Ten Years in the Ice Factory

Over the past 10 years, July’s downtown theater scene has gotten a lot cooler, thanks to the Ice Factory festival. “The original idea was to give an opportunity to develop work,” says Robert Lyons, Ice Factory founder and artistic director of the Soho Think Tank. “Part of the philosophy of the festival was to keep it small and simple.”

That philosophy hasn’t changed much, which suits Lyons just fine. “We’re a very small organization here,” he says. “By keeping it simple, we also keep ourselves sane.” The festival, which presents six shows over the course of six weeks, recently received an Obie Award in recognition of its achievements. The 10th anniversary celebration features new works by a mixture of prominent and up-and-coming theater artists including Emma Griffin, Jeremy Dobrish, Lenora Champagne, and David Greenspan.

“I’m honored to be part of that lineup,” says Griffin, artistic director of Salt Theater. The company’s entry in the festival is a workshop production of Charles Ludlam’s Conquest of the Universe, directed by Griffin. “It’s a really angry play,” she says in describing this reimagining of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. “For some reason, that feels really appropriate now. The things that it’s angry about — which are deeply related to issues of war and power — just hit home with me.”

Griffin was not yet born when Ludlam first presented the play with his Ridiculous Theatrical Company in 1967. Although she’s done her research, she feels that it’s impossible for her to be “true” to some kind of Ridiculous Theatrical aesthetic. “All I can do is do the play with the people I think are interesting in a way that I think is theatrical,” she states. “The way that we are approaching Conquest — and what you’d have to do with any of Ludlam’s early plays — is that it’s less of a play and more of a strong blueprint for performance. I think the man was a genius, a total American genius, completely underappreciated. His plays have a sense of frivolity and theatricality that’s really refreshing; they’re full of joy and anarchy and insanity.”

Like Griffin, Adobe Theater Company’s Jeremy Dobrish is also using the Ice Factory to develop new work. “This play is a big departure from other Adobe plays,” he says of Deception, which he is writing and directing as part of the festival. “Most Adobe plays are very funny, very wacky, very zany, and they’re not necessarily about real people.” In contrast, Deception is based upon a true story. “It happened in France,” says Dobrish. “A man basically lied about every detail of his life to everybody, and when those lies unraveled, he killed his wife and children and parents. I was fascinated by this notion — how one strand of a lie becomes part of an intricate web, and when that starts to unravel, what do you do?” As far as Dobrish is concerned, “The Ice Factory offers the perfect opportunity to put something up for a few nights. Adobe regulars might rebel against it and say, ‘Hey, I don’t come to an Adobe show looking for this!’ Or they might say, ‘Good for you for trying something really different.’ Obviously, I’m hoping for the latter.”

The chance to workshop new and potentially challenging material is one of the things that make the Ice Factory so highly valued among theater artists. Each show gets an entire week in the theater for the load-in, several days of tech, and four performances. “That schedule is luxurious as far as festivals go,” notes Lyons. “Some just grind them out: ‘Here’s a lot of work.’ This was always more like, ‘Here’s a big chunk of resource.’ We wanted to create an environment that would be most conducive for artists to develop work.”

Lyons himself is participating in this 10th anniversary celebration by directing Lenora Champagne in her new show, Mother’s Little Helper. “I’ve directed four or five of her pieces, so I have a very long-standing creative relationship with her,” he says. “What I like about this piece is what I like about all her work: There’s this kind of lyrical structure. It’s non-linear, evocative, and rich. It’s very funny, but there’s a darkness that runs through the imagery.” The piece focuses on a former Cajun-American princess struggling to raise her daughter in a post-9/11 world. In Lyons’s view, “[Champagne] is very successful at moving from the big world to the small, from global events to more familial relationships, and finding the way that these things are connected.”

David Greenspan’s contribution to the festival is The Myopia. “I started this play, if you can believe it, in the Reagan-Bush era,” says the writer-performer. “There was so much opposition to the arts and such a recalcitrant, regressive, political environment. Not unlike the one we’re in right now.” Described as “an epic burlesque of tragic proportions,” the solo work is about a man writing a play about his father…who is writing a musical about President Warren G. Harding…which is being re-written by the son to feature his grandmother, his mother, 16 U.S. senators, and Carol Channing.

As with many of Greenspan’s works, including his recent Off-Broadway play She Stoops to Comedy, there’s a kind of self-referential layered effect within The Myopia. “If I just did the plotline, it wouldn’t take long,” says Greenspan. “It’s only about four scenes. But the tangents and divertissements take up a big part of the play. For example, there’s a long digression in which the process of writing the piece and cutting it and discarding huge sections is alluded to in a kind of coy manner.”

Greenspan performs the entire two-hour piece sitting in a chair. “It’s mostly changes in my voice, changes in focus that help delineate the characters,” he says. “The stage directions are used as a narrative storytelling device. I thought it would be interesting simply to let the audience imagine — to see it in their minds without having me show it on stage.”

In addition to the works described above, this year’s festival includes a New Vaudeville piece called Flop by the Philadelphia-based Pig Iron Theatre and another piece called Hatched by the Montreal-based Sabooge Theatre. Lyons states that there is seldom any attempt to make Ice Factory shows fit some imposed thematic. “For people who see one or two or four of the shows, there’s very little in common in terms of style or material,” he remarks. “We pride ourselves in how eclectic the work is.”

Asked about future plans for the Ice Factory, Lyons replies that the organizers plan to keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing for the past 10 years. “We’ve had people approach us and say, ‘Well, you can do a late-night show,’ or some such. And we could, but this is enough. We want to keep doing the same thing, which is trying to keep the festival oriented towards the artists who are developing the work.”