THEATRE + COMEDY

The University of Houston School of Theatre and Dance presents bobrauschenbergamerica, by Charles L. Mee. Directed by J.Ed Araiza.

February 20, 21, 26, 27, 28 at 8:00 pm
February 22, March 1 at 2:00 pm

Experience live-action poetry that explores the American landscape in a play that one of our greatest artists, Robert Rauschenberg, might have conceived if he had been a playwright instead of a painter. It’s a delightful collage of people and places and music and dancing, of love stories and picnics and business schemes and shootings and chicken jokes and golfing. A quintessentially American play.

"...brashly, unapologetically entertaining"
- New York Times

J. Ed Araiza is a member of the SITI Company and has appeared in numerous SITI productions, including Hotel Cassiopeia, Midsummer Night's Dream, Culture of Desire, War of the Worlds and the premiere of bobrauschenbergamerica. A native of San Antonio, his Texas work includes directing MedeaStories, Cukoo's Nest, Ladee Leroy and most recently Vaudeville Vanya, a musical adaptation of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in Austin. This past November he conceived and directed a workshop of Everyone Diees Right?, a meditation on Hamlet in the SITI Company Studio in NYC.

Chuck Mee has written bobrauschenbergamerica, Wintertime, Belle Epoque, Vienna: Lusthaus, Snow in June, A Perfect Wedding, Limonade tous les Jours, and a number of other plays in addition to his work inspired by Greek plays: Big Love, True Love, Orestes 2.0, Trojan Women A Love Story and others. His plays have been performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, American Repertory Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, the Public Theatre, Lincoln Center, the Humana Festival, Steppenwolf, and other places in the United States as well as in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Vienna, Istanbul and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the lifetime achievement award in drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and two OBIE Awards for Vienna: Lusthaus and Big Love.

His work is made possible by the support of Jeanne Donovan Fisher and Richard B. Fisher.