THEATER 8: Wabi Sabi

ABOUT

What does it mean to accept ourselves, and each other? Friends from the past reconnect in High School in this bittersweet Library conversation.

WRITER

Rachael Carnes

Playwright Rachael Carnes received a 2020 Oregon Literary Fellowship and had more than 50 productions in 2019, across the U.S., U.K., Canada, the Middle East, and Asia. She’s recently developed work at the William Inge Theatre Festival, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Midwestern Dramatists Center, the Mid-America Theater Conference, the American Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Great Plains Theatre Conference, the Lighthouse Writers’ Conference, and the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival. Rachael’s plays are seen in many literary journals. Rachael is the founder and editor of CodeRedPlaywrights, a consortium of writers across the country, responding to gun violence. She and her family live in Oregon.  www.rachaelcarnes.com

DIRECTOR

Bernadette Armstrong

Bernadette moved to Los Angeles to work in film in the late 1990s and after her first two films went to festivals she took a short hiatus from writing until she fell in love with small theater. Since 2008 she has had several successful theater projects produced in No Hollywood. Her play The Reading Group was named Pick of the Week by LA Weekly Magazine and in 2017 her play Simple Lives was nominated for Outstanding Writing of an Original Play or Musical by the Valley Theater Awards (the only woman nominated). Bernadette is the founder of Open-Door Playhouse. 

ACTORS

Franco Machado as Mike

Franco was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and moved to the United States at the age of 3. Franco has lived in Chicago, Ann Arbor, and now resides in Los Angeles. Since the age of 16, Franco has worked both in front and behind the camera, which has allowed him to explore and embrace different perspectives within his writing.  In 2019, he graduated Summa Cum Laude with a degree in Screenwriting and a minor in Sociology from Chapman University’s Dodge College. Franco has had the opportunity to work with many well-known artists including Anthony Ramos, Leonardo DiCaprio, Francis F. Coppola, Rita Wilson, Jessy Terrero, Lil Peep, Lil Twist, and CD9. He’s directed two short films, Our Lives Matter (2017) and Be a Man (2017), and a music video for TAKARA.

Whitton Frank as Laurel

Whitton Frank is a voice, film, television, and theater actor living in Los Angeles.  Recent work includes the award-winning horror short Seeing Green as well as immersive vo work in the VR world of The Under Presents and The Tempest and as Kate in season 1 of RomCom Pods. Her theater credits include Florence Boorman in Her Naked Skin/Greenwood Theater, Andrea in Cat’s Eye/Pleasance Theater, King Arthur and Mordred in Clarissant/Little Candle Productions, Grumio in Taming of the Shrew/The Porters of Hellsgate, and Flaming Girl in What the Moon Saw/Son of Semele Ensemble. She can also be seen as Jenna Laffy in season 3 of the TNT show Murder in the First. She is a popular audiobook narrator and can be found on Audible and other sites.  And in her copious free time, she moonlights as a DJ and specializes in vintage jazz, blues, and soul.

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