Your LA. Your Theater.
need
theater
need theater presents a workshop presentation of
Performed by 17 actors and 4 live musicians, this workshop of August G is an epic showdown of dreams and fears, in which a humble street-sweeper recounts his life and realizes he has made a difference. It is befitting that this workshop, which is about a man on the cusp of poverty with
dreams of a grand world, be held in Downtown LA, which is itself undergoing a vivid transformation from Skid Row to an upper-class urban enclave.
ARMAND GATTI is a prolific author, and an icon of the 20th century.
Gatti was born in 1924 in the slums of Monaco, from a family of refugees fleeing Mussolini’s fascist Italy. He excelled in school, earning the highest grades in French - as his poor
working class parents warned that if he didn’t learn French (the language of the bosses), he would remain a servant his entire life just like they were: a garbage man and a cleaning maid.
During World War II, Gatti joined the resistance to the Nazi occupation. He was captured and sent to the Neuengamme concentration camp, where he was assigned to a bizarre underground forced-labor project involving Himmler’s belief in a concave world (where rockets could be fired in a straight line from Hamburg to London). Gatti eventually managed to escape the camp, and made his way to London, where he joined the British Special Air Services and participated in the liberation of France.
After the war, Gatti became a journalist and covered world events including the Chinese and Cuban revolutions. In the late 1950’s he turned his attention to film and television. His first film, The Enclosure (about his concentration camp experience) won the Moscow Film Festival’s Silver Prize.
In the 1960’s Gatti became one of the most produced playwrights in France. He later turned his attention to creating theater with specialized communities such as factory workers, refugees and prison inmates in order to make a direct impact in people’s lives through theater.
