EgoPo Presents Beckett's ROCKABY As A Live Immersive Experience For An Audience Of One

EgoPo Classic Theater announces the next production of their radically-intimate, socially-distanced 2020-2021 Isolations Season. Rockaby, Samuel Beckett's famed intensive 10-minute one-woman show, will take place March 10th-21st, 2021 in another innovative theatrical format. Rockaby is watched by one audience member at a time peering through a house window in one of three different neighborhoods across the city in a COVID-safe experience.

Guests choose which part of the city they will attend. They journey deep into that neighborhood arriving at the designated street corner where a masked guide leads them to a single chair awaiting in front of a window. They don disposable headphones and the blinds lift to reveal the woman in the rocking chair, isolated inside her home looking for connection. Audience members listen to the beautiful, hypnotic text while glimpsing her haunting journey through the window. Each audience member sees the show without ever going inside and remains distanced from any other people.

Beckett's Rockaby is considered one of the pinnacles of avant-garde theater, distilling the human experience of loss, isolation, and desperation to connect with other humans into a potent 10-minute drama. It is the perfect anchor for EgoPo's season which is mirroring our experiences of living during covid with innovative theatrical formats that allow us to experience theater safely. In neighborhoods across our city, individuals have been trapped inside their homes for a year. Death is omnipresent and the yearning for connection is tangible. Rockaby is a way of sharing this experience, while providing many audiences their first taste of live theater in over a year.

Rockaby will be co-directed by EgoPo's Founding Artistic Director, Lane Savadove, and the company's season-long Artist-in-Residence, Damien J. Wallace. Wallace was most recently seen in this season's Underground which he co-created, and serves as Artistic Director of EgoPo's co-producing partner, Lawrence Theatre Company. This is Wallace's directing debut with EgoPo.

"We are very excited with how this event has evolved over the course of the season. When Damien and I originally conceived the piece, our actors were intended to be performing in rotations in the same space. But due to the status of the pandemic, we decided to explore what it would be like for actors to perform in private residences never interacting with their collaborators or the audience. At the same it provides audiences with an immersive mini-tour through our city. Damien and I now get to create three distinct worlds for the 'Woman in the Chair'. It is a deeply personal piece for both of us. Each world is developed based on the particular actor and the neighborhood and our sense of people in our lives who have become isolated within their own worlds.

Joining Wallace and Savadove on the production team is Chris Sannino (Sound Designer), and EgoPo Associate Producer Dane Eissler (Production Designer). The production is sponsored by The Judith Charles Memorial Fund.

Tickets will go on sale mid-February and will start at $25. Experience each location with the purchase of a Rockaby passport ticket, also on sale in mid-February. Casting and neighborhood performance schedule will be announced shortly.

For more information about the experience and what to expect, visit www.egopo.org/rockaby or call 267-273-1414.

About Rockaby
This intimate piece takes place in three locations across the city, of which you will choose your preferred neighborhood. Alone, you arrive at a street corner and are guided to a private residence where a single chair awaits facing a window shrouded by venetian blinds. You take your seat, don headphones, and watch as the blinds slowly rise to reveal a woman inside, swaying in her rocker. Her thoughts, in the form of Beckett's text, enter directly into your ears, allowing your mind and hers to merge. In EgoPo's intensely intimate version of this famed avant-garde classic, solo audience members witness a haunting and hypnotic ten-minute journey of birth, death, and isolation.

EgoPo Classic Theater's 2020-2021 Season of Isolations is a festival of four radically intimate theatrical events experienced in innovative socially distanced formats. EgoPo saw social distancing as an opportunity to create new ways of experiencing and watching theater - sometimes even redefining what theater can be. Each piece of this special season re-examines the interaction between audiences and performance, creating intensely intimate events that can be experienced safely in the midst of our ever-changing environment. The season reflects our communal experience of isolating over the last year by using the classic literary mode of the solitary artist choosing to live in self-imposed isolation in order to seek transformation.

In the Fall/Winter of 2020, EgoPo invited audiences to experience two original theater works from the safety of their homes. Brenna Geffers and Natalia de la Torre's Emily was a five-week mail event inspired by Emily Dickinson and was featured in American Theatre Magazine for its unique, play-by-mail format. Underground was a virtual film event, created by EgoPo Associate Producer, Dane Eissler, and Philadelphia-based artist, Damien J. Wallace. Hailed as "captivating" and a "strong, unapologetic work of political theater" by Broadstreet Review, the multi platform event transformed Donstoyevsky's 19th century novel into a modern-day tale through the eyes of a Black Man, with Philadelphia's controversial racial history as the backdrop. Samuel Beckett's Rockaby is next up in this highly distanced season and will be presented one-on-one through the glass window of a house. The final event scheduled for April/May 2021 will be a drive-in version of Adam Rapp's Nocturne. All four pieces are curated to provide an intensely human and connected experience while we continue to remain physically apart.

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