2004-2005 Season: Sugar Plum Fairy

WRITTEN BY Sandra Tsing Loh

DIRECTED BY David Schweizer

Cast

Artistic Collaborators

David Schweizer (Director) is delighted to be returning to San Jose Rep as Ms. Loh’s “house” director after staging Aliens in America at the Rep in previous seasons. He was trained at the Yale School of Drama and has been directing new theater, performance and opera work nationally and internationally for thirty years, beginning with his debut at Lincoln Center with his controversial revival of Troilus and Cressida and extending to last summer’s triumph at Glimmerglass Opera Festival with Sir Richard Rodney Bennett’s The Mines of Sulphur. His memorable residencies at national theaters in Warsaw, Sarajevo, Lisbon, Prague and Toga Village-Japan have generated productions which can still be seen on the stages of today. Last summer, his production of Rinde Eckert’s Obie Award-winning chamber opera And God Created Great Whales ran at the Barbican Center in London. Recent noteworthy productions include Wintertime by Charles Mee at Second Stage in New York, James Magruder’s new adaptation of Moliere’s The Miser at Center Stage in Baltimore, and currently running in New York City, the world premiere of William Hamilton’s White Chocolate at the Century Playhouse.

Cast Profiles

Sandra Tsing Loh (Performer/Playwright) has done two solo off-Broadway shows: Aliens in America and Bad Sex with Bud Kemp. Both premiered at Second Stage Theatre and had various held-over runs at the Tiffany Theatre in Los Angeles, Seattle Repertory Theatre and San Jose Repertory Theatre. To date, Aliens in America has been performed over 200 times. Her two latest shows, Sugar Plum Fairy and I Worry, received their world premieres this past year at Seattle Repertory Theatre and in Washington D.C., at the AFI Theatre at the Kennedy Center (in co-production with the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Co.) respectively. I Worry has subsequently received successful productions at Santa Fe Stages and Actors Theatre of Louisville.Sugar Plum Fairy had its Los Angeles premiere at the Geffen Playhouse in November 2003.

Ms. Loh’s books include: A Year in Van Nuys; If You Lived Here You’d be Home (named by the Los Angeles Times as one of the 100 best books of 1980), Depth Takes a Holiday and Aliens in America. She won a 1995 Pushcart Prize in Fiction for her short story “My Father’s Chinese Wives,” which was also included in the 1999 Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. On public radio, she has been a regular contributor to both NPR’s “Morning Edition” and Ira Glass’ “This American Life”; currently her commentaries are heard nationwide, every third Wednesday on “The Loh Down” on PRI’s Marketplace.