Trey Lyford Brings Newest Work THE ACCOUNTANT To Fringe Festival in Philadelphia

Critically acclaimed Philadelphia-based artist Trey Lyford is preparing to return to the Philly Fringe Festival with his newest work, The Accountant. This highly anticipated production includes a unique audience participation project surrounding the notion of memory, and will have an exclusive five performances only run at Old City's Christ Church Neighborhood House, September 6-9, 2018.

The Accountant is a a collaboratively created visual theatre piece inspired by Lyford's recent personal experiences with death, America's isolating obsession with twitter word-limit-reality, and Samuel Beckett's iconic rumination on impermanence and regret, the play Krapp's Last Tape. The new work blends physical theatre, vaudeville routines, illusion, origami, slapstick and kinetic set elements to create a piece that celebrates the beauty shuddering in the depth of the details and the poetic humor embedded at the epicenter of loss.

The show is set in the forgotten workplace of an elderly office clerk. Buried amongst endless towers of stacked paper and hunched over a single desk lamp, he sifts through the forgotten files at a nameless company. The accountant's mind slowly slips from the tedium of work into a comical and haunting dream world of remembrance and remorse. In his wistful visions, co-workers transform into fractured representations of grief and characters from his past. The stacks of paper that surround him mysteriously come to life creating the surreal landscape of an old man's nostalgic longing.

Mr. Lyford is no stranger to Fringe audiences. He has been creating work in the greater Philadelphia region for over twenty years. Fifteen of those years has been spent co-creating, producing and performing with theater artist Geoff Sobelle as the award winning and critically acclaimed duo rainpan 43. Following a world tour of their first piece all wear bowlers (2005 Drama Desk Nomination, Innovative Theatre Award and originally produced by 1812 Productions), r43 followed up performing at the Surgical Amphitheater in Pennsylvania Hospital with Amnesia Curiosa (2006), the OBIE award-winning kinetic junk sculpture play machines, machines, machines, machines, machines, machines machines and the 2011 festival hit, the surreal magic show Elephant Room.

The production features puppets from Eric Novak, who has designed works for the Broadway productions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Addams Family. Other artists involved include a world-renowned Beckett interpreter Conor Lovett and composer Cole Kamen-Green, who arranged horn parts for Beyoncé's albums 4 and Beyoncé.

As a way of engaging the personal experience of their audience as well as exploring the The Accountant's universal themes of memory and loss, the creative team has created a unique project, titled (re) collection, that will capture audience members' reactions to a series of visual stimuli. Both a website and a postcard will be used to collect audience's past experiences. These individual memories will be collected and published on a website designed specifically for The Accountant as a "gallery of moments and memories". The gallery will serve as a way for potential audience members to engage with the work as well as participate in a project devoted to collective memory. You can log on to treylyford.com/recollection to participate.

The Accountant is part of the curated FringeArts Festival; tickets can be purchased by visiting fringearts.com. Tickets are $29; students and those under 25 are $15.

 

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