‘Just Like Us’ uses a bilingual script to put immigration issues on stage

The cast of “Just Like Us” | Courtesy of Brenda Marie Moran

Recently, stories of immigration troubles dominate the news, including undocumented students and workers as well as people being removed from their homes and torn from their loved ones.

Starting Thursday, March 14, the story four latinx students — two of whom are undocumented — will come to the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts when Teatro Tercera Llamada and Looking for Lilith Theatre Co. present a co-production of Karen Zacarías’ “Just Like Us.” The play uses a bilingual script.

Insider spoke with Brenda Marie Moran, who plays one of those students, as well as Haydee Canovas, TTL producer and co-founder, and Kathi E.B. Ellis, director of this production and co-artistic director of Lilith.

Brenda Marie Moran

For Moran, “Just Like Us” is an extension of her work in Latinx rights.

“I think it’s another form of being an advocate, because you’re also telling the story of other people,” she says. “You’re not just lobbying or rallying, you’re telling a story through theater.”

Theater wasn’t Moran’s focus until recently. An international studies major at Northern Kentucky University, she’s minoring in Spanish, fine-tuning and understanding the language of her culture and her family. Her parents moved to Louisville from Hidalgo, Mexico, just before she was born.

For her minor, she had to take an acting class in Spanish, but she had no intention of being in plays at NKU.

“The professor for the Hispanic drama class and the director of the World Languages department, they reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, we’ve seen you act for your final (for Spanish drama), why don’t you audition?’” says Moran.

She was similarly recruited by Lilith and TTL.

“The director, Kathi Ellis, and Haydee Canovas, both of them went to see me at NKU and apparently that was my audition.”

Moran isn’t likely to change her major — in fact she graduates this year — but she wants to continue doing plays, especially those that speak to the issues facing the Latinx community.

“I want to make sure that all the plays I get into are some kind of specifically Latino play,” she says. “I found out about this play, and it has to do with my life — everything I’ve done, my upbringing, everything I’ve gone through. I guess as a Latina living in the United States, it does mean a lot to me.”

Haydee Canovas

Canovas stresses the importance of the social issues at play on stage and what it means for the Latinx community.

“You don’t realize how important this story is for us,” she says. “This play is based on real lives … It goes over all the dilemmas of the culture and what the culture values, their desires and how some of them are being labeled criminals because they lack documents.”

She also corrects what she believes is a common misconception about the legal status of undocumented immigrants.

“That’s not a criminal offense. It’s a civil offense,” Canovas says.

Social justice gets addressed on stage in “Just Like Us,” but an extra-textual social justice issue comes with the play. Lilith and TTL knew they wanted to tackle onstage representation for the Latinx community, as well as representation behind the scenes.

Ellis agrees that Lilith was very intentional in this partnership and how they interacted with the theatrical presentation of these issues.

Kathi E.B. Ellis

“It was important to Lilith in choosing to produce this script that we partner with artists who can help us to tell the story authentically,” the director says.

As individual artists, members of TTL, Louisville’s Spanish-speaking theater company, have worked with Lilith for several years. So there were prior relationships to help create an official connection.

In addition to concerns about authenticity, Canovas explains there are logistical reasons for the co-production as well.  

“This show is like a monster of a show because it has so many actors and so many characters … (and) Kathy is the mastermind,” she says. “I don’t know if you know this, but she is a mastermind. And she said, ‘What do you think if we do a co-production?’ I said, ‘Yeah, that’s a no-brainer.’”

The “monster” of a show includes actors who have to play multiple roles. That’s not too uncommon. What is a little more out of the ordinary is that those actors have to play characters in two different languages. All of the actors — half of whom are Latinx, half of whom are white — play characters who are Latinx and white in attempt to truly reinforce the themes of the play.

Whatever ethnicity we claim as our own, the people around us, the myriad of other ethnicities found in Americas citizenry, are just like us.

“Just Like Us” runs March 14-16, 18 and 21-23 at 7:30 p.m., and March 24 at 5:30 p.m. at the Kentucky Center. Tickets are $21 for general admission, or $16 for seniors, students and military. And on Monday, March 18, all ticket prices are $11. 

This post has been updated with the correct date for the $11 tickets.

Looking for Lilith’s ‘We. Are. Here.’ examines the here and now

The cast of “We. Are. Here.” | Photo by Holly Stone

This story has been updated with a new venue and times.

While they’ve produced many scripted plays in their 15 years of existence, the unapologetically feminist theater company Looking for Lilith may be better known for creating devised works, original pieces of theater based on interviews and research. The devised works always tackle an aspect of social justice, women’s history, lifting up unheard voices, or a some combination of the three.

This time, instead of examining a historic event like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire or feminism in the 1960s, they’re tackling what it’s like to be in America here and now.

“We. Are. Here.” looks at the endless stream of debate and invective in America, dealing with diverse topics — white privilege, immigration, anti-blackness — and the stereotypes, both positive and negative, are all put under the stage lights.

Kathi E.B. Ellis | Courtesy

Kathi E.B. Ellis, the production’s director, spoke with Insider, along with cast member Jo Volar, who also is an immigrant from Venezuela.

Ellis talked about the play’s conception.

“At a retreat … we were trying to wrap our head around the huge social currents that are happening in this country at the moment,” she said.

They decided to use the skills they’ve honed for 15 years and devise a play grappling with their questions and the issues of today’s America. They began by narrowing down the number of issues they wanted to address, and giving those issues a focus.

“For example, Jo’s character is part of our immigrant family, and that family started out with the stereotype of the ‘lazy immigrant.’ And, of course, that is anything but true, but it was a starting place,” said Ellis.

From that starting place, the devising team asked questions like: Why does that stereotype exist? What do the people who believe that stereotype do and say? How do people who are the targets of these stereotypes refute those negative images?

Volar, who didn’t become interested in acting until she lived in Louisville, is in America legally, but she plays Isabelle, one of the so-called “Dreamers,” so she had to work to understand Isabelle’s plight. As a native Spanish speaker, Volar also had to do that work in a second language.

“It has been playing  a lot with my own brain, my own accent, with my ability to communicate in another language … it has been amazing also to connect with,” she said. “These stories might be different from mine, but they belong to the Latino community, something so real, from this moment in this country.”

Though Isabelle is very integrated into American society, she still struggles against stereotypes and the pervasiveness of white privilege.

Battling stereotypes in the white community isn’t the only difficulty Isabelle faces.

“Isabelle is a teenager, and she is in love with her boyfriend, who is black, which is a problem to a certain group in her family,” explained Volar. “And there’s a weird disparity right there that she has with her family. At the same time, she is defending the Latino culture, she’s defending the black culture, she’s defending her boyfriend, she’s defending her mom — everybody. She’s trying to get the right representation, because she knows the truth behind all these ignorant comments.”

There is a struggle within Isabelle, too, as she feels pressure to be an advocate and model for the entire Latino community.

“She also encourages her mother to prepare herself and be ready to confront situations like that, like ignorance, bigotry, in different common spaces in life,” Volar said.

In the devising process, as all the characters were interacting with strangers and strange ideas, Lilith’s devisers started to look to another hot-button topic: social media.

Ellis talked about how the play addresses the effects of social media and the pervasiveness of cell phones.

“We filter some of the hot-button issues and events that get a knee-jerk reaction through characters engaging with social media, so it has become a theatrical convention to have cell phones present throughout the piece, and there are sequences that overtly embrace how we receive information from social media,” said Ellis.

The onstage social media helps “We. Are. Here.” engage with a variety of topics, just like people who come across diverse topics on Facebook every day.

“(‘We. Are. Here.’) is not one theme or story, it’s completely across the board, and in terms of the way Lilith works, I don’t remember another play that has had this much presentness about it,” said Ellis.

“We. Are. Here.” runs from June 18 to 24 at Bellarmine University’s Black Box Theater. Tickets are $21, or $16 for students. 

(The play was originally supposed to be held at the Kentucky Center, but due to Wednesday’s fire, it has been relocated.)

Looking for Lilith’s ‘Patron Saint of Losing Sleep’ is a prescient meditation on consent

Trina Fischer and Ke’Leb Beauchamp in “The Patron Saint of Losing Sleep” | Photo by Holly Stone

Looking for Lilith Theatre Company’s latest is a production of Louisville playwright Diana Grisanti’s surreal meditation on insomnia and consent, titled “The Patron Saint of Losing Sleep.”

This play took its time coming to a local stage, first stopping in New York, Charlotte, Pennsylvania and Nashville. All told, we had to wait about five years, but a quick read of the script proves it was worth the wait.

Diana Grisanti | Photo by Bralyn Stokes

Insider caught up with Grisanti about the play, its origins and what it says about social and economic justice — as well as consent.

“I wanted to explore my worst impulses dramatically,” says Grisanti. “You know, I try to be a good ally, and I feel like sometimes I’m so empathetic that I stop being helpful and start getting in the way.”

Grisanti’s personification of her impulses is Ada, the main character in “Patron Saint.” Ada is a call-center employee who drifts in and out of reality, and backward in her memory, as she struggles with insomnia. It’s a setup that allows Ada to do some deep thinking, while Grisanti keeps the action moving.

But Grisanti didn’t start out with a call center, or even Ada.

“I wrote some bad pages during the season I sojourned in L.A.,” she explains. “I think the initial premise was, like, a woman who had moved into an apartment in which someone died. That was the starting point, but that had nothing to do with anything. But the character was born in those random pages.”

Later, in 2013, Grisanti wrote the first full draft of the play, and its themes and ideas started to emerge.

“I started thinking about this weird temp job I had the summer after grad school,” she says.

In that job, where she took complaint calls for a large property management company, she saw the ugly side of the business.

“They were all residential properties. People call in with their complaints about apartments, and I had to write down their complaints,” she says. “As one of my co-workers put it, ‘Our job is to let the customers vent until they get over it’ …. Then nothing would be done, ever. It was deeply messed up.” 

That job led to situations where people really needed help, but Grisanti, and now Ada, couldn’t help those people through normal channels.

Sean Childress and Laura Ellis | Photo by Holly Stone

While one thread of the story in “Patron Saint” follows Ada in the call center, another follows a student at divinity school and a situation that is again loosely based in Grisanti’s life.

“It’s from my grad school, based on a kind of ‘#MeToo’ moment before ‘#MeToo’ was popularized,” she says.

In examining the broader arc of Ada’s actions — at best ineffective and at worse creating problems for those she seeks to help — Grisanti offers a pretty intense observation about allyship and social justice.

“These institutions are so large and intractable, as individuals we’re trying whatever we can to make change, to make things better, but we can’t make change on our own,” she says. “We have to build coalitions, which is harder and takes time, especially in the face of these large intractable institutions.”

Ebony Jordan and Trina Fischer | Photo by Holly Stone

Despite being four years old, the play explores today’s hot-button issues surrounding consent. When is consent not consent? People are talking about consent that is coerced in an uneven power dynamic, or only given when people didn’t feel they could safely say no.

“It’s amazing that phrases like ‘micro aggression’ and ‘uneven power dynamic’ and ‘systems of oppression’ — all the phrases that are so common in social justice circles — are starting to become common parlance,” says Grisanti. “To me, it’s important to explore these. As #MeToo has shown us, and as we knew already anyway, every woman has experienced either harassment or assault, or something in that spectrum. Multiple times, probably.”

Dramatically, that means an exploration full of unspoken threats, emotionally charged gaslighting and institutional silencing of voices who speak out of turn. It works as a discussion of the issues, but it also creates the sort of slow-burn action that inhabits many of the best plays of the modern era.

Grisanti hasn’t been an active part of the rehearsal process for Looking for Lilith’s production, but she’s anxious to see the show.

“I’m actually really curious to see how the play plays in this post-#MeToo world we’re living in,” she says. “I’m interested to see how audiences react.”

“The Patron Saint of Losing Sleep” runs from March 15-24 at the Kentucky Center’s MeX Theater, 501 W. Main St. Tickets are $21. Grisanti will be doing a post-show talkback after the 2 p.m. matinee on Saturday, March 24.

Looking for Lilith learns to look inward, with help from a grant and ‘Carefully Taught’

Ebony Nolana Jordan and Jennifer Thalman Kepler in “Carefully Taught” | Photo by Holly Stone

This weekend, Looking for Lilith Theatre Co. opens “Carefully Taught,” a production that hopes to introduce Louisville to a new mission Lilith has began working on: turning inward with their focused passion for forwarding social justice and evaluating their own white privilege.

Insider spoke with Lilith’s Jennifer Thalman Kepler, Kathi E. B. Ellis and Ebony Nolana Jordan to discuss the impetus and intentions of that mission.

“Back in 2015 when the Charleston shooting happened, we really became more intentional about addressing the issue of race and gender,” said Jordan.

The nine people murdered in a racially motivated mass shooting at the historic black church Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal included several of women. In revelations from his journal and statements made after the shooting, Dylan Roof claimed that among other motivations, he wished to protect white women.

Phil Lynch and Jay Padilla | Photo by Holly Stone

It struck a chord for Lilith members, who recognize that white feminism and women’s rights in history has frequently come without thought to women of color.

“Lilith has always striven to work in an intersectional way, and we had looked at racial issues before in various ways, but we hadn’t plunged into that intersection as intentionally as other issues,” Jordan said.

Focusing on those intersections is known as intersectional feminism, and it’s a hot-button topic among activists all over the social justice spectrum. After discussion and some introspection, Lilith’s members decided to do a deep dive into their own culture. After all, they reasoned, change needs to come within as well as without.

“We need to not only look at this as a societal issue, we need to recognize how we ourselves, as individual artists and an organization, are working within a system that is steeped in patriarchy and white supremacy,” said Kepler.

Lilith applied for a grant from from Alternate Roots, an organization that helps support and deepen the social justice works of other grassroots initiatives.

After applying for grants last fall, the company finally got word that they would receive funding to help them in the new direction for their mission. Their work will help strengthen relationships in communities and focus on continued internal examination.

Kathi E.B. Ellis

At the same time Lilith became interested in introspection, they also were planning their season schedule, and Co-Artistic Director Ellis was looking at the script for “Carefully Taught,” written by Cheryl Davis.

Looking for Lilith celebrates 15 years with ambitious theater festival

Looking for Lilith will remount its first show, “Crossing Mountains.” | Courtesy of Looking for Lilith

Over a decade and a half ago, Shannon Woolley Allison, co-founder and one of the current heads of Looking for Lilith Theatre Company, was in a position familiar to most women actors: She was playing a crap role in a play written by men, starring men, directed by men. It was pretty unfulfilling.

From that moment of frustration came the formation of Looking for Lilith, an unabashedly feminist-forward, social-justice focused, community-oriented theater company that turns 15 this year.

To celebrate, Allison — along with the other co-founders, current company heads, company members and a host of other collaborators — are throwing “UNHEARD [outloud],” an ambitious and exciting theater festival featuring six plays as well as script readings and workshops from July 13-23.

Shannon Woolley Allison | Courtesy of Looking for Lilith

Insider caught up with Allison about some of the highlights Louisville can expect.

The fully produced shows are split between Lilith-led production, and shows brought in by community partners, including Pandora Productions, the newly formed Resonant Light Theater Project, and guest artist Adanma Onyedike Barton.

Lilith’s “Crossing Mountains” is actually a remount of its first show, but the other two productions Lilith is mounting are original creations.

“I’m Wearing My Own Clothes!” — a play the company commissioned and is written by local playwright and frequent Lilith collaborator Nancy Gall-Clayton — is about Dr. Mary Walker, who saved lives on the battlefields of the Civil War while also fighting the assumption that she shouldn’t be on those battlefields.

“One of the things she did to facilitate being able to treat men on the field of battle was, of course, she wore pants, because that was more practical,” says Allison. “And she was often accused of wearing her husband’s clothes, hence the title.’”

The production, like many of Lilith’s show over the years, sheds light on an unheard voice or perspective from history.

“Dr Mary Walker is someone … unless you’re a deep Civil War scholar or a deep women’s history scholar, you’re not gonna know much about her,” says Allison.

She also points out that the Civil War is an era in our collective history that is generally told from the point of view of the men involved.

“When you think of the women involved in the Civil War, you think of Scarlett O’Hara,” she says.

“Defining Identity” came from a 10-minute play.

The second new production from Lilith, “Defining Infinity,” is an expansion of a 10-minute play.

“Trina (Fischer, another Lilith co-founder) actually started working on this project about 25 years ago as an undergrad, and it started as a 10-minute piece, based on interviews of people who identify as bisexual,” explains Allison.

At the time, and even now, the LGBTQ community sometimes had problems including bisexual voices and other folks who weren’t in an easily definable place on the spectrum of sexuality. Since then, the issue has become even more complex as the community struggles to address and include an array of sexualities and gender identities.

“We talked with a lot of trans folk, people who identify as non-binary and people who identify as queer in all of the many manifestations of what that can be,” says Allison. “The spectrum can continually be divided and sub-divided into tiny little fractions of light.”

The productions from guest artists broach other topics — some political, some personal.

“Look Me in the Eye” is devised by the newly formed Resonant Light Theatre Project and uses monologue and sketch comedy to address sexism, consent and interpersonal relationships.

Adanma Onyedike Barton presents “Lost and Found.” | Courtesy of Adanma Onyedike Barton

Guest artist Barton presents a one-person show, “Lost and Found,” that lifts up the voice and story of a woman who has suffered multiple miscarriages — a conversation and viewpoint with which people still struggle.

And finally, Pandora Productions’ cabaret “Still I Rise!” is an exploration of the women composers of Broadway.

For a company as involved in outreach and community work, the workshops and staged readings are just as important as the fully produced shows. One of those workshops is an exploration of the techniques of Theatre of the Oppressed, a political theater movement started in Brazil in the 1970s led by organizer and activist Augusto Boal.

It’s a technique Lilith uses in a variety of projects, including its trips to Guatemala to work with women’s groups there.

“One of the principles of that is generosity of pedagogy,” says Allison. “It’s not a pedagogy that any one person owns; it is meant to be shared, and we believe really strongly that theater is a means for revolution and that theater is a means for rehearsing for life.”

Devising tools is another skillset Lilith will be offering to the community.

“Devised theater” is a term that can get thrown around a lot, but some of the more casual theater-goers aren’t familiar with the process. Basically, instead of starting with a script and then hiring actors and a director, devised theater starts with a bunch of artists in a room and a basic idea. From there, the actors and director — and anyone else involved — create a script.

But it requires concrete and useable tools to help the devisors.

“We’re one of the few companies (in Louisville) that produces primarily devised work,” says Allison. “We’ve got 15 years experience in developing skills and structures for doing that, and we’re eager to share them.”

Other “UNHEARD [outloud]” offerings include workshops on gender, racial justice, theater for middle-school girls, and staged readings from other local playwrights who are still fine-tuning their plays.

The festival promises to be a jam packed 10 days of theater, social justice and community organizing.

For a complete schedule of “Unheard [outloud]” and prices for tickets and ticket packages, visit Lilith’s website. All performances, workshops and readings will be held at the Clifton Center, 2117 Payne St.

Looking for Lilith opens anniversary season with ‘Legacy of Light’

Some of the cast of “Legacy of Light” | Courtesy of Looking for Lilith

Looking for Lilith opens its 15th anniversary season on Thursday, Oct. 27, with Karen Zacarías‘ “Legacy of Light.” The play follows two women scientists, separated by centuries, who struggle to understand the universe, and in doing so illuminate the human condition.

Insider caught up with director Kathi E.B. Ellis and company founder and actor Shannon Woolley Allison. They talked about the production, how the play serves Lilith’s mission, and some of the tools they’ve used to stay together for 15 years.

Kathi E.B. Ellis

Ellis originally brought “Legacy of Light” to Lilith’s attention after viewing a previous production.

“I thought it was absolutely a Lilithian piece,” she says. “It lifts up the story of a pretty phenomenal woman scientist whose story got lost for almost two centuries, and it has a parallel story in the present, and deals with life and love and science and relationships.”

That scientist is Émilie du Châtelet, who advanced Newtonian physics in the 1800s, predicted the existence of infrared light, paved the way for Einstein, and did most of her work in secret because women weren’t allowed to practice science in France at the time. She, incidentally, was Voltaire’s mistress, which is not as important as the science stuff, but he does show up as her love interest in the play.

Lifting up the names and voices of lost women in history is integral to Looking for Lilith. Not only is it in their mission statement, it’s in their name.

“I came up with the name of the company before I founded the company actually,” says Woolley Allison. She learned the story of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, and became fascinated with the idea that this proto mythical figure had been either removed or demonized from Judaeo Christian religion due to her insistence that she be Adam’s equal.

So a play about a scientist whose name is mostly forgotten, despite her huge contributions to the modern world, is perfect.

Woolley Allison was quick to mention “Legacy of Light” doesn’t just lift up the name of historical ladies of science. “It’s not just Émilie du Châtelet who’s lost in the sauce, female scientists in 2016 are also consistently lost,” she says.

The cast in rehearsal | Courtesy of Looking for Lilith

Woolley Allison plays modern-day scientist Olivia Browning. She’s not the only Lilith founder to appear in the play, she’s joined by founder Trina Fischer, as well as company member Karole Spangler and three additional actors. Lilith functions as an ensemble company, which means they have a number of actors who commit to appearing on stage and taking on other roles off stage in service of producing a season of theater.

Ellis spoke to the method Lilith uses to assigns roles.

“As we set our season, it’s really important for us … to reach out to our company members and say, ‘How many shows can you do this year? In a perfect world, what role — and I don’t just mean on stage — what role do you see yourself being involved?’” says Ellis.

She’s pleased “Legacy of Light” includes so many members of the ensemble. “It’s a tremendous way to start our anniversary season, to work with almost everybody in some aspect on stage or off stage.”

Woolley Allison gushed about the script, and not just because of its historical elements.

“(Playwright Zacarías) takes a concept that is traditionally thought of as ‘male,’ the lifting up of rational thought, and a concept that is traditionally female, which is the lifting up of magical storytelling, and marries them really beautifully,” she says.

Ellis also mentioned the parallel structure of the script.

“We have the two dynamic stories that happen two-and-half centuries apart, (but) what has become increasingly apparent is the skill with which Zacarías has embedded elements from each story in each time period,” she says, noting as the rehearsal process moved forward, her understanding of those parallels deepened. “There have been many sort of ‘A-ha’ moments in rehearsal, where all of us have sort of locked into that echo, that resonance.”

Zacarías’ structure also brings some science to the script. “The way in which she does it brilliantly suggests some of the science, the numbers, the math that Émilie figured out back in the 18th century,” says Ellis. “The way the playwright has dropped all that in reflects the big ideas Émilie brought to (Newtonian physics) and eventually led to Einstein’s view of the universe.”

“Legacy of Light” reflects the way people — artists, scientists, mathematicians — are all seeking to do the same thing: understand the universe and our place in it.

Looking for Lilith presents “Legacy of Light” Oct. 27-29 and 31, and Nov. 3-5 at 7:30 p.m. There is also a 2 p.m. matinee on Nov. 5. Tickets are $20. All performances are at The Henry Clay, 604 S. Third St.

Looking for Lilith offers a glimpse into the once vibrant Shaker community

Shannon Woolley Allison, Kelsey Thompson and Trina Fischer in “As It is in Heaven” | Photo courtesy of Looking for Lilith

The Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill doesn’t have any Shakers anymore, but for a brief moment, their vibrant community lives again as Looking for Lilith Theatre Company presents Arlene Hutton’s “As It Is in Heaven.”

Directed by Lilith company member Kathi E.B. Ellis, this production features an excellent nine-woman ensemble. The somewhat staid subject matter doesn’t make for edge-of-your-seat action, but there is a lot going on in this play if audience members are willing to slow down a moment, step away from their Facebook and let their minds travel back to the pre-digital age.

Lilith generally focuses on work that addresses women’s issues — and there are plenty of those explored here — but the play asks questions about faith and social hierarchy that apply to any human who has ever believed. Or doubted.

The action revolves around the daily lives of nine Shaker women. We see them working, singing, praying and, occasionally, even gossiping. Life is stable and work is good.

Things get shaken up as some younger women and newcomers in the community have difficulty adapting to Shaker life. And they get really complicated when one of the young women, Fanny (Kelsey Thompson), begins seeing visions of angels. Thompson plays Fanny’s ecstatic visions with just the right combination of beauty and awkwardness. They securely anchor the intense moments of the play.

Fanny’s visions drive the plot, but the stage time is divvied up nearly equally between the nine actors, with a focus on the youngest residents: Fanny, Izzy (Olivia Thompson) and Polly (Jane Embry Watts). This is a blessing and a curse. Everyone gets great character moments and there is some lovely singing, but there are few fleshed-out character arcs.

Shannon Woolley Allison, Trina Fischer and Kelsey Thompson | Photo courtesy of Looking for Lilith

The stage is sparsely set — four benches are used to form various pieces of furniture. The actors are all on stage the entire time. Instead of using props, the ensemble gets to show off some serious mime skills.

Director Ellis wisely keeps the focus on the actors. While the flashiest mystery is the appearance of these angels, the playwright gives equal weight to the smaller mysteries of human joy, interaction and the ever complicated generation gap. The ensemble beautifully embodies the everyday struggles of these women.

While the attention to smaller interpersonal interaction often slows the play down, it gives a tremendous weight to even the slightest moment of human connection or betrayal. It is a refreshing change from so much of our current media that seems like all explosions all the time.

“As It Is in Heaven” doesn’t feel the need to give audiences pat answers about faith or friendship. It doesn’t judge, it presents. Ellis’ director’s notes explain that Lilith chose this play to “lift up unheard voices.” They have succeeded and given Louisvillians a beautiful glimpse of an all but dead society.

“As It Is in Heaven” runs March 2 and 5-7 at 7:30 p.m., with an additional matinee at 2 p.m. on March 7, at Bellarmine University’s Black Box Theatre, 2001 Newburg Road. Tickets are $18 ($15 for students and seniors). The March 2 performance is a “community night,” and all tickets are $10. For more information, check here or call 638-2559.