A record number of Swarthmore College alums have been nominated for the 2010 Barrymore Awards, the winners of which will be announced in Philadelphia on October 4, 2010 at a ceremony inside the Walnut Street Theatre.

Pig Iron Theatre Company’s Fringe show from 2009, WELCOME TO YUBA CITY, received a total of six nominations–a record for any production to date in the group’s history.  The acting ensemble and creative team for YUBA CITY included Dito van Reigersberg ’94 (actor), Sarah Sanford ’99 (actor), Kim Comer ’09 (master electrician), and Lang Performing Arts Center staff member Dave Todaro (assistant lighting designer).  WELCOME TO YUBA CITY enjoyed the largest audiences of any Pig Iron production at the Philadelphia Live Arts/Fringe Festival since 1997, and was also the best-attended show of the entire festival last September.  It was reviewed by Jason Zinoman in the NEW YORK TIMES, and the company hopes to revive the production for tours in the near future.

The nominations for YUBA CITY are:
Outstanding Overall Production of a Play, Outstanding Direction of a Play by Quinn Bauriedel ’94 (Quinn is also a part-time faculty in the Swarthmore Department of Theater), Outstanding Set Design by Mimi Lien, Outstanding Ensemble in a Play, Independence Foundation Award for Outstanding New Play (for the ensemble and playwright Deborah Stein ’99), and Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Play by Charlotte Ford (a Bryn Mawr alum and recent participant in Swarthmore Project in Theater).

Sarah Sanford ’99 has also been nominated for Best Supporting Actress in THE HUNTER GATHERERS at Theatre Exile and The F. Otto Haas Award for an Emerging Philadelphia Theatre Artist.

You can read a full list of nominees on the Theatre Alliance website.

Also in the news, Pig Iron will also premiere a new work at Christ Church Neighborhood House as part of this year’s Philadelphia Live Arts Festival: CANKERBLOSSOM, very freely inspired by Shakespeare’s A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM.  For CANKERBLOSSOM, director Dan Rothenberg ’95 has teamed up with cartoonist and pioneering puppeteer artist Beth Nixon, whose fantastical cardboard creations work alongside stop motion animation, video projection, live music, and Pig Iron’s signature physical style to create this shadowy fairytale land.  For more information about the company and the show, check out their website http://www.pigiron.org/.

Cartogoraphasia is the first experiment from Telephone Bronco Theater Company.  Under the auspices of the Swarthmore Project in Theater, the company  committed themselves to working as a collective and mashing up their different areas of expertise to generate a new work and to explore new territories in devising performance.  This process has been mainly character-based, and Cartogoraphasia is a celebration of The World’s Greatest Explorers–but probably not the ones audiences are most familiar with. The piece weaves together the narratives of six extremely varied characters and brings together amazing stories of intrepid explorer moments for both characters and performers alike.

Cartogoraphasia opens the first weekend of September at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and also runs the second weekend. It’s at Circle of Hope on at 1125 South Broad Street. Tickets are for sale at the Fringe Festival website: http://www.livearts-fringe.org/details.cfm?id=1326.

For more information about supporting the show and the company, visit  http://telephonebronco.blogspot.com.

You can also find the company on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Telephone-Bronco-Theater-Company/122056474499910?ref=ts) and follow their success on Picasa (http://picasaweb.google.com/118341499264178649897).

Currently working at SPT (Swarthmore Project in Theater): the Telephone Bronco Theater Company!

“Telephone Bronco is a new theater company composed of Swarthmore College alumni and current students. We are committed to working as a collective, devising new work, and blending our combined knowledge to incorporate a variety of performance styles and contemporary commentaries. We are devoted to our goals both in the narratives we create and in the ways we create them.”

Telephone Bronco is made of up of both current Theatre Department students (Nell Bang-Jensen ’11 and Isa St. Clair ’11) and recent graduates (Emma Ferguson ’10, McFeely Samuel Goodman ’10, Eric Holzhauer ’10, and Louis Jargow ‘10, Jessie Bear ‘09)  and will debut their new work at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in September 2010.

For more information go to: http://telephonebronco.blogspot.com/

2010 participants in The Swarthmore Project in Theater include Telephone Bronco Theater Company, which is made of up of both current students (Nell Bang-Jensen ’11 and Isa St. Clair ’11) and recent graduates (Emma Ferguson ’10, McFeely Samuel Goodman ’10, Eric Holzhauer ’10, and Louis Jargow ‘10, Jessie Bear ‘09) of the Department and will make its debut at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in September.  Also in residence has been New York City’s Barrow Street Theatre in collaboration with Philadelphia’s Rainpan 43 on rehearsals for a tour to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival of Rainpan 43’s Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl, by Geoff Sobelle and Charlotte Ford (production management by Kim Comer ’09). New York City’s The Riot Group will also be in residence for workshops on a new play by Adriano Shaplin (who teaches playwriting in the Department).

Check out more information on the Swarthmore Project in Theater at the Department of Theater’s website!

Please join us as the  Department of Theater presents:
Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding) by Federico Garcìa Lorca
Fri & Sat, April 16 & 17, 2010 at 8 pm
Sun, April 18, 2010 at 3 pm
Frear Ensemble Theater
Lang Performing Arts Center
Free and open to the public

Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding) is the Honors Directing Thesis of McFeely Sam Goodman ’10.  The production features a new English language adaptation by the director.
Federico Garcìa Lorca’s Bodas de sangre is a play of poetry and passion that draws on traditions of Spanish folklore and Spanish surrealism.  When the Bride, engaged to the Groom but in love with Leonardo, the son of an enemy family, runs off with Leonardo on the wedding night, the Groom must pursue them into the forest where the chase reaches its bloody conclusion.  The Groom’s Mother, who has already lost a son and a husband to the blood feud between her family and Leonardo’s, predicts the events of the play with a combination of dread and perverse satisfaction.
Set in a bizarre Las Vegas wedding chapel that is both futuristic and evocative of movie theaters of the ‘20s and ‘30s, this production follows a group of punkish neo-flappers driven by the same deadly passions that curse Lorca’s protagonists as they live their own disastrous wedding through Lorca’s text.
McFeely Sam Goodman ‘10 directs the production. Original music is composed and directed by Jamie Birney ‘10.  The design team includes: Tara Nova Webb ’94 (set and media); Samantha Panepinto ’13 (costumes); James P. Murphy (lighting); Daniel Perelstein ’09 (sound); and Logan Tiberi-Warner ’11 (hair and make-up).  Logan Tiberi Warner ’11 also worked as dramaturg on the production. Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding) features Jane Lief Abell ’11, Jamie Birney ’10, Nell Bang-Jensen ’11, Melissa Cruz ’10, Nolan Gear ’12, McFeely Jackson Goodman ’13, Eric Holzhauer ’10, Sirkka Natti ’11, Anna Ramos ’13, Miriam Rich ’11, and Carson Young ’10.  The faculty advisor is K. Elizabeth Stevens.
All performances are free and open to the public without advance reservations.  For further information about the production, contact Liza Henty-Clark at (610) 328-8260 or lclark1@swarthmore.edu.

The Department of Theater will treat the campus community and public to three more productions this Spring. We hope you can join us for one or all!

• Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding) by Federico Garcia Lorca, directed by McFeely Sam Goodman ’10. April 16-18. A tale of a bloody family feud – love, passion, revenge and murder – this production is set in a bizarre Las Vegas wedding chapel. For more info click here.
• The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney, directed by Niccolo Aeed Moretti ’10. April 30-May 2. Adapted from Sophocles’ Philoctete, The Cure at Troy explores themes of loyalty and abandonment and war and peace, through the story of Philoctetes’ ill-treatment at the hand of the Greeks, left to fend for himself on an unpopulated island, until he is needed to win the Trojan war. For more info click here.
• Nights of Scenes II.  Scenes by students of the Directing II Workshop.  May 5-6.  More information coming soon.

Professor of Theater Allen Kuharski offers a critical overview of Pig Iron Theatre Company’s history and relationship to contemporary theater in the U.S. and beyond. First launched by a group of Swarthmore College theater alumni in 1995, Pig Iron Theatre Company is now in its 15th season as a critically-acclaimed and growing part of Philadelphia’s professional theater community. Though strongly rooted in Philadelphia, Pig Iron’s cosmopolitan, unpredictable, and highly mobile work (consisting of almost two dozen original works to date) has earned it a national and international profile. The company’s unique character and success reveal a continuation and dialog with certain aspects of the American avant-garde as well as a significant departure from much contemporary theater practice in the United States.

To listen to Prof. Kuharski’s lecture or watch a clip of the work of Pig Iron Theater Company, click here.

Please join us as the Swarthmore College Department of Theater’s Production Ensemble presents:

Divided Together: Hayavadana by Girish Karnad
Fri, March 26, 2010 at 8 pm
Sat, March 27, 2010 at 3 pm (ASL-interpreted)
Sat, March 27, 2010 at 8 pm
Sun, March 28, 2010 at 3 pm
Frear Ensemble Theater
Lang Performing Arts Center
Free and open to the public
Divided Together: Hayavadana by Girish Karnad is a play with songs that centers on a young woman in love with her brainy husband’s sexy best friend. When their heads are switched, the central question of the play becomes: which man is her husband, the one with his head, or the one with his body? Divided Together: Hayavadana is a surreal love story about the head/body divide (in its many manifestations), about the quest for perfection, and about the need to accept people for who they really are.
Members of the deaf community are invited especially to the Saturday matinee performance, which will be interpreted in American Sign Language by Doreen DeLuca.
Assistant Professor Erin B. Mee directs the production, with sets and costumes designed by Assistant Professor Laila Swanson, lights designed by James P. Murphy, and original music composed by Daniel Perelstein ’09.  The ensemble features Katie Becker ‘10, Rebecca Contreras ’13, Melissa Cruz ‘10, Nia Gipson ‘10, Vianca Masucci ‘13, Regina Noto ‘12, Cathy Park ‘13, Watufani Poe ‘13, and John Simon ‘12.

Girish Karnad is one of India’s most important modern playwrights. His plays are produced at major theatres and colleges all over India, as well as in theatres abroad. His plays, in addition to Hayavadana, which he wrote in 1971, include Yayati (named for a character from the Mahabharata; 1961), Tughlaq (about Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq; 1964), Naga-Mandala (Play with a Cobra; 1988), Tale-Danda (Death by Beheading; 1989), Agni Mattu Male (The Fire and the Rain; 1993), The Dreams of Tipu Sultan (1997), Bali, The Sacrifice (2000), Flowers (2004), and Broken Images (2005). His numerous awards include a Homi Bhabha fellowship, the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya Award, the Padma Shri, the Padma Bushan, and the Bharatiya Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary award.

Erin B. Mee has directed at some of this country’s most important theatres, including New York Theatre Workshop, The Public Theatre, The Guthrie Theater, and The Magic Theatre.  In India she has directed two productions with Sopanam, one of India’s leading companies.  She has written a book about modern Indian theatre called “The Theatre of Roots: Redirecting the Modern Indian Stage,” and has edited a collection of plays called DramaContemporary:India. For the department, Mee has directed Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin’s Savage/Love (2004), Robert Auletta’s modern adaptation of The Persians (2005), Charles Mee’s Big Love (2006), and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest (2005) in a co-production with East Coast Artists.
Laila Swanson received an MFA in Set Design with a minor in Costume Design from Temple University in 1994. She has worked as costume and set designer for productions in Scandinavia as well as in the US., and is Visiting Assistant Professor of Design and Resident Costume and Set Designer for the Theater Department.
James P. Murphy received his BA in Technical/Design Theater from SUNY at Albany in 1981. Since then he has worked as a technical director, production manager, lighting and sound designer throughout the Northeast. He is the Resident Lighting Designer for the Dance Program at Swarthmore, as well as the Theater Department’s Lighting Design Instructor.
The performances are free and open to the public without advance reservations.  For more info contact Liza Clark at lclark1@swarthmore.edu or call (610) 328-8260.

The Swarthmore College Department of Theater and Senior Company present

Melancholy Play by Sarah Ruhl
Thursday-Saturday, December 3-5, 2009
8 pm
Frear Ensemble Theater, Lang Performing Arts Center
Swarthmore College
Free and open to the public
For more info: lclark1@swarthmore.edu, (610) 328-8260

Tilly is beautiful when she’s sad. She doesn’t get in trouble with policemen when she cries. She goes to therapy and her therapist falls in love with her. But when she’s happy she’s more like a sweaty cow, and everyone falls out of love with her. Tilly’s world is a world of long lost twins, children abandoned in unspecified European countries, too many windows, and almonds. Fall out of love, fall back in love, come see Senior Company’s production of Melancholy Play by Sarah Ruhl.

Ruhl has written about Melancholy Play: “Melancholy in this play is Bold, Outward, Sassy, Sexy, and Unashamed. It is not introverted.”

Sarah Ruhl is an American-born playwright. Her plays include The Clean House, Late: A Cowboy Love Song, Eurydice, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and In the Next Room (or the vibrator play). In September 2006, Ruhl was named the winner of the MacArthur Fellowship. She is also the recipient of a 2008 PEN/Pels Award for Drama. Ruhl saw her Broadway debut in 2009 with In the Next Room (or the vibrator play).

This production is directed by Nicco Moretti ’10 and Louis Jargow ’10, and features set design by Emma Ferguson ’10, light design by Dave Todaro, sound design by Dan Perelstein ’09, and costume design by Eleanor McSherry ’10. The ensemble includes Nell Bang-Jensen ’11, Samantha Friedman ’10, McFeely Sam Goodman ’10, Eric Holzhauer ’10, Chris Klaniecki ’10 and Brian Willis ’11.