BONNIE & CLYDE Trailer (2013)

BONNIE & CLYDE
Written By Adam Peck
Directed By Mark Jackson
Performed by Joe Estlack and Megan Trout.
Scenery Robert Broadfoot. Video Micah Stieglitz. Sound Matt Stines. Costumes Ashley Rogers. Lights Jon Tracy. Props Caela Fujii.
Produced by The Shotgun Players, Berkeley, CA, 2013

Adam Peck’s script leaves ample room for its collaborators to finish it in performance. Working on it felt very much like devising a new piece rather than staging an existing play. This dynamic process helped us to get inside Peck’s rendition of these two famous figures. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow comprise one of the lasting American myths. Our version of Robin Hood: two young lovers on the road in a fast car, fashionably dressed, sticking it to The Man. They were living out the fantasies of many Americans who viewed the law as their oppressor, the rich as their aggressor, and the American dream as a cheat stripped naked by the crashing economy. While they lived, Bonnie and Clyde themselves were consciously caught between their own mythic status and just being two people. The one fact complicates the other, and it’s a complication that chews at the heart of the American experiment. How to reconcile our tangled relationships with authority, class, greed, need, desire, and the American dream?

PRESS:

“The word ‘gorgeous’ doesn’t even begin to brush the surface when it comes to describing the production as a whole… Shotgun Players’ BONNIE & CLYDE contains all the vital ingredients of good theater. This work, directed by Mark Jackson, is a hybrid form of theater-meets-performance-art. Alluring in almost every way, the production boasts a script equally delicate and dramatic, with dreamlike interludes of internal monologues and poetry reading, coalesced with gorgeous visual projections and modern dance.” – The Daily Californian

“It's the quieter, frailer, more delicate moments in Mark Jackson's robust, at times transcendent staging that prove most memorable in this Shotgun Players production. It's a sign of Jackson's sure intelligence as a director that he can let a moment happen here wordlessly, without recourse to cut-and-dry cues of one sort or another… Enthralling… Embodying the play's only characters, Trout and Estlack are outstanding, dynamic and utterly persuasive.” – San Francisco Bay Guardian

“Compelling and tragic… The lovers' more fraught moments are bracketed by poetic and charged movements… At turns frantic, poppy, and sensuous… Riveting throughout… The whole atmosphere is pervaded by a sense of both exhilaration and doom… The play brings a devastating energy to the task of making Bonnie and Clyde's legend mortal once more.” – East Bay Express