THE GOLDEN STATE
Written by Lauren Wilson 
Inspired by Moliere's The Miser
Directed by Michael Fields

THE GOLDEN STATE is a 21st Century adaptation of Molière’s comic gem,THE MISER. Set in a sun-drenched and hedonistic Southern California, the play draws its inspiration, as did Molière, from humanity’s blinding and passionate lust for money. It takes Molière’s comedy of profit-driven family relations and turns it on its head, re-inventing the Miser as an elderly California widow with a fortune stuffed in her bra and whose adult children are the desperate products of her fanatical hoarding.

In 1667, Molière’s incarnation of greed was a rich old coot named Harpagon, whose love for his cashbox eclipsed all other loves, even that for his children. THE GOLDEN STATE takes this comedy of profit-driven family relations and turns it on its head, re-inventing the Miser as an elderly California widow with a fortune stuffed in her bra, whose adult children are the desperate products of her fanatical hoarding.

Featuring Dell'Arte's founding artistic director, Joan Schirle, in a tour-de-force performance as the Miser, this is Molière with the heat turned up, the stops pulled out, and women brought into the foreground, in all their complexity and ferocity.

Directed by producing artistic director, Michael Fields, Dell'Arte celebrates 30 years of creating internationally renowned original work. Fields says about THE GOLDEN STATE, "As we enter our fourth decade as a theatre ensemble we thought there was no better inspiration than the works of Moliere, who was the great, great grandfather of this ensemble. This new adaptation by playwright Lauren Wilson is fast, physical, topical, and will involve all generations of the Dell'Arte Company in this next evolution of the companies work to push the boundaries of the physical performance forms in work that speaks powerfully to our times" 

Playwright Lauren Wilson says about her adaptation: "Through all the absurd family relations and interdependencies of the play--between parent and child, old and young, master and servant--we begin to also see a portrait of California, a California laid waste by the lust for profit, dependent on underpaid labor, which has little in common with the sunny “Golden State” of tourist brochures and civic boosterism. The same state, which gave the world movies, computers, and freeways, is also the state where the materialist urge plays itself out in an endless cycle of dissatisfactions. This inherently comic tale has a tragic heart."

THE GOLDEN STATE is designed by associate artistic director and award winning scenographer Giulio Cesare Perrone, with original music and sound design by Tim Gray and lighting by San Francisco designer David Robertson.