Gas & Electric Arts presents the East Coast premiere of Quick Silver, a play by Kesselring Prize winning playwright Kira Obolensky.

In the Hat Making Capital of the World, nothing is as it should be. Time evaporates like a splash of silver mercury. A swirl of actors, puppets and bric-a-brac animate this Alice-in-Wonderland-like adventure where everyone breaks into song at the drop of a hat. Wildly entertaining, yet thought provoking, Quick Silver theatricalizes the legacy of America's hazardous industrial practices and its imprint on the environment and society by drawing us into a story of criss-crossing family lines around the life of a river and a hat-making factory. Quick Silver is a fanciful and compelling fable that looks back to the hat factories and the people who depended on this poisonous industry whose legacy we still feel today.

With a fast-growing reputation for risk-taking, hybrid performance theatre, Gas & Electric Arts jumps into the seriously surreal world of Kesselring-award winning playwright Kira Obolensky, and her factory town fable Quick Silver which won the “best experimental theatre piece” of 2003 by Minneapolis critics. Directed by Lisa Jo Epstein, Quick Silver features actors Vivian Appler, Seth Reichgott & Joseph Ritsch with puppets and music by Tim Harbeson.

Quick Silver will be performed during the Philly Fringe Festival, August 29 – September 15, 2007. See attached schedule for performance dates and times. Performances will take place at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom Street in Philadelphia. Tickets are $20. For tickets Fringe Box Office: 215.413.1318 or visit www.gasandelectricarts.org.

Post-Show Environmental Actions | Quick Silver will also feature several post-show conversations and a panel discussion, “From Greed to Green, From Fable to Fact” featuring a variety of environmental advocacy groups and Environmental Scientist Johan Varekamp. Visit www.gasandelectricarts.org for a schedule.

The Play
Renowned for concocting wildly imaginative adventures (Lobster Alice), Kira Obolensky's play Quick Silver is a factory town fable that points to the underbelly of American capitalism and the challenges to hold onto one's deepest desires in the face of exploitation. Quick Silver was inspired by Obolensky’s research into the history of Danbury CT, long known as the hat making capital of the world in the 19th century. While CT was her focus, she may as well have looked at Philadelphia which by the late 1800’s had countless hatters in the city and was a leader in hat manufacturing. Obolensky turns some of the grimmer aspects of hat making—and by extension, the ongoing reign of corporate practices, ethics and resultant attitudes that permeate American society -- into the basis of an engagingly surreal fable. A factory owner with a voracious appetite and picketed by petitions cannot hold onto his heart or his head which fly away, much to his chagrin. A lonely journalist who is sent to get the story speaks in a rush of garbled clauses but catches the drift nonetheless from a recent factory widow who wills her words into an irresistible cake that will change the world. A tiger who keeps changing size finds all kinds of tasty treats but leaves homemade confections behind. A teen debutante trapped in her filial role desperately flees her own party and leering suitors, only to fall into the arms of a wannabe poet struggling to write a stanza about the river running red through his town. Both struggle to hold onto desire in an ailing America teetering on the precipice of hope and loss. Here time evaporates like a splash of silver mercury against a violet sky as a swirl of actors, puppets and bric-a-brac animate the stage and break into song at the drop of a hat.

Gas & Electric Arts
The mission of Gas & Electric Arts is to create stage performances, educational programs and community events that respond to the currents of our time and in doing so, engage the hearts, senses and imagination of those who experience our work. We create theatre productions and teach workshops that support storytelling at its best: visually engaging, intellectually nourishing, and which shed light on our humanity. We are called Gas & Electric Arts because we believe that theatre -- an art form which embraces all others -- should be an essential part of a community's life, an accessible, vital utility that ignites introspection even as it generates dynamic dialogue around who we are and what we desire.

Gas & Electric Arts was founded in 2005 by Lisa Jo Epstein and David J. Brown. Our purpose is to lead audiences to experiences that shimmer with theatricality and shiver with social reality. In our work, we are committed to corporeal, visual, vocal and spatial investigations. Our art exists at the intersection of a spectrum of theatrical forms--from the epic, disciplined physical work of the Théâtre du Soleil to the joy of stage clowning and puppeteering, from gestural, movement-based theater to new forms of vocal exploration. This type of theatre leaves quotidian expression behind as the actors devise vivid, extra-ordinary forms for their bodies so they can become instruments of passion, resonators of our time. Like electricity in action, the intangible that sparks energy, Gas & Electric Arts creates theatre that stimulates us to think again, to live more fully in the present moment, and to never forget the power of our five senses.

Gas & Electric Arts season continues in the spring of 2008 with O Yes I Will by Deb Margolin.