August 31, 2006 Issue                                       

©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

‘Voices,’ by Mt. Airyite’s company, making noise
by CLARK GROOME

Lisa Jo Epstein (seen here at her Mt. Airy home with daughter, Zivia Bea Brown) and her husband, David, have founded Gas & Electric Arts. (Visit www.gasandelectricarts.org ) The company’s current production, Abi Basch’s Voices Underwater, began previews August 25, and opens officially August 31, running through September 10 at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St.

“I wanted my own theater company even as a nine-year-old when I started doing theater in elementary school,” Mt. Airy resident Lisa Jo Epstein said last week. Her Gas & Electric Arts Company is, 30 years later, the fulfillment of that dream.

Now in its second year, Gas & Electric Arts’ mission “is to create highly refined, viscerally evocative theater that engages our hearts, senses and imagination while broaching oft-unspoken but ever-present social concerns.

“We seek to create theater that is storytelling at its best: visually engaging, theatrically nourishing and responsive to the currents impacting our lives today. We want audiences to experience new performances that shimmer with theatricality but also with social reality.”

In order to create her theater, Epstein and husband David Brown returned to Philadelphia and settled in Mt. Airy in 2003. The Lower Merion native had left Philadelphia in 1984 to attend Tulane University. Her triple major in French, theater and political science combined the elements that make up the theater she and Brown founded in Philadelphia.

“I was always attracted to things French,” Epstein said in a recent interview. “In college I was able to immerse myself in the traditions of French theater. I found myself not only attracted to what those traditions of revolution had to offer but also the traditions of theatrical form and investigation and what it meant to be an actor. I wasn’t getting that from American theater.

“I went to Paris in my junior year abroad and just found a sense of freedom and exploration of images and the body in space and time that felt right. So, I continued down that path.

“In graduate school (she holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in theater history/text/criticism from the University of Texas at Austin) I began investigating all forms of modern and contemporary and post-modern theories and theater. I found that I was able to mesh them in the theater I was creating.”

Unlike so many others who come to directing after a time as an actor, Epstein said, “I set out to be a director. In college, when it became clear to me that I was attracted to other kinds of theater and sensed that I had an ease with more physically oriented kinds of theater, I knew that I was not meant to be an actor. I hungered for French theater.

“So much of my work from when I was an undergraduate up to the present has been influenced by two particular threads of the theater. One of them is the Téatre du Soleil (The Theater of the Sun), one of the longest-running theaters in Western Europe, a major company in France.”

For most of her career she has directed and taught theater. She was an assistant professor from 1997 through 2003 at her alma mater, Tulane. Since returning to Philadelphia she has taught successively at Ursinus, Temple’s Tyler School, the University of the Arts and Arcadia University, where she is currently a visiting professor.

After all that time in the south, Epstein said she returned to Philadelphia because “I have an aging father. I’d been in New Orleans for seven years. My father was here. I have a four-and-one-half-year-old daughter. I didn’t want our lives to continue without her knowing her grandfather.

“We just had to come home. I spent my life pursuing every possible pathway to nourish me as a theater maker and went very far away from Philadelphia. As I grew older and spent years teaching and directing I wanted to come home.

“We feel more at home in Mt. Airy than anywhere we’ve been in our lives. It was just like it was the intersection of many of our interests coming to life in a neighborhood.”

After her return she wasted no time organizing her theater. Gas & Electric Arts’ first production was Anna Bella Eema by Obie-award winning playwright Lisa d’Amour. It was staged in Northern Liberties in October, 2005.

The company’s current production, Abi Basch’s Voices Underwater, began previews August 25, opens officially August 31 and runs through September 10 at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St.

“Gas & Electric Arts works only with living playwrights whose work is alive and untested, still in that space of being opened up by a group of actors and a director.

“I only work with playwrights who love language. I only create theater that is storytelling at its best. All of my work is how to tell a story that is visually exciting, that’s intellectually engaging, that’s emotionally moving.

“I pay attention to how an actor’s body makes an image that I hope will be evocative for an audience and get them thinking about who they are and how they exist in the world.

“There’s that incredible moment when an audience is bearing witness to somebody’s story. That is a tremendous privilege; also a responsibility. If what’s happening on the stage is effective, then an audience member can be moved and become part of that community on stage. It’s a real moment of generosity and community building.”

Lisa Jo (never just Lisa) Epstein has, she says, three full time jobs: her theater, her teaching and raising her daughter, Zivia. Her desire to have her own theater company may very well have been transmitted to her daughter.

At a rehearsal not too long ago, Zivia asked her mother, “When I grow up, can I have my own actors?” Stay tuned.

For more information about Gas & Electric Arts and its production of Voices Underwater call 215-407-0556 or email gas.electric.arts@verizon.net.