Touch the Water

A River Play

Written by JULIE HÉBERT
Directed by JULIETTE CARRILLO

May 28 - June 21, 2009
Wednesdays - Sundays @ 8pm

Rio de Los Angeles State Park - Bowtie Parcel
2800 Casitas Avenue, Los Angeles 90039

Touch the water. Come to the river this spring and let the magical waters of Los Angeles wash over you.

Under the City of Angels runs a fierce river flowing from the mountains to the ocean. But do you know it's there? Once an unpredictable and mighty stream, a bountiful life source subject to raging floods, the Los Angeles River has lived under a shroud of concrete for the past fifty years. Today, having been tamed and transformed into an industrial flood channel, the river is at the center of much debate. What happens when we change Nature? Should we free the river from her concrete corset and let Angelenos finally touch the water?

This play was created in collaboration with local river residents, engineers, biologists, environmentalists, activists, advocates and patrons who walk, fish, bike and ride horses on the Los Angeles River.

Part of Cornerstone's ongoing Justice Cycle, a four-year series of plays exploring how laws shape and disrupt communities, Touch the Water takes on environmental justice as seen through the lens of the LA River and the people who live, work and play there.

Community partners for this project include:
Metabolic Studio/Farmlab
Friends of the Los Angeles River
South Asian Network

JULIE HÉBERT

Julie is a writer/director who started in San Francisco with the Eureka Theater, the Magic Theater and Intersection for the Arts, then went on to work throughout the country with the Los Angeles Theater Center, San Diego Rep, Steppenwolf, Provincetown Playhouse, Circle Rep, La MaMa and many others. She was a founding member of the Bay Area Playwrights Festival and a long-time member of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival. She also served as Artistic Director of Theater at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans for four years, and is a proud member of Alternate ROOTS.

Her plays include: Abe Lincoln's Dog , The Knee Desires the Dirt, Almost Asleep, True Beauties, St. Joan and the Dancing Sickness, and Ruby's Bucket of Blood, which she also adapted into a film for Showtime, starring Angela Bassett. She also wrote the screenplays for Female Perversions (October Films), All-American Girl: The Mary Kay LeTourneau Story (USA), and for the upcoming film Lying Awake, which was adapted from the novel by Mark Salzman.

In 2002, Julie received a Peabody Award for In Their Own Words, a documentary film of interviews with survivors of the 9/11 attacks in New York. She has received grants from the NEA, TCG, and the Rockefeller Foundation for writing, directing, and inter-disciplinary arts. Playwriting honors include the Pen Award for Drama, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, first runner-up, the Bay Area Critics Circle Best Play and several Drama-Logues. Her plays are published by Dramatic Publishing, Plays in Process, and in the Best Of The West anthology. Currently, Julie is writing for the television show, NUMB3RS, developing a new series of her own, and working to produce and direct her screenplay, Proud Flesh.