October 9, 2001
Contact: Roman Baratiak
(805) 893-2078
e-mail: baratiak-r@sa.ucsb.edu

UCSB Arts & Lectures presents
playwright-actress Jude Narita
in Stories Waiting to Be Told

Summary Facts:

• Jude Narita
• One-woman performance: Stories Waiting to Be Told
• Original play exploring the lives of Asian and Asian American women
• Narita is a Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle Award winner
• Friday, November 16
• 8 pm / UCSB Campbell Hall
• General public $10 / UCSB students $5
• For tickets & information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at 893-3535

UCSB Arts & Lectures will present Jude Narita in Stories Waiting to Be Told, her solo performance celebrating Asian and Asian American women, on Friday, November 16 at 8 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall. Stories Waiting to Be Told dramatizes the lives and experiences of a gallery of women, from the young Korean who befriends an African-American student and learns about jazz to a newly married wife from Asia attempting to comprehend her brutal American husband. Narita, in what Variety calls “a provocative journey,” extols our differences while illuminating the universal similarities of us all.

Frustrated with the paucity of strong roles that represent Asian American women as anything more than a demure stereotype, Jude Narita began to write and perform her own work. Her first one-woman show Coming Into Passion/Song for a Sansei, ran for two years in Los Angeles, toured the United States and internationally and earned Narita a Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle Award.

Since that play she has led free acting/writing workshops to encourage other Asian American women to create original material. She was named one of the “50 Asian Americans Who’ll Be Making a Difference” in 1996 by Asian Week, The Voice of Asian America and one of the “Top 100 Asian Americans in the Nation” by Trans-Pacific Magazine.

“Writer-performer Jude Narita has a rare gift of understanding usually reserved for the best poets and novelists. By applying a seemingly boundless human sympathy, she slowly develops epiphanies that linger long after the final curtain,” claims the Los Angeles Times about Stories Waiting to Be Told. “This highly theatrical piece has a plain-spoken simplicity and emotional sophistication that will touch nearly everyone who encounters it...This thoroughly natural and unaffected performer plumbs the depths of her characters’ souls, as naturally and freely as if she were stepping into a familiar dress.”

Directed by Charlie Stratton, Stories Waiting to Be Told features an original musical score and sound effects by O-Lan Jones and careful and compelling lighting design by Joe Damiano.

Jude Narita previously visited UCSB as a part of a three-week residency in 1996 as the Raznick Distinguished Lecturer in the UCSB College of Letters and Science. She has also served as a Regents’ Lecturer.

Stories Waiting to Be Told is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures with the Women’s Center and the Asian Resource Center as part of Celebration of Communities activities at UCSB.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
Roman Baratiak at (805) 893-2078.