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ANY GIVEN DAY
BEGINS March 29
American Premiere/Begins March 29
ANY GIVEN DAY
A story about the moment when everything changes
By Linda McLean
Directed by Jon Tracy
It’s 2pm in the East Side of Glasgow: Bill and Sadie are preparing for the arrival of their favorite person. It’s all going like clockwork until they discover they’ve forgotten the bread. Buying bread means going outside. Uh oh.
It’s 2pm in the West Side of Glasgow: two people are closing up the bar for the afternoon. A chance call opens up the opportunity for a future which they have stopped imagining. Leading Scottish playwright Linda McLean explores the fleeting nature of love and happiness set against a backdrop of violence and disappointment.
Winner of the Rella Lossy Playwriting Award.
“With a Linda McLean play, you can bet on two things. One is characters who are held together by the bonds of family loyalty and the memory of some past trauma. The other is a mould-breaking dramatic structure that reflects the characters’ emotional fragmentation. In Any Given Day, which is as bold, unnerving and fraught as anything she has written, you get both.”
—Mark Fisher, Guardian
“Taut…an excellent play!”
—David Pollock, The Independent
“I can guarantee that those who see it will never forget the faces, the lives, or the stories of the four characters McLean has created.”
—The Scotsman
Meet the Playwright Linda McLean
Linda McLean was born in Glasgow where she studied and trained as a teacher. She travelled teaching English as a foreign language in Europe, America, Africa and Scandinavia before she wrote plays.
Her plays include, for the Traverse – This Is Water (2010), Any Given Day (2010), Strangers, Babies (Susan Smith Blackburn prize finalist), Shimmer (Herald Angel), Olga (from the original Finnish play by Laura Ruohonen) and One Good Beating (winner of Best One Act Play 2008). For Dundee Rep and Oran Mor: What Love Is (2011). For Paines Plough and Oran Mor: Riddance (Fringe First, Herald Angel) and The Uncertainty Files; for 7:84 Theatre Company – Cold Cuts and Doch an Doris; for Magnetic North – Word for Word; for RSAMD – Reminded of Beauty. She adapted Like Water for Chocolate (for Theatres sans Frontieres, from the novel by Laura Esquivel). She has also written for radio, most recently a political satire, And So Say All of Us, co-written with Duncan McMillan and Dan Rebellato.
Strangers, Babies (Fractures); Any Given Day (Un Joure Ou’Autre) and The Uncertainty Files (Dossier Incertitudes) have been translated into French.
Linda is Chairwoman of the Playwrights’ Studio Scotland and has worked for the British Council in Mexico City, Teluca and Bogota. She regularly works in schools
and colleges, encouraging new writers to find their own voices. In 2009 she delivered the keynote speech to the Playwrights’ Guild of Canada.
She is currently under commission to the National Theatre of Scotland, Magnetic North, and the Traverse Theatre. Her new play Sex and God for Magnetic North will be produced in 2012.
Linda is the Creative Fellow at Edinburgh University’s Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities.
Meet the Director Jon Tracy
Jon Tracy works as a director, playwright, designer and educator throughout the Bay Area and beyond. He works with such companies as Shotgun Players (Company Member; directed The Farm, The Salt Plays Pt. 1: In the Wound, The Salt Plays Pt. 2: Of the Earth), The SF Playhouse (directed Man of La Mancha, Bug, Slasher, and Aaron Loeb’s award winning First Person Shooter, as well as being recently commissioned to write All of the Above (an adaptation of the story of Joan of Arc), American Conservatory Theatre (directing their MFA students in The Rainmaker, The Diviners), Darkroom Productions (Co-founder, Former Artistic Director; directed and designed productions of Macbeth, subUrbia, King Lear, Marisol, Some Devil Whisper (his movement adaptation of Titus Andronicus) and The Good News (which he also wrote), Willows Theatre (West Coast premiere of Evil Dead: The Musical), Impact Theatre (writer and director of See How We Are), Aurora Theatre (developed Ron Campbell’s Sinker), Marin Theatre Company (developed A. Zell Williams’ Blood/Money), Theatre FIRST (directing Grapes of Wrath), Sonoma County Repertory (directing Nixon’s Nixon, Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter, and Macbeth as well as adapting Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol), New Conservatory Theatre (Bay Area Critics Circle Nomination for Fight Choreography of R & J), Missouri St. Theatre (writer and director of the award winning Chatterbox: The Anne Frank Project), Traveling Lantern Theatre Company (former Artistic Director), Magic Theater (former Artistic Associate), and the San Francisco, Marin, Carmel, Napa, Sebastopol, and Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festivals. Further, Jon is an Affiliate Artist with The Foothill Theatre Company (developed and directed Gary Wright’s Evermore) and Alter Theatre Ensemble (developed and directed Robert Ernst’s Catherine’s Care), a Company Member of PlayGround (developed Geetha Reddy’s The Safe House among others), an Associate Artist at The Berkeley Playhouse (director of The BFG, The Wizard of Oz, Narnia and the writer/director of Born and Raised as well as core instructor for their youth programs) and an Affiliate Artist with Marin Shakespeare Company. A graduate of Solano College Theatre’s Actor Training Program, he is also the recipient of the Kennedy Center Meritorious Achievement Award, fifteen North Bay Arty Awards, a Sacramento Elly Award, Bay Area Critics Circle Award and is a grant recipient from Theatre Bay Area and the National Endowment for the Arts.
