BI-CO THEATER FACULTY, STUDENTS FEATURED IN FESTIVAL

Director of Theater Mark Lord

Big House Plays and Spectacles' Zone is one of the featured programs at this year's Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, which organizers describe as a selection of "cutting-edge, boundary-breaking performing-arts events, created by some of the most renowned contemporary artists from our region and around the world." The performance will also be a showcase of Bi-College talent: directed by Bryn Mawr Director of Theater Mark Lord and designed by Technical Director of Theater Hiroshi Iwasaki, the production features a cast and crew composed primarily of students and alumni of the Bryn Mawr-Haverford Theater Program.

Zone pairs two 20th-century texts, opening with an adaptation of Guillaume Apollinaire's poem "Zone" and closing with "A Piece of Monologue," a late work of Samuel Beckett. The Apollinaire poem, in which a peripatetic narrator wanders the streets of Paris, is especially well suited to Lord's signature site-focused approach.

"The poem centers on a character who is referred to in the text as 'you,'" says Lord. "We make that literal, by taking the audience through the alleys and corridors of a sort of maze that Hiroshi has created from the raw material of a beautiful, rough basement space."

Some of the actors speak lines from the poem, while others represent characters who are referred to in the text. Still other characters inhabiting the basement are Lord's inventions.

"The audience will make its way through the maze by following the voices that speak to them," Lord says. "At the other end is a more traditional theater space where the Beckett piece will be performed."

According to Lord, "A Piece of Monologue" presents "a man standing in a dark room next to an oil lamp, talking about a man standing in a dark room next to an oil lamp and staring at a wall — which is the conceptual wall behind which the audience sits." The speaker, Lord says, works through his sense "that there was being born and now there is dying and that 'living' never actually happens. It's a roller coaster ride from born to dead."

"It's not exactly a cheery show," Lord says, "but it's beautiful acting — a lyrical, evocative work."

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