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  Gas & Electric Arts Announces the 2006 premiere of Voices Underwater, a theatrical storm that swirls the racial muck of American history with forbidden love For Immediate Release: July 6, 2006 Written by Abi Basch | Directed by Lisa Jo Epstein Featuring Vivian Appler, Emmanuelle Delpech-Ramey, James Ijames & Leah Walton "There will never be anything more interesting in America than that Civil War never." --Gertrude Stein On the heels of Gas & Electric Arts' widely-lauded production of Anna Bella Eema (one of City Paper's top theatre moments for 2005, hailed as a "superb debut.filled with theatrical pleasures") comes the premiere of Abi Basch's Voices Underwater, a spicy, daring play that rushes like water as time frames, forbidden desires and characters collide. Through the interplay of actors' bodies, light and sound, this production will remind us of the inheritances that shape us as Americans and sizzle beneath the surface of our relationships. Performances August 25 - September 10, at the Adrienne Mainstage, 2030 Sansom Street. Voices Underwater is a joint national premiere between Gas & Electric Arts (Philadelphia), Synchronicity Performance Group (Atlanta), and Serendipity Theatre Company (Chicago). Voices Underwater features a live soundscape by Sean Mattio. Previews run August 25 - August 29 (Friday & Saturday 7pm, Sunday, 2pm Tuesday, 7pm); Performances run Wednesday - Thursday August 30 & 31 and then during the Philly Fringe Festival, Friday, September 1 - Sunday, September 10. See schedule for all dates and time. Preview tickets are $10 (available at www.gasandelectricarts.org). Performance tickets are $20 and are available at the Fringe Festival box office, 215.413.1318 and at www.gasandelectricarts.org. For information and group prices call 215.407.0556. Voices Underwater reveals what happens when an interracial couple-Emma, a Jewish woman, and Franklin, an African-American-- head South to explore a deserted Alabama house that Emma has mysteriously inherited. Their simple trip is shattered by a violent storm and they're forced to take refuge in the attic. As the floodwaters rise, the house's past inhabitants swell from the walls forcing them to face their buried histories and related legacies. 1864: a Southern plantation home, now hospital for wounded Union Soldiers like Albert who have fiercely fought for liberation. Distraught by the mass destruction and rampant violence, he aches to feel his legs, to embrace a lost lover, and to speak freely. Pouring rain. 1923: the same home, now headquarters for an Imperial KKK Wizard where his teen daughter Jennie, who, struggling for comprehension in the face of violence yet aching deeply for a dark boy fiercely forbidden by her daddy, turns voyeurism into murder. Pouring rain. 2005: very same, now empty. Franklin and Emma, an interracial urban couple, are forced to take refuge in the attic during a storm where a painful flood of toxic discrimination torments them across time and threatens to rend their relationship. Can they openly be who others could not and bravely acknowledge the traumas of their lives? About the Playwright- Abi Basch is a playwright and director whose plays and performance installations have been presented at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Brave New Works in Atlanta, Fusebox, PulseWorks, and Out of Ink in Austin, Best Feet Forward in Minneapolis, hotINK! In New York City, and Transeuropa in Hildesheim, Germany. She's received three Austin Critics Table award nominations, been a finalist for the Weissberger Award at Williamstown and for PlayLabs at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, and received Best of Fest in Fronterafest. She has developed work collaboratively with Live Action Set and the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, and Refraction Arts Project and Physical Plant Theater in Austin. Abi is a Core member of Austin Script Works, has received two Jerome Fellowships from the Playwrights' Center, and a Fulbright Fellowship for research on collaborative physical-theater methods in Germany. She holds an AB in History from Brown University and an MFA in Playwriting from The University of Texas at Austin. Gas & Electric Arts- Led by Artistic Director Lisa Jo Epstein, Gas & Electric Arts' mission is to create viscerally evocative theatre that engages our hearts, senses and imagination while broaching oft-unspoken but ever-present social concerns. We seek to create theatre that is storytelling at its best: visually engaging, theatrically nourishing and responsive to the currents impacting our lives today. We want audiences to experience new performance that shimmers with theatricality and shivers with social reality. Like electricity in action, the intangible that sparks energy, Gas & Electric Arts creates theatre that stimulates us to think again, to listen and to live more fully in the present moment. Our theatre combines corporeal, visual, vocal and spatial investigations. It 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, 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 which enable them to be instruments of passion, to be resonators of our time. VOICES UNDERWATER SURGE WORKSHOP 
Questions? Contact us at 215.413.7150 or info@theatrealliance.org.
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