By Robby Osborne
Birds fly through Metropolis in the year 2050, Lex Luthor is at it again, and it’s plane to see that only Superman can stop him. The Alden Theater brings this fight is to the extraordinarily-small stage for one night: March 22 at 8 p.m. Theater UnSpeakable’s seven actors will perform every character, create every prop, sound effect, and every setting while balancing on a three-by-seven-foot stage.
From the beginning of the play, it’ll be obvious to the audience that this show is not about Superman derailing Luthor’s dastardly scheme. The purpose of this play is to create a complete world, using only seven actors and a 21-square-foot platform. These actors work together in imaginative, and often inspiring, ways to deliver a complete tale of Superman.
Theater UnSpeakable debuted in 2010 with a goal to create new ways to perform and enhance physical theater. Following its creation, founder Marc Frost gathered a group together to produce the company’s first innovative play, “Superman 2050,” which has since finished a successful run at Second City in Chicago and Theater New York’s Times Square International Theater Festival in 2012.
“Many theater teachers and directors speak of the need to make the ‘invisible visible’ on stage,” wrote Frost in Theater Unspeakable’s mission statement, “Theater Unspeakable would like to extend this vision by saying, let’s make the ‘inaudible audible.’ And, more than that, the ‘impossible possible.'”
TheaterUnspeakable Superman2050 from SeeChicagoDance on Vimeo.
The Robert Ames Alden Theatre McLean Community Center
March 22, 8 p.m.; $20/$15 for McLean district residents
1234 Ingleside Avenue, McLean 22101
www.aldentheatre.org, 703-790-0123
