FREQUENCY HOPPING, by Elyse Singer
About the Play
Frequency Hopping is the story of the remarkable collaboration in 1940 between film icon Hedy Lamarr and avant-garde composer George Antheil on a military communications device now recognized as the model for wireless communication. Based on a true story, Frequency Hopping is a darkly comic multidisciplinary play about the rhythms of human connection. It celebrates the process of scientific invention - and the electrified nature of the collaborative process itself - while also exploring the relationships between beauty and intelligence, science and art, and celebrity and identity.
Multi-media is intrinsic to the play; it's used to explore the fantasy lives of the central characters, as well as to illuminate and make visual that highly charged imaginative space where scientific and artistic collaborations happen.
About the Playwright
ELYSE SINGER'S writing/directing credits include Love In The Void (alt.fan.c-love); the groundbreaking 1995 multi-media adaptation of Courtney Love's Internet postings, performed by Carolyn Baeumler at HERE and P.S. 122; Private Property (Edinburgh Festival; BBC-TV; 1993 Jane Chambers Award finalist); and Care-less: Eva Tanguay (Dixon Place).
Singer's Off-Broadway directing credits include the 2007 Obie Award-winning production of Trouble in Paradise, adapted from the 1932 Ernst Lubitsch film; the first New York City revival of Mae West's play, Sex, at the Gershwin Hotel; and Deborah Swisher's Hundreds of Sisters & One BIG Brother at the Harold Clurman Theatre, following runs at HERE, HBO Workspace in Los Angeles, and Brava in San Francisco. Recent projects include the world premiere of Ruth Margraff's new music-theatre piece, Wellspring, at the Century Center, the Public Theater, and BAM; Margraff's Red Frogs, at P.S. 122; the first New York City revival of Mae West's Pleasure Man (starring Charles Busch); Kirsten Greenidge's Life After Curious George; video and dramaturgy for Dura Mater's The Bentfootes at Dixon Place; and Jake-ann Jones' Magic Kingdom. Most recently, under Singer's direction, Hourglass Group was the featured company for "Week 6" of Suzan-Lori Parks' 365 Days/365 Plays at the Public Theater.
Founding Artistic Director of the Hourglass Group, Singer has directed and produced the premieres of new plays by writers such as Ruth Margraff, Kirsten Greenidge, Kate Moira Ryan, Neena Beber, Naomi Iizuka, Jake-ann Jones, Brooke Berman, and Catherine Zimdahl. A Yale graduate, she is a Usual Suspect at New York Theatre Workshop, an alumna of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, and Artistic Director of the Hourglass Group. She is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, and is represented by Bret Adams, Ltd.