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Thursday, February 10 through Saturday, February 26, 2011 at The Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5

The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, whose mission is to present absurdist theater to audiences in the Philadelphia region, will present Boris Vian’s darkly farcical essay on the culture of fear, The Empire Builders, Thursday, February 10 at 7:30 pm through Saturday, February 26, 2010 at The Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5. There will be one preview performance on Thursday, February 10 at 7:30 pm; opening night is Friday, February 11, 2011. Curtain will be 7:30 pm Tuesdays through Saturdays; 2:30 pm on Sundays.

The Empire Builders (1959) was written by one of France's most gifted poets, playwrights, critics, and musicians. Les Bâtisseurs d'Empire ou le Schmurz was staged in England in 1962 and in New York in 1968 and follows the antics of a respectable family and their maid as they attempt to flee a strange and terrifying noise within the confines of their home. Like the villagers in Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, they struggle to make the best of the growing menace while their internal world crumbles.

The Empire Builders will feature Charlie DelMarcelle, Kirsten Quinn, Kate Black-Regan, Sonja Robson, Tomas Dura and Michael Dura. IRC Producing Artistic Director Tina Brock will direct. The designers on The Empire Builders include Meghan Jones, set design, and Brian Strachan, costume design. Born in 1920, Vian died thirty-nine years later in a fit of apoplexy while watching the film version of his first novel, I Spit on Your Graves. Published under the pen name Vernon Sullivan, the novel came about as a bet between Vian and his friend and publisher Jean d'Halluin of Editions du Scorpions. D'Halluin needed a bestseller; Vian believed he could write it. I Spit on Your Graves subsequently became a runaway success - and landed Vian a 100,000 franc fine for an "affront to public morals.” Vian died before The Empire Builders would be produced and scrutinized.

The circumstances surrounding his death are part of the mystery of Vian, known less for his work than for his role as the presiding spirit of the intellectual café society and a close friend of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. It has been written that without the Sartre of Nausea (La Nausée) and the Camus of The Stranger (L'Etranger), without the jazz of Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, without Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett's absurdism, and without the American noir of McCoy, Cain and Goodis, that Vian wouldn't be the writer he was. In a 2006 New Yorker article, Dan Halpern writes about Vian and his work: “…Vian’s novel, L’Écume des Jours (Foam of the Days) written in 1946, became one of the most popular books in all of twentieth-century French literature making Vian, in France, the sort of hero whom succeeding generations transform into an institution. Foam of the Days was largely ignored on its publication but became a much-heralded book to the revolutionary generation of 1968: in 1962, it had sold only three thousand copies. By 1975, the figure had reached a million.”

The Empire Builders will have one preview performance on Thursday, February 10 and will open Friday, February 11 at 7:30 pm, running Tuesdays through Saturdays at 7:30 pm, Sundays at 2:30 pm through February 26, 2011 at The Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5 in Philadelphia. Tickets are $20.00 ($15.00 preview) and may be purchased by visiting the IRC website at www.idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.org or by calling 215.285.0472.