ABC Project
The ABC Project is a series of 26 site specific pieces of interactive theater, each at a location starting with a different letter of the alphabet. All written and directed by Anne Katherine Lesser (...please, call me annie). ABC Project is part of LA Weekly's Best of LA 2016 in the Arts and Entertainment as Most Extreme Audience Immersion.
Annie is an international award-winning poet and playwright. Her first interactive theater piece Getting to Know You: An Experiment in Intimacy premiered in June 2015 at the Hollywood Fringe Festival where it won the Freshman Spirit of the Fringe Award and was called by Anthony Byrnes on KCRW, "An inspired combination of speed dating and relationship time travel."
Interactive theater is difficult to produce. It cannot receive massive crowds unless it has the help of outside funding to run fulltime. There are the costs of insurance, production design and paying actors/production staff. Annie currently is paying for all of this out of pocket and going into great credit card debt over it. She would like your help for her to be able to safely put on all 26 theater pieces and not give up due to financial hardship.
She will use every dollar towards paying staff, extending runs for extra performances, paying for insurance, and increasing the production value of the shows.
Annie is so thankful for any support you are willing to give and wants to just put on the most intriguing and exciting theater possible over the next 4 years.
A(Partment 8) was the first theater piece in the series and premiered in June 2016 at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. More info here: http://hff16.org/3822.
More info: http://annielesser.com/abc
Instagram: @ABC_INTERACTIVE
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/abctheater
REVIEWS
LA Weekly: "It's difficult to express the exhilarating sense of the uncanny produced by an Annie Lesser immersive stage show. Since her L.A. debut at the 2015 Hollywood Fringe Festival, the experimental theater auteur has fearlessly explored a densely poetic, deeply intimate and intensely personal dimension of the actor-audience relationship where few other directors have dared to go."
Stage Raw: "In the few years since she landed in Los Angeles, experimental playwright-director Annie Lesser has firmly established herself as one of the most fearless and adventurous forces in the city's emerging immersive scene."
Critics on B(arbershop) (November 2016)
"B(arbershop) is a step back from the precipice of the irrational violence that so charged A(partment 8) with its sense of audience-implicating danger, what continues to be exciting is seeing Lesser fearlessly experiment without the firewall of the physical and figurative distance between spectator and performer that mediates the traditional drama. Even when its fireworks prove less than incendiary, the ABC Project provokes an introspective self-awareness all too rare for the stage."
"With any immersive piece the moment you make me forget I'm in a play, that I'm in something theatrical, and I treat it as if it's real, it's job well done you've got me. And that's what happens and that's what happens with this."-MY HAUNT LIFE
Critics on A(Partment 8) (June 2016)
"Lesser not only successfully implicates audience members in their own sundry crimes of the heart but opens a space between empathy and horror for something more critically and morally contemplative." - Stage Raw
"Those looking for a darkly original work that sticks with you long after it's finished, A(partment 8) is worth the admission price."-LAist
"Annie Lesser has a small wonder on her hands, and actress Keight Leighn pretty much defines the term fearless at this point." -No Proscenium
