Raúl Esparza, Alice Ripley, Carmen Cusack & More Star in The Waves in Quarantine

A star-studded cast has been announced for The Waves in Quarantine, a new musical film project featuring six short films inspired by Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Conceived by Raúl Esparza and director Lisa Peterson, and produced by Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the production focuses on friendship, loss and the making of art in this world-changing year. The Waves in Quarantine will be available for free from April 29 through May 28 on the Berkeley Rep website.

Esparza is joined by Alice Ripley and Carmen Cusack to lead a company that features Nikki Renée Daniels, Darius de Haas and Manu Narayan. 

In kitchens and on couches, at beaches and on rooftops, The Waves in Quarantine invites audiences into the creative process. As Virginia Woolf ingeniously excavated the inner lives of six friends in her groundbreaking novel, Peterson and her collaborators are creating a film in six movements that meditates on themes from the musical adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece The Waves. The Waves in Quarantine builds upon Woolf’s gorgeous prose to reveal an intimate look at where art meets isolation, creating something entirely new in the process. It juxtaposes the majestic with the everyday to forge a unique work of interdisciplinary art, made of and for this moment.

Written by Peterson, The Waves in Quarantine features music and lyrics by David Bucknam, with additional music and lyrics by Adam Gwon. The creative team also includes Mary-Mitchell Campbell as music director and Rachel Hauck as set designer.

“The musical adaptation of The Waves is a project that Lisa and Raúl and I have been in a long-term conversation about, since we did a developmental production of it at New York Stage and Film in 2018,” said Berkeley Repertory Theatre Artistic Director Johanna Pfaelzer. “As the pandemic took hold, they began to imagine a way to make use of this time of isolation, shutdown, and longing—whose themes are so poignantly paralleled in Woolf’s novel itself...I am incredibly proud of the form-breaking work that this team has created, and can’t wait to bring it to an audience.”

Originally produced by New York Theatre Workshop in 1991, The Waves musical adaptation was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. In 2018, the project was revived and reworked at New York Stage and Film in 2018. The Waves in Quarantine was shot at home and outside by the six actors and a team of professionals spanning the United States and Europe, working remotely using DSLR cameras and iPhones.

Watch the trailer below!