Kira Obolensky  - Playwright

Kira Obolensky's new work includes Raskol, an adaptation of Crime and Punishment  with an improvisational jazz band, which was commissioned by Ten Thousand Things Theatre and premiered in an area prison in April 2009.  She wrote the story for Open Eye Figure Theatre's winter show, Snowman, and is currently adapting Alice in Wonderland for The Acting Company in New York: the play will open at the Guthrie Theatre in January, 2011.  Her novella, "The Anarchists Float to St. Louis", recently won Quarterly West's national novella contest and will be published in the winter.  Other plays: Quick Silver, a play for puppets and actors, commissioned by 3 Legged Race and produced in Minneapolis, Prague and  in Philadelphia by Gas & Electric Arts. Modern House (finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize); Lune, pronounced loony, commissioned and produced by B Street; Lobster Alice (Kesselring Prize winner; productions in Atlanta, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Off Broadway) The Adventures of Herculina, productions in Chicago, Minneapolis. Awards and Fellowships include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a McKnight Advancement Grant, Jerome Fellowships, two Henson Foundation grants, a Bush Foundation Fellowship.  Kira is a graduate of Williams College; she attended the Playwrights' Program at the Juilliard School; and recently received an MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers.  She teaches at the University of Minnesota, at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and is on faculty at Goddard College's MFA Program in Interdisciplinary Arts.



Lisa Jo Epstein - Director

Lisa Jo is a theatre director, educator and community-based artist. Her foray into physical theatre began in Minneapolis at Theatre de la Jeune Lune. She continued her explorations in physical and intercultural theatre and socially-engaged theatre practices at the University of Texas at Austin where she obtained a Master's and Ph.D. She then moved to Paris France where she served as Ariane Mnouchkine's assistant during the Théâtre du Soleil's creation of Molière's Tartuffe.  While in Paris, she also worked at Augusto Boal's Center for the Theatre of the Oppressed.Prior to returning to Philadelphia, Lisa Jo was an Assistant Professor of Theatre in the Department of Theatre & Dance at Tulane University for seven years where she won awards for teaching and directing, both inside the university and in the community. Lisa Jo regularly facilitates interactive, experiential theatre workshops with a variety of populations around issues of identity and empowerment, community and social justice.  Recent productions include: Anna Bella Eema (Lisa d'Amour)--2008 Barrymore Award nominations for Best Ensemble and Best Lead Actress , O Yes I Will (Deb Margolin), Quick Silver (Kira Obolensky) Voices Underwater (premiere, Abi Basch) for Gas & Electric Arts, Pop Out (Jessie Bear) and Everlasting Father: A Religious Fantasy (premiere, Hannah Harvester) at Swarthmore College; O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms (remount, Deb Margolin) at Painted Bride Art Center; What the Moon Saw; or, I Only Appear to be Dead (Stephanie Fleischmann), The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek (Naomi Wallace) and The Love of the Nightingale (Timberlake Wertenbaker) at Ursinus College; Spinning into Butter (Rebecca Gilman) Southern Repertory Theatre, New Orleans. In Philadelphia, she has taught at Temple University, Arcadia, and University of the Arts, guest artist residency at Towson University’s MFA in performance, and currently teaches movement for the stage at Rutgers-Camden.



Cabinet Actors


Ross Beschler  - Performer

Ross was most recently seen on the Philadelphia professional stage as Valene in The Lonesome West at the Lantern Theater, and as the Masked Man in EgoPo's Spring Awakening.  In New York, he is a frequent collaborator with Brooklyn-based performance group Object Collection, and has performed with The Flea, Vital Theater, Polybe & Seats, Michael Chekhov Theater Company, Ensemble Studio Theater, Verse Theater Manhattan, and others.  Ross has written many plays for young audiences that have toured the US and England, and is currently developing an adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass.  Ross has a BA in Theater from Columbia University, and is currently in his third and final year in the graduate acting program at Temple University, where he is also pursuing a craft emphasis in physical theater. 





Catherine K. Slusar - Performer

Catharine was recently in Norway, performing The European Lesson with the Jo Stromgren Kompani.  She often creates multiple characters in a play: Mrs. Meany and Mitzy Lish in Owen Meany, all 24 characters in The Syringa Tree (both at The Arden) and the 15 characters in Lebensraum (InterAct). Other favorites include Tamara in Taking Sides (Act 2), Gloria in Missing Link (InterAct) and Mrs Linde in A Doll's House (Lantern). She's performed on many Philadelphia and National stages winning a Barrymore Award, the Haas Award for an Emerging Artist, and an Independence Fellowship which took her to France and Russia.  She's a graduate of Yale. She is grateful for the enormous challenge of this role. Next up will be Any Given Monday with Theatre Exile and Act 2 teams. Love to Whit, Jane and Emory.





Creative Team


James Clotfelter - Lighting Design

James is a New York based lighting designer committed to the creation of collaborative and socially conscious work. James has been the resident lighting designer for Gas & Electric Arts since 2005. He is also the Resident Lighting Designer of Miro Dance Theater, an Artistic Associate with Pig Iron Theatre Company and the co-founder of the Miro design laboratory, Mlab. Recent/current collaborations: Pig Iron Theatre Company: Chekhov Lizzardbrain, Mission to Mercury, 365 (feat. Cynthia Hopkins); Rainpan 43:Machines7; JohannesWieland: Progressive Coma, New You!; and the Living Word Project(Marc Bamuthi Joseph): Scourge, thebreak/s. Past collaborations include work with Rennie Harris, Reggie Wilson, Antony Rizzi, Bill Shannon, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Phrenic New Ballet, and Deeply Rooted Dance. James received a BFA in Lighting Design from Tulane University.


Irve Dell  - Objects and Cabinets


Irve has exhibited both in Minneapolis and regionally including exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Rochester Arts Center and St. John’s University. He was awarded a Bush Fellowship in 1988. His work is fairly evenly divided between gallery or studio pieces, private commissions, and public art projects.  Recent commissions include work for the Ohio State University, Grinnell College, Inver Hills Community College and the Minnesota Department of Transportation.


“I'm still intrigued by art and its relationship to every day life. I like to make ordinary objects and spaces extra ordinary (extraordinary). I often use functional objects or concepts as points of departure for my sculptures.”


Having become increasingly interested in the creative intersection of art and theater or performance, Dell worked on a successful collaboration with Kira Obolensky called Quick Silver -- an object and puppet theater piece which was named by Twin Cities’ critics as the “most outstanding experimental theatre event of 2003.”  He has also has worked with Obolensky and Shawn McConneloug on Force Matter, which was recently performed at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center.  In February of 2008, he created and performed his first solo piece called Hierarchy of the Box at Open Eye Figure Theater in Minneapolis.


Dell graduated from Williams College in 1983 with a major in biology and significant course work in art. He received an MFA in sculpture from the University of Minnesota in 1988 and is currently an Associate Professor of Art at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.  Dell lives in Minneapolis with his wife, playwright, Kira Obolensky and their son Isaac.


Tim Harbeson  - Composer


Tim’s experimental, solo performance project/alter ego Fence Kitchen, a perpetual work-in-progress employing original music played live and/or as recorded soundtrack, set & lighting design, and puppet/object installation and manipulation has toured extensively throughout the eastern US since 2002.  A cd that serves as both document and continuance of this work, Beading the Rook, was released in 2006 by Northeast Indie Records.  His multi-disciplinary performance has been featured at Big Ears Festival (Knoxville, TN), The Stone and Tonic (NYC), The ICA (Phila.), the Puppet Showplace (Brookline, MA), and the Portland Museum of Art (Portland, ME).  A graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the recipient awards including the J. Henry Schiedt Memorial Traveling Scholarship and a Maine Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in Music Composition, his primary artistic concerns lie in the merging and transformation of disparate forms.  In addition to his work with music ensembles tarpigh and Cerberus Shoal (including national tours and 11 albums collectively), Tim has collaborated with artists from choreographers Buffy Miller, Carol Dilley, and Middle Eastern Dance Ensemble Baraka!, to the award-winning youth theater troupe A Company of Girls.  Tim shares Stillhouse Theatre with his wife Buffy Miller and son Lark, a 31-seat, jewel-box behind their home in Mt. Airy. Cabinet of Wonders is his third collaboration with Gas & Electric Arts.


Rosemarie E. McKelvey - Costume Designer

Cabinet of Wonders is Rosemarie’s first collaboration with Gas & Electric Arts. Other companies Rosemarie has designed for are The Arden, People’s Light, New Paradise Labs, Theatre Exile, 1812 productions, Azuka, Pig Iron and Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival. Rosemarie won the 2007 Barrymore award for Caroline or Change produced by the Arden Theatre Comapny. This year, her designs received Barrymore nominations for Something Intangible (Arden Theatre Co.) and Cinderella (People’s Light & Theatre Co.).  She is also an adjunct professor in the fashion department of Moore College of Art & Design.


Ruth Worthington - estate sale coordinator/props

Ruth has devoted her performing arts career to all phases of Audience Development marketing and outreach programs for organizations such as The Annenberg Center for Performing Arts, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Pennsylvania Ballet, The Dell East, and The Mann Center for Performing Arts, Dance Celebration, The Theatre League of Philadelphia and The Philadelphia All Star-Forum.  She has also represented commercial productions such as Late Night Catechism, Tony n” Tina’s Wedding, Menopause the Musical,Shear Madness, Grandma Sylvia’s Funeral, “Bernie’s Bar Mitzvah, Mama I Want to Sing and Beauty Shop. Ruth is also passionate about the world of antiques, vintage collectibles and oddities.  An avid flea marketer and collector, her hobby parlayed into a second profession as an Antique/Vintage Collectible Dealer.  She has booths in four antique cooperatives in Adamstown, Pennsylvania, participates in Antique and specialized Collectibles Shows, and sells at flea markets in Center City.  This independent venture has turned into a family affair “Johnsworth Collectibles”.  Daughters’ Tess Johnson and Emma Johnson are both participants in the world of antiques. Ruth’s favorite collaboration to date, is with her husband of twenty-five years, Production Manager/Technical Director/University Educator, Edward J. Johnson.