The Marsh Berkeley Presents "The Kipling Hotel"

BERKELEY, CA (25 August 2017) – The Marsh Berkeley announces the return of Don Reed’s acclaimed autobiographical hit The Kipling Hotel: The ‘80s. This hit show invites audiences to 1980s Los Angeles, as Reed recounts the awkward adventures of the son of an Oakland pimp, awarded a partial scholarship to UCLA. The under-funded Reed scrambles to stay afloat with a variety of schemes, from serial party-hopping to stripping, before finally earning room and board by serving breakfast at an unforgettable retirement home on the rough side of town. Called “wildly funny” by The Mercury News, The Kipling Hotel follows Reed’s hair-raising misadventures, and brings to vivid life the hotel’s exotic elderly denizens who impart their own brand of wisdom, as well as the earnest students, aspiring actors, and drug dealers, who are recruited to wait on them. The Kipling Hotel will perform 8:30pm Saturdays, 5:30pm Sundays, August 5-27. Performances times will then change to 5:00pm Saturdays, 5:30pm Sundays for the remainder of the run (September 2-10). The Marsh Berkeley is located at 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley. For tickets ($20 - $35 sliding scale, $55 - $100 reserved), the public may visit www.themarsh.org or call 415-282-3055 between 1:00pm and 4:00pm, Monday through Friday.

Called “hilarious” by The New Yorker, “hard not to love,” by The New York Times, and “a dynamic performer” by San Francisco Chronicle, Don Reed has created a trio of solo shows that recount his formative years in a 1960s Oakland grammar school (Can You Dig It?), and his irregular teens in the 1970s shuttling between his father the pimp, and his mother and Jehovah’s Witness stepfather, on opposite sides of the street (East 14th). In The Kipling Hotel, which offers a look at making his way in the “electric pink 80s” of Los Angeles, Reed was declared a “Comic genius. A solo performance powerhouse,” by The Mercury News, which went on to note, “Lucky us as we hunker down to watch this lanky, hilarious, agile, and flat-out remarkable man dazzle us with the tale of his pre-salad days,” also describing Reed as “an impressionist, wildly talented physical comic and sharp-eyed writer.”

Don Reed is a San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle nominee, NAACP triple nominee for Best Actor and Best Playwright, and will be seen online in the streaming comedy Bartlett, where Reed plays the boss in a struggling ad agency. As a producer and writer, he has also been working on transforming Charlotte Burley and Lyah Beth LeFlore’s best selling book Cosmopolitan Girls into a television series. Reed has performed, written, and directed for film, television, and theater. He was the opening act/warm-up comedian for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno for more than 1,000 episodes, and his voice can be heard on: Spiderman, Johnny Quest, Captain Planet, The Voice, Law & Order, SNL and as the voice of the cat on 2 Broke Girls. Reed has created promos for The Voice, The Golden Globes, The Academy Awards, MLB, Chappelle’s Show, Tyler Perry Films, and the Olympics. Additionally, he has written, directed, produced, and starred in the HBO shorts: Lucky: The Irish Pimp and Pookie Watson: Hood Detective. Reed has written and starred in work for Oprah Winfrey’s OWN. He is also a board member of the thriving 51Oakland foundation which aims to keep music and the arts alive in Oakland Public Schools.

The Marsh is known as “a breeding ground for new performance.” It was launched in 1989 by Founder and Artistic Director Stephanie Weisman, and now annually hosts more than 600 performances of 175 shows across the company’s two venues in San Francisco and Berkeley. A leading outlet for solo performers, The Marsh’s specialty has been hailed by The San Francisco Chronicle as “solo performances that celebrate the power of storytelling at its simplest and purest.” The East Bay Times named The Marsh one of Bay Area’s best intimate theaters, calling it “one of the most thriving solo theaters in the nation. The live theatrical energy is simply irresistible.”