For Immediate Release: August 1, 2005
Media Contact: David Brown, Gas & Electric Arts, 215.925.9914 x14

Anna Bella Eema is an enthralling ghost story, a trailer-park odyssey about a precocious 10-year-old girl, Anna Bella, and her emotionally wounded mother, who live on the edge of extinction. As her home is threatened with demolition so a city can expand, Anna Bella conjures and then breathes life into a girl made out of mud. No sooner has the mud girl been dubbed Anna Bella Eema than the presence of this mysterious composite of the mother and daughter catapults them onto a pulse-quickening rollercoaster ride filled with vampires, werewolves, wild animals and police chases. This family's stories and songs, crackling with the heat of the mother/daughter bond, are rooted in the darkly comic here and now. The revelation of their secrets and deepest instincts vividly reminds us not only of how many in America are mistreated, silenced, and forgotten but also the tremendous power of their inner resources and resiliency.

Anna Bella Eema is directed by Lisa Jo Epstein, a Philadelphia native who has returned home to Philadelphia after 20 years of honing her craft as a theatre artist. It is performed by Vivian Appler, Rainey Lacey and Sarah McCarron, with lighting and set design by James Clotfelter (Renni Harris Pure Movement, Mlab, Phrenic Ballet).

Anna Bella Eema runs October 6-23 at the Triangle Theater. Tickets are $15 General/$12 Students. Preview Night: Wednesday, October 5, 8pm. Performances run Thursday-Saturday, 8pm; Sundays, October 9 & 16, 7pm & October 23, 2pm. For tickets call the Triangle Theater at 215.763.0110. The Triangle Theater is located at 1220 N. Lawrence Street (between 4th & 5th Streets, off Girard) Philadelphia, PA. For more info visit randomactsoftheater.com.

Obie-award winning playwright Lisa d'Amour has been called "one of the most articulate explorers of the human (and particularly female) experience" (Austin Chronicle). Combined with the haunting lyric lilts that mark Chris Sidorfsky's musical score, Anna Bella Eema holds onto you with its beauty and extraordinary emotional depth, "so organic and cohesive it feels like a work of nature rather than a work of art" (Theater Mania). D’Amour has had highly successful runs of Anna Bella Eema in Austin TX (where it premiered), New York City, and Minneapolis. Now, she has chosen to partner with Gas & Electric Arts for a new production of Anna Bella Eema to inaugurate this company that is committed to new theatre—exemplified by D’Amour’s play-- that engages audiences in pressing, passionate questions about desire, history, identity, culture, and society.

As a theatre director and educator, Epstein (Artistic Director, Gas & Electric Arts) has always been drawn to theatre with verve, theatre that stirs her imagination and her heart, precisely because it offers fleeting moments of illumination and therefore danger --if but for a second—and in doing so, offers uncanny insights into her own and others' realities.

”I love the sense of community that comes with making theatre that is brave, humorous, seductive and spiritual, political because it asks more of us.” says Epstein “Such communal moments that can happen only in the theatre have the ability to renew our perceptions of the exquisiteness of being alive and our mortality, of the necessity of empathy and the imperative to act responsibly. Like gas and then electricity in the modern age, illuminants of our lives and livelihoods, seeing a striking image onstage that resonates with you can open up multiple interpretations of an idea, precisely because it is embodied in a simple gesture made extraordinary through theatre. Like electricity in action, the intangible that sparks, Gas & Electric Arts will create theatre that stimulates us to think again and listen more fully, reminding us that we live in the present moment and should never forget the gifts of our five senses.”

With Anna Bella Eema, Gas & Electric Arts begins its mission to create theatre that is responsive to the plethora of cultural and sociopolitical currents impacting our lives in the present moment, theatre that is vital, and nourishing, giving strength to those who create the production and those who see it. This kind of theatre is storytelling at its best: visually and viscerally engaging, theatrically compelling, inherently thought-provoking.

Anna Bella Eema will be the first production of Gas & Electric Arts: it is an excellent example of dynamic, affective theatre that sheds light on social injustices that have been woven into the tapestry of our country. The travails of the family in D’Amour’s wildly imaginative yet honest play ring loudly of the many lower-income, disempowered women in Philadelphia. Epstein has heard these stories first hand as a resident artist with the Women’s Community Revitalization Project of Eastern North Philadelphia. Many women face tremendous barriers to economic and social self-sufficiency because of the lack of educational and work opportunities combined with single motherhood as well as social policies and systems, compounded now by private redevelopment through eminent domain that can uproot and tear families apart. As Center City expands northward, longtime residents of these communities must be seen and heard so that changes in their neighborhood happen with them not to them. Anna Bella Eema vividly imprints a few individual faces on the reality of displaced people as experienced all over the world, even at your doorstep.

Lisa Jo Epstein (Artistic Director): Lisa Jo is a theatre director, educator and community-based artist who just returned to home to Philadelphia after being away for 20 years searching for dynamic theatrical forms. Her foray into physical theatre began in Minneapolis at Theatre de la Jeune Lune. She continued her explorations in physical and intercultural theatre, as well as socially-engaged theatre practices at the University of Texas at Austin where she obtained a Master's and Ph.D. In Paris France she served as Ariane Mnouchkine's assistant during the Théâtre du Soleil's 1994-95 creation of Molière's Tartuffe. While in Paris, she also worked at Augusto Boal's Center for the Theatre of the Oppressed, trained in clowning and Roy Hart voice work. In the US, 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. In Austin, Paris, and New Orleans, Lisa Jo created and facilitated interactive, experiential theatre workshops with a variety of populations around issues of identity and empowerment, community and social justice. Recent productions include: Everlasting Father: A Religious Fantasy (premiere, Hannah Harvester) at Swarthmore College; O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms (remount, Deb Margolin) at the 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. She is currently an artist in residence at the Women’s Community Revitalization Project in Eastern North Philadelphia and an adjunct at Temple in the Art Education program.

Lisa D'Amour (Playwright): Lisa D'Amour writes plays and creates collaborative, often site-specific theater. Recent projects include Nita and Zita, created with Katie Pearl and Kathy Randels (for which they received a 2003 OBIE Award); 16 Spells to Charm the Beast, produced by Salvage Vanguard Theater (Austin); and LIMO, a performance installation commissioned by the Whitney Museum of Art. D'Amour has received funding from the Jerome and McKnight foundations, the Minnesota and Louisiana State Arts Boards, and the MacDowell Colony, and has received commissions from Children's Theater Company, The Guthrie Theater, and Playwrights' Horizons. She is a core member of the Playwrights' Center and a member of New Dramatists. D'Amour received her M.F.A. in playwriting from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a James A. Michener Playwriting Fellow.

For more information and photos contact David Brown, Managing Director of Gas & Electric Arts at 215.925.9914 ext 14 or dave@paintedbride.org.

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