Friday, September 15 ONLY: 2pm performance followed by a post-show discussion moderated by Nick Stuccio, president and producing director, FringeArts
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“Meaning and meaninglessness mingle quite comfily in The Object Lesson.” Geoff Sobelle
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Explore the inner life of objects.
Alone with a mountain of boxes, all filled with the stuff of lifetimes, a man reaches into the heap to investigate the artifacts of everyday existence; ordinary objects are imbued with deeper meaning, rooms are reconstructed, stories unfolded before being lost and forgotten. Physical theater artist Geoff Sobelle has created an absurdist mystery about the search for meaning in a massive collection of stuff.
Like an archeological detective, Sobelle conducts his search to uncover the secrets of a life in storage, how objects gain and lose value, evoke memories, how they transform from meaningful to meaningless, from loved to discarded. How wonderous the stuff of our lives becomes under the examining eye of a curious stranger.
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Past Festival shows: Elephant Room (2011), Amnesia Curiosa (2006), all wear bowlers (2005).
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Geoff Sobelle is a Philadelphia based physical theater artist known for his sublimely ridiculous, avant-garde “new vaudevillian” mode of performance. Having graduated from Stanford University in his home state of California and trained at École Jacques Lecoq in Paris, France, he has been a member of Obie award-winning theater company Pig Iron Theatre since 2001 and is also co-artistic director of rainpan 43, producing actor-driven works such all wear bowlers and Elephant Room. Sobelle has received widespread acclaim from the Philadelphia arts circuit; he was nominated for the prestigious F. Otto Haas Award for an Emerging Philadelphia Theater Artist, claimed the title of “Best Theatre Artist” from Philadelphia Magazine in 2004 and became Pew Fellow of the Arts in 2006. Geoff Sobelle’s persistently inane aesthetic seeks to challenge traditional modes of perspective through complex, multi-layered, visual theater that uses performance as a metaphor for the human experience.
