North Coast Rep Presents San Diego Premiere of Steve Martin's Adaptation of THE UNDERPANTS, 9/5-10/7

North Coast Repertory Theatre presents a San Diego premiere of The Underpants, adapted by Steve Martin and written by Carl Sternheim. The show begins previews September 5-7 and continues September 8 through October 7, 2012.

Adapting Carl Sternheim's 1910 comedy, Steve Martin has reinvigorated a hilarious, laugh-out-loud farce. Theobald Maske has an unusual problem: his wife's underpants won't stay on. One Sunday morning they fall to her ankles right in the middle of town...a public scandal! Mortified, Theo swears to keep her at home until she can find some less unruly undies. Amid this chaos he's trying to rent a room in their flat while the prospective lodgers have some underlying surprises of their own.

Ticket prices: $37 - $54 (Senior/Student & Military discount save $3.00 per ticket with valid I.D. off regular ticket prices. and North Coast Repertory Theatre subscribers save $5.00 off regular prices.)

Show times: All Previews are at 8:00pm. Regular show times are Wednesdays at 7:00pm, Thursday - Saturday at 8:00pm, Saturday & Sunday matinees at 2:00pm and Sunday evenings at 7:00pm.

Tickets for The Underpants are available only at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach at 987 Lomas Santa Fe Drive, Suite D, 92075. Box Office hours are Noon to 4PM daily and Noon to Curtain day of shows. Call 858-481-1055 for tickets or visit www.northcoastrep.org.

Featuring: Matthew Henerson*, Holly Rone*, Clarinda Ross*, Jacob Bruce*, Omri Schein* and Jonathan McMurtry*

*The actor or stage manger appears through the courtesy of Actor's Equity Association, the union of professional actors and stage managers.

The writers of The Underpants are:

Steve Martin (Adaptor) Steve Martin was born in Waco, Texas on August 14, 1945. By high school, he was already performing comedy routines at local coffee houses, juggling, playing the banjo and doing magic tricks. After college Martin landed a job writing for "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" in 1967, winning an Emmy Award in 1969. During the 1970's, Martin was a fixture on the "Tonight Show" and "Saturday Night Live". Martin released several comedy albums including A Wild and Crazy Guy, which charted at #2 and featured the comic song "King Tut", which became a Top -Forty hit. He won Grammy Awards for "Best Comedy Recording" in 1977 and 1978. By the end of the1970's, Martin had achieved near "rock star" status selling out arenas for his live shows. Steve Martin's next foray was in film. His first, a seven-minute short that he wrote and starred in, was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1979, he wrote and starred in The Jerk, which was a critical and financial success. His film career remains strong. In the 1990's, Martin continued to make films, but also focused his attention on writing. In 1993, his play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, about a fictional meeting between Picasso and Einstein in a Paris Bar, won critical acclaim, as did his novella Shopgirl, which was recently made into a filM. Martin adaptEd Sternheim's The Underpants in 2002, which ran Off-Broadway at Classic Stage Company.

Carl Sternheim (Playwright) Carl Sternheim was born to a Jewish father and a Lutheran mother in Leipzig, Germany in 1878. While married to his first wife, Eugenie Hauth, he found his muse in another woman. Thea Lowenstein inspired and encouragEd Sternheim, and as an heiress, could afford to support his writing. He left his first wife, with whom he had a son, and married Thea in 1907. Through this marriage he met Franz Blei, with whom he began the journal Hyperion, where Franz Kafka's writing was first introduced to the masses. Thea and Blei also familiarized him with Molière's French farces, which later influenced his own satires. Through out his playwriting career Sternheim focused on a theme he knew well: the struggle to express and assert oneself within German bourgeois society. He wrote most of his best-known plays between 1911 and 1916. The Underpants (Die Hose), scheduled to open in 1911, was initially banned because its subject matter was too indelicate. Only after the chief of police attended a private viewing where actress Tilla Durieux could persuade him to reconsider did the show go up under the less racy title The Giant. It was Sternheim's first play in a four-part series about the Maske family titled From the Lives Bourgeois Heroes. Der Snob followed in 1914, 1913 in 1915 and later The Fossil in 1925. Together, the plays follow three generations of the Maske family as they maneuver through society's chutes and ladders, attempting to do as the Romans (or in this case, the Wilhelmine Germans) do. Sternheim suffered multiple "nervous illnesses" and had a complete nervous breakdown in 1928. He and Thea had divorced by 1927, and in 1930 he married his third wife, Pamela Wedekind, whom he would later divorce as well. Because of his Jewish descent and the bitingly satirical nature of his work, Sternheim's voice was silenced in Nazi Germany. He died in Brussels during World War II.