VOICES UNDERWATER

Written by Abi Basch

Directed by Lisa Jo Epstein

Performed by Vivian Appler, Emmanuelle Delpech-Ramey,

James Ijames & Leah Walton

2006 Adrienne Theatre

"Stunning, poetic, and supernatural." --6NT.com

1864: a Southern plantation home, now hospital for wounded Union Soldiers like Albert who have fiercely fought for liberation. He aches to feel his legs, to embrace a lost lover, and to speak freely. Pouring rain.

1923: the same, now headquarters for a KKK Wizard where his teen daughter Jennie, who aches deeply for a dark boy fiercely forbidden by her daddy, turns voyeurism into murder. Pouring rain.

2005: very same, now empty. Franklin and Emma, an interracial urban couple, must take refuge in the attic during a storm where a painful flood of toxic discrimination torments them across time and threatens to rend their relationship.  Can they openly be who others could not?

O YES I WILL

(I will remember the spirit and texture of this conversation)

Written by Deb Margolin

Directed by Lisa Jo Epstein

Performed by Michele Horman & Joseph Ritsch

2008 Adrienne Theater

O Yes I Will is a testament to the power of solo performance and a concession to the vitality of theatrical conceit. It's funny, it's powerful.. -  Phillyist.

A woman is amazed to learn that just prior to going under for surgery, she talked, talked and talked for 12 straight minutes without stopping! This unmediated aria performed before a bunch of men in scrubs with knives was known to them but unknown to her.  What kinds of things do you say when your body and mind are engaged but not married? Love? Politics? Sex? Conspiracy theory? Evasion? Ontology? Requests for a ménage à trois, quatre or cinq?

Imagine you live in this body and are just dying to know what you said! This comic tour-de-force is a kind of Scherezade for the surgery-bound, and offers five radically different possibilities of what she might have said outside the realm of conscious volition. 

Cabinet of Wonders, An Impossible History

Written by Kira Obolensky

Directed by Lisa Jo Epstein

Objects & Cabinets by Irve Dell

Performed by Catharine K. Slusar & Ross Beschler

2009 World Premiere

Underground Arts at the Wolf Building

Renowned for concocting wildly imaginative adventures, playwright Kira Obolensky and visual artist Irve Dell of Minneapolis join forces with Gas & Electric Arts, bringing fierce physicality and object theater together for a multi-sensory ride through the magical mesh of fiction and reality that reside in family stories.

Meet Leopold and Christina Carcass. The Enigmatic and charismatic offspring of a family of immigrants, revolutionaries and entertainers. Poised on the edge of eviction, in a free fall from grace, the Carcasses debate salvation strategies and tussle over the plethora of family possessions stashed inside the ancestral cabinets. With impending foreclosure, no destination or relatives in site, they can only take away what they can carry.

Cabinet of Wonders, An Impossible History explores how we define a family – is it a collection of artifacts and stories, memories, genetic information or what the census tells us? In the course of this highly theatrical evening, Leopold and Christina attempt to reconcile their own impossible histories with the story that the cabinet reveals. Caught in an elaborate web of family fairy tales, the characters impress us with a torrent of stories, songs, vaudeville routines and the animation of unlikely heirlooms. Secret drawers pop open unannounced, letting loose lemons and letters, bones and beans, wishbones and rats – and the boundaries between tale and fact, between memoir and fiction burst apart, unleashing shards of truth that insist upon their own new story.

Cabinet of Wonders was funded by The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, through The Philadelphia Theatre Initiative.