PARADISE LOST: The Clone of God
adapted and directed by Giulio Cesare Perrone

The Plays:
The Golden State takes the comedy of Molière's profit-driven family relations and turns it on its head, re-inventing the Miser as an elderly widow who wants to rent out her daughter's womb to her golf partner. Desperate lovers, illegal servants, and obscenely wealthy women claw for every cent they can get in the hedonistic social jungle of modern-day California. This is Molière with the heat turned up, the stops pulled out, and women on top.

Paradise Lost: The Clone of God mixes original music, movement, dance and the spoken word in a dense visual and aural tapestry that transforms John Milton's epic poem into modern times to confront both scientific advances like the Human Genome Project and cloning, and sociological events like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the destruction of the Twin Towers. Actors, musicians and audience will travel through the stately forest of Arcata's Redwood Park as the question of earthly creation is taken to a most-natural setting.

The Company:
Dell'Arte is a professional touring company founded out of the desire of a group of professional actors to create original work and live in a rural area. Dell'Arte's unique style comes from a quarter-century of ensemble work and the imaginative marriage of traditional forms with contemporary viewpoint. At its home base in Northern California, which has become an international center for training and exploration of physical theatre, the company is revitalizing an ancient art and bringing new perspectives to the world of performance.

The Reviews:
"With its frenetic charm, strong female characters, ethnic and class-based pecking order, The Golden State is Molière by way of Nathaniel West and Pedro Almodovar."
The San Francisco Bay Guardian

"With Paradise Lost, Dell'Arte has pulled a 400-year-old poem out of time and, while preserving its integrity, has lent it new and multiple dimensions that readers in its own century couldn't have imagined."
American Theatre Magazine

Website: www.dellarte.com