In Front of Your Eyes 2026
A Festival of New Performance Presents
Catherine Debon’s
Lullaby of a Partisan
The Marsh Berkeley Theater
August 22 at 7:00 pm & August 23 at 5:30 pm
Written & Performed by Catherine Debon
Opener: Ipeleng Kgositsile
Ticket Information
Tickets: $15 – $35 General Seating | $50 & $100 Reserved Seating
60 minutes | No Intermission
(Please do not bring infants to the show)
Online ticket sales close 2 hours before each performance.
Additional tickets may be available for purchase at the door.
Show Description
Courage and resilience saw her mother through the Nazi occupation of France and the struggles of raising a child alone—singing resistance songs as lullabies. Now, with history threatening to repeat itself, her daughter searches for her own path to resilience—and less fraught expressions of love.
Artist Biography
Catherine Debon, Writer, Performer and Director
Catherine Debon is a writer, performer and director who has been involved with the performance art scene since she immigrated from France in the mid 80’s. She won the best of the Fringe in 2011 with Alma Colorada. Originally a dancer, she weaves movement, narrative, and musicality when creating solos from personal stories. More shows info are on website: https://www.catherinedebon.com
Opener
Ipeleng Kgositsile
Ipeleng Kgositsile is a Black woman writer, comic & auntieprenuer.
Born and raised in New York City during South Africa’s apartheid period, her artistic expression pays homage to the internationally acclaimed, hilariously satirical, and unapologetically African plays about contemporary life in South Africa staged at the Lincoln Center Theatre in NYC during the 1970s and featured in the WOZA AFRIKA Festival in the fall of 1986.
Ipeleng’s first full-length play, a work-in-progress entitled, “The First 72,” has been staged and performed in bits-and-pieces at The Marsh in Berkeley, San Francisco, and even via Zoom, since 2018.
While the 1976 Soweto Uprisings in South Africa—the cornerstone of the play’s narrative, coupled with growing up the child of a Black South African exile father and raised by a Black American mother, might not seem like likely sources for comedy, they are foundational influences for Ipeleng’s mischievously dark sense of humor.
The trajectory of her artistic journey took a turn towards comedy in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd Uprisings. In response, she pursued studies with joke-writing experts and comedians, including Judy Carter, Jerry Corley, and Dean Lewis. She has also honed her craft through taking classes in improv, foundational acting, and sketch-writing at institutions like All Out Comedy Theatre, BATS Improv, Berkeley Rep School of Theatre, and Studio A.C.T. Ipeleng’s wit and talent has graced the stages of over a dozen open-mic events at venues throughout the Bay Area like the Alameda Comedy Club, Artichoke Basille’s Pizza, Club OMG, and Penelope. She has performed professionally as a comic at New Faces of Comedy at the Fireside Lounge in Alameda, also for the staff of The Wolf, the Wood Tavern and Southie at the restaurant group’s annual holiday party in April 2022.
Ipeleng resides in Oakland, CA, home to the maternal side of her family since the early 1940s.
Piece Description – The First 72
The 15-minute piece I’d perform is an excerpt from The First 72, a coming of rage story of complicated family love set in NYC in April 1994 during my mother & apartheid’s final days. Its major theme: the complications of revolutionaries showing up as parents.
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