Showing results by author "Kate McAll" in All Categories

A group of friends decamps from 1920s Paris for the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain. Jake is in love with the aristocratic Bret Ashley, but Bret’s wandering eye lands on a young matador. In the week of drinking, bullfighting, and jealousy that follows, friendships will be upended and hopes for love dashed.

Scornful of men and the love they profess for her, Gwendolen Harleth is a beautiful but spoiled young woman, frustrated by her limited options in Victorian England. Daniel Deronda is an intelligent, handsome young man who has been raised by his guardian, Sir Hugo Mallinger, but knows nothing of his true origins. Deronda’s search leads him into the world of 19th-century Zionism, a discovery that will alter the course of his life.

The 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Tambora volcano had a catastrophic effect on climate around the world. In North America and Europe, the following 12 months became known as “the year without summer”. Confined indoors by the relentless rain and cold, a group of friends, including 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and poet Lord Byron, began writing ghost stories to pass the time. Shelley’s tale Frankenstein remains, more than 200 years later, a work of timeless imagination and power.

As Jews tried to escape Nazi Germany in the 1930s, they faced unthinkable roadblocks in obtaining exit visas. And while they were denied entry in one country after another, a bureaucratic oddity enabled some of them to flee to an unlikely destination: Shanghai, China. In this LATW original commission, playwright Kate McAll used the survivors’ own words to create a narrative of people starting their lives over in a completely new land.