancient Greece.

Generated over the course of a year (writers were picked from a larger pool of applicants in September of 2009), the plays range from wild comedies to elegant period pieces, terrifying horror stories to contemporary satires, romantic dramas to political commentaries. The one great unifier will be the goddess Hestia, the twelfth Olympian who gave up her throne to the young god Dionysus when he came to Olympus seeking his place amongst his peers. A vital figure of Greek culture (she was the goddess of fire, the hearth and home), there is little mythology focused around Hestia until now, when she will step to the front of the line as the patron goddess of the Festival, and a supporting character in each of the twelve plays.

Every one of the twelve Olympians will get their own night, during which the play dedicated to them will be given a staged and rehearsed reading at the Exit Stage Left by some of the best and brightest of the San Francisco acting scene. Additionally, the theater itself will contain an ongoing exibit of the twelve specially themed art pieces being generated for the show’s publicity by twelve local artists. Truly a unique event, the evening will be a reminder of the still potent vitality of Greek mythology and its continued significance not only as our cultural roots, but as cultural mirror as well.

Check back here for more information.

The plays, dates and authors:

DIONYSUS by Nathan Tucker, July 8
APOLLO by Garret Groenveld, July 9
POSEIDON by Bryce Allemann, Dana Constance and Kathy Hicks, July 10
HERMES by Ben Fisher, July 15
ARTEMIS by M.R. Fall, July 16
ZEUS by Helen Noakes, July 17
DEMETER by Claire Ann Rice, July 22
APHRODITE by Nirmala Nataraj, July 23
ARES by Sean Kelly, July 24
ATHENA by Ashley Cowan, July 29
HERA by Stuart Bousel, July 30
HEPHAESTUS by Evelyn Jean Pine, July 31

All readings will occur at the Exit Stage Left in San Francisco (156 Eddy Street) at 8 PM.

Admission: $10.00 per reading (if you attend 4, you get the 5th one free).