Gas & Electric Arts continues its 2007-2008 season with the East Coast premiere of O Yes I Will (I will remember the spirit and texture of this conversation), a new play by Kesselring and Obie-award winning playwright Deb Margolin.

With O Yes I Will, Margolin gives a public voice to the oft silent and singular experience of a woman in love with her life who is amazed to learn that just prior to going under for surgery, she talked and talked and talked for 12 straight minutes without stopping. This unmediated aria performed before a bunch of men in scrubs with knives was known to them but unknown to her. Was it love she talked about? Politics? Sex? Conspiracy theory? Evasion? Ontology? Requests for a ménage à trois, quatre or cinq? What kinds of things do you say when your body and mind are engaged but not married? This comic tour-de-force is a kind of Scherezade for the surgery-bound, and offers five radically different possibilities of what she might have said outside the realm of conscious volition. The main character irresistibly invites the audience to imagine what it must be like to live in her body facing the unknown. When we dive in, we can’t help but inhabit her perspective and morality, her humor and desires, her fears and pleasures, her willingness to step into the fire of her deepest emotions and impulses, including her urgency to recapture the impossible. When we dive in, we are lead to ponder things that normally might have passed us by: the beauty yet fleetingness of time; what is extraordinary in the ordinary; the need to bear witness actively with compassion to others’ struggles; what is language anyway and what is its relationship to our bodies.

Directed by Lisa Jo Epstein, O Yes I Will is to be performed by Michelle Horman with Joseph Ritsch, February 29 – March 16 at the Playground at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom Street. Tickets are $15-$20. For info and tickets visit www.gasandelectricarts.org or call 215.407.06556. See schedule for dates and times.

Margolin’s “speciality is celebrating the bizarre and the glorious in the unexpected corners of everyday life…She reminds us that the world is rife with enough pleasures, oddities, and mysteries to keep us all thinking and marveling in perpetuity.” – Theater Week

Deb Margolin’s plays put the “liveness” back in live performance and make us want to live more fully than we ever have. In her plays, Margolin mingles deep, profound humor that makes one cry with laughter. As she affectively places us inside the character’s experience that she is living in that moment--in whatever unlikely place they may be—she enlivens our senses, our desire to live passionately, and our sense of community and connectedness. Margolin allows desire to lead her, and thus leads us back to our own creative potential inherent in our desires, the pressing need to hold onto imagination in our lives, and the indomitable human spirit in the face of adversity. Lynda Hart once wrote that “Margolin’s special blend of comedy and sublimity of the everyday creates performances that are at once easily within one’s grasp yet somehow just enough beyond it to repeat the seduction.” And so it is with O Yes I Will, regardless of--and precisely because of-- where we find ourselves.

Director Lisa Jo Epstein was drawn to this play because of the way in which Margolin situates us inside the exquisiteness and terrifying danger of being on the edge of life, thus leaving audiences with renewed vigor and passion for life, with a sense of awakening to the beauty, vitality and sense of the extraordinary in our everyday experiences.

Margolin says that “O Yes I Will concerns the deepest meditation I have written to date on the body and its many mortalities, on the ultimate, beautiful, poetic, complete failure of language to stop us from suffering or dying or even understanding each other in love and on they ways in which, ultimately, there are some senses in which the body has a far greater immortality than the word, written, spoken or bethought.”

Gas & Electric Arts will be the first theater to produce O Yes I Will since Margolin premiered the piece herself this past September at Dixon Place in New York. Normally, Margolin writes and performs her own full-length solo plays; however, after a decade of working with artistic director Lisa Jo Epstein in a variety of capacities, she has granted Gas & Electric Arts permission to mount O Yes I Will. Their professional collaborations began when Margolin was the Zale Writer-in-Residence at Tulane University where Epstein was a professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance. For that occasion-- and subsequently in different cities, from Toronto for the Ashkenaz Festival of Yiddish Culture, to most recently in Philadelphia at the Painted Bride—Epstein directed Margolin’s remount of her solo play entitled O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms to great acclaim.

Deb Margolin is a playwright, performance artist and founding member of Split Britches Theater Company, She is the author of nine full-length solo performance pieces, which she has toured throughout the United States, and is the recipient of a 1999-2000 OBIE Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance. In February of 2001, PS122 presented Deb's play Three Seconds in the Key, a meditation on illness, love and basketball, which was given a workshop production in November of 2001 at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, and was premiered under the auspices of New Georges at Baruch Performing Arts Center in April of 2004. Deb has lectured extensively at universities throughout the country, has been artist in residence at Hampshire College and University of Hawaii and Zale writer-in-residence at Tulane University, and is currently an Associate Professor of Playwriting and Performance in Yale University's Theater Studies Program. Her TV credits include stints on Comedy Central, MTV and HBO Downtown. In 2007 she traveled on a Fulbright Senior Specialist grant to University of Tel Aviv to present her play Critical Mass, in a Hebrew translation, with faculty and students at the University of Tel Aviv as part of a Beckett Centennial festival. A book of Deb's performance pieces and plays, entitled Of All The Nerve: Deb Margolin SOLO, was published in 1999 by Cassell/Continuum Press; the collection was a recent nominee/finalist for the LAMBDA literary award in Drama. Deb was awarded the 2005 Richard H. Brodhead Prize for Teaching Excellence at Yale University, and the 2005 Kesselring Playwriting Prize.

Gas & Electric Arts creates performances, educational programs and community events that respond to the currents of our time and in doing so, engage the hearts, senses and imagination of those who experience our work. We support storytelling at its best: visually engaging, intellectually nourishing, and which shed light on our humanity. We are called Gas & Electric Arts because we believe that theatre should be an essential part of a community's life, an accessible, vital utility that ignites introspection even as it generates dynamic dialogue around who we are and what we desire.

Gas & Electric Arts was founded in 2005 by Lisa Jo Epstein and David J. Brown. Past productions have included Anna Bella Eema (2005) and Voices Underwater (2006) and Quick Silver (2007). Our purpose is to lead audiences to experiences that shimmer with theatricality and shiver with social reality. In our work, we are committed to corporeal, visual, vocal and spatial investigations. Our art exists at the intersection of a spectrum of theatrical forms--from highly disciplined, dynamic physical work and ensemble creation to the joy of stage clowning, puppeteering and invigorating vocal exploration. This type of theatre leaves quotidian expression behind as the actors devise vivid, extra-ordinary forms for their bodies so they can become instruments of passion, resonators of our time. Like electricity in action, the intangible that sparks energy, Gas & Electric Arts creates theatre that stimulates us to think again, to live more fully in the present moment, and to never forget the power of our five senses.

Lisa Jo Epstein (Director) is a theatre director, educator and community-based artist who returned home to Philadelphia four years ago having left in 1984 in search of dynamic theatrical forms. Her foray in to physical theatre began in Minneapolis at Theatre de la Jeune Lune. She continued her explorations in physical and intercultural theatre and socially-engaged theatre practices at the University of Texas at Austin where she obtained a Master's and Ph.D. She then moved to Paris France where she served as Ariane Mnouchkine's assistant during the Théâtre du Soleil's creation of Molière's Tartuffe. While in Paris, she also worked at Augusto Boal's Center for the Theatre of the Oppressed. Upon returning to the US, Lisa Jo became an Assistant Professor of Theatre in the Department of Theatre & Dance at Tulane University for seven years where she won awards for teaching and directing, both inside the university and in the community. In Austin, Paris and New Orleans, Lisa Jo created and facilitated countless interactive, experiential theatre workshops with a variety of populations around issues of identity and empowerment, community and social justice. She also specializes in shepherding original solo performances to the stage. Recent productions include: Quick Silver (East Coast premiere, Kira Obolenski), Voices Underwater (premiere, Abi Basch) and Anna Bella Eema (Philadelphia Premiere, Lisa d'Amour) for Gas & Electric Arts, Everlasting Father: A Religious Fantasy (premiere, Hannah Harvester) at Swarthmore College; O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms (remount, Deb Margolin) at the Painted Bride Art Center; What the Moon Saw; or, I Only Appear to be Dead (Stephanie Fleischmann), The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek (Naomi Wallace) and The Love of the Nightingale (Timberlake Wertenbaker) at Ursinus College; Spinning into Butter (Rebecca Gilman) Southern Repertory Theatre, New Orleans.

Michelle Horman has appeared in Philadelphia most recently in the Wilma Theater’s production of Amadeus. Other credits include Inherit the Wind (Peterborough Players, NH), King Lear and The Winter’s Tale (Theatre of the Seventh Sister, Lancaster, PA), A Hotel on Marvin Gardens (Hedgerow Theatre, Media, PA), Vagina Monologues (City Theater Company, Wilmington, DE), and Reckless (Theatre Outlet, Allentown, PA). In addition to studying acting at the Actor's Studio Drama School, Michelle holds degrees in Vocal Performance and Speech Language Pathology. She is a licensed voice therapist and is currently training to become certified in Fitzmaurice Voicework.

Joseph Ritsch is a recent transplant to Philadelphia from New York City. He holds a BA in Theater & Dance from The School of Performing Arts at The University of Maine, and did his graduate studies in acting at the Professional Program at Playwright's Horizons in NYC. Directly after graduating from Playwright's, Joseph became a principal ensemble member with Jane Comfort and Company, one of the movement theater world's premier companies. With Jane and the company he has performed in multiple productions at The Joyce Theater (NYC), The Joyce Downtown (NYC), Dance Theater Workshop (NYC), Judson Church (NYC), The 92nd Street Playhouse, and PS 122 (NYC), as well as on two national tours and a tour to Paris, France. Joseph is also a director and choreographer as well as an arts educator who has taught on the middle school, high school and university level. He also the creator/executor of Sunrize Highway, an original character which lovingly spoofs the grand dames of Vegas and Broadway. Sunrize's one "woman" musical extravaganzas have played to stellar reviews across the country as well as in Mexico and Canada.