In the helter-skelter of summer theater, the cool curatorial heads of the New Ohio's Ice Factory always provide a welcome breeze. Each production in the fest's 29th annual edition runs for a single week, but the Thursday performance of each show is live-streamed and remains viewable on demand until the end of the festival. See below for details about this year's shows.
July 6–9: Trash Body Monkey Fest
Jenn Pitt's tragic comedy, inspired by traditions of clown work and dance theater, uses a drunken group-suicide pact among Molière and his friends as the jumping-off point for a look at the riddles of life, death and humor. The piece was devised with its all-female cast.
July 13–16: The Weaver (part II) Paradigm
TÉA Artistry's devised piece, the second in its series of works about the nuances of racism, looks at the aftershocks of a heated outburst by a young hospital patient. Vieve Radha Price and Chuk Obasi are the director-creators; the script is by cast members Tara Amber and Nalini Sharma.
July 20–23: Isla
Hit the Lights! Theater Co.'s multimedia piece, inspired by the family history of cast member Samatha Blain, fuses documentary theater with magical realism, Cuban mythology and Miyazaki movies in telling the story of three sisters who escape from a war-scarred island and work to build new senses of home.
July 27–30: Acheron: The River of Tragedy
Aline Lemus Bernal and Cinthia Pérez Navarro perform a new work by Xavier Villanova that applies mythopoetic techniques to an exploration of the relationship between would-be immigrants and immigration agents at the Mexico–U.S. border. The show is performed in Spanish with English supertitles; Martin Balmaceda directs for XIPE Colectivo Escénico.
August 3–6: Body Through Which the Dream Flows
Writer and choreographer Soomi Kim draws on her own experience as a gymnastics coach in a dance-theater work that explores the state of the sport in the wake of the Larry Nassar sexual-abuse scandal. Kim, who shares direction credit with Meghan Finn, is joined onstage by a six-person ensemble of young gymnasts (who have collectively generated the piece's movement).
August 10–13: The Strange Case of Citizen De La Cruz
Luis H. Francia's political satire, set in the Philippines, explores radical nationalism as variously seen by politicians, milirary men, housewives, spies and faith healers. Claro de los Reyes and Robert Thaxton-Stevenson direct for Atlantic Pacific Theatre.
August 17–20: Salt
Soprano Aliana de la Guardia plays an elderly woman who reflects on her abusive marriage as she prepares a meal for her husband in Guerilla Opera's experimental musical monologue, created by librettist-director Deniz Khateri and composer–sound designer Bahar Royaee.
