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August 2007
Emerging Playwright Highlights Foundation
Support of Bay Area Cultural Life
Playwright Peter Nachtrieb performing during a comedy
sketch at Killing My Lobster. (Photo courtesy of Killing
My Lobster)
Peter Nachtrieb seems like such a nice young playwright, not at all the sort to open a play with the slaughter of a lamb in a Gen-X couple’s living room.
Perhaps more discomforting is how funny it is. In Hunter Gatherers, the San Francisco–based Nachtrieb’s play, our cultured selves and the primal ones that roil beneath do battle for supremacy to endless, if horrific, comic effect.
“I think it comes from having a double major in theater and biology,” says Nachtrieb, a graduate of Brown University. “I like to explore people as animals. At the same time I love comedy, and it’s a way to offer a social critique.”
Now, with the support of a joint $50,000 grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, Nachtrieb is turning his sociobiological dramaturgy to the topic of privacy in contemporary society. Expect more laughs.
Nachtrieb is one of six young California playwrights to receive a commission for new work, in the second year of a three-year, $900,000 program by the two foundations to support Bay Area performing artists and arts organizations at a time when funding for new work has been harder to come by. Read more...
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