Z Owns It

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More About

• T.C. Boyle
• Matthew Spangler

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We love walking around Project Artaud Theater in the low hum of the Mission’s warehouse district, wondering why hardly anybody ever performs there. That’s set to change: Z Space, the organization behind the popular Word for Word literature plays, has leased the very tall former factory, which used to make cans in the 1920s and airplane parts during WWII, for the next 10 years. To celebrate, its first production is a Word for Word Off the Page staged reading of T.C. Boyle’s short story “Killing Babies,” which features a young man trying to clear his head after a bout of rehab while working in an abortion clinic haunted by right-to-life protesters. He’s trying to simplify his life. Wrong place for that! Word for Word performs every last syllable of the stories it draws from, and God knows Boyle never met a word he didn’t employ, but he sticks to a tight script in “Killing Babies.” It’s got a queasy end that should make you uncomfortable, and enough description of the right-to-lifers as “zombies” to make for exciting staging — let’s hope director Matthew Spangler runs with this one: “… bodies, deadweight, the zombies piled up on the steps like corpses.”
Mon., Aug. 31, 7 p.m., 2009