SWEAT-Inspired THIS IS READING Installation Will Occupy Franklin Street Railroad Station

Starting this May, This Is Reading, an ambitious site-specific multimedia installation blending live performance and visual media, will occupy the historic Franklin Street Railroad Station in Downtown Reading, re-animating the long vacant building. Using as its foundation the hardships, challenges, and triumphs of people living in and around Reading, Pa., This is Reading will weave their individual stories into one cohesive and compelling tale of the city. The project is inspired by the relationship Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage forged with the people of Reading while researching her critically-acclaimed play Sweat, which is coming to Broadway this spring under the direction of Kate Whoriskey.

Responding to a 2011 New York Times article that highlighted Reading, PA's designation as the poorest city in America, Ms. Nottage was motivated to travel there to see how economic stagnation was redefining the city's identity, and to determine how she might collaborate with the community to generate understanding and change.

"Residents of Reading speak about themselves in the past tense," says Ms. Nottage. "I want to explore how this city is taking steps to re-imagine itself in the present tense."

This Is Reading will be created by an award-winning team of artists, including Lynn Nottage; filmmaker Tony Gerber; director Kate Whoriskey; projection designer Jeff Sugg; set designer Christine Jones; and producers Jane M. Saks, Blake Ashman-Kipervaser, and Allison Bressi.

The installation will approach the historic Franklin Street Railroad Station as a collaborator, placing its unique history and architecture in dialogue with stories collected in Reading, PA.

This is Reading is produced by LAByrinth Theater Company, Market Road Films and Project&. The project will use live performance, film and projection mapping to illuminate the Reading Railroad Station, animating surfaces inside and outside with the stories of the city's residents. Working closely with members of the Reading community, the artists aim to capture the voice of a city that is grappling with how to reclaim a narrative that has been fractured along racial and economic lines.

"We want to invite the community to see the world from another's perspective, thereby forging an unexpected dialogue," says Nottage.

In service of this ambition, members of the artistic team have spent over four years conducting interviews throughout Reading, PA., meeting with local historians, community organizers, politicians, business owners, social activists, educators, parole officers, police officers, students and the community at large.

The team's hope is that the project will serve as an innovative model for the way in which traditional producing organizations can work together with artists to create socially engaged projects that defy the conventions of theatrical form and purpose; and to establish a fresh and visually adventurous new mode of storytelling.

"The idea is to build an exciting space that captures and reflects the diversity, rhythms and texture of the city and to bring opportunity to the creative community in Reading," says filmmaker Tony Gerber.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Ford Foundation, Venturous Theater Fund of Tides Foundation, Project&, Columbia University, and The Howard Gilman Foundation.

Following a sold out, critically acclaimed engagement last fall, Sweat, the new play by Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, directed by Kate Whoriskey will transfer to Broadway's Studio 54 (254 West 54th Street). Broadway performances of Sweat will begin March 4 for a March 26, 2017 opening.

With warm humor and tremendous heart, Lynn Nottage's Sweat tells the story of a group of friends who have spent their lives sharing drinks, secrets and laughs while working together on the line of a factory floor. But when layoffs and picket lines begin to chip away at their trust, the friends find themselves pitted against each other in the hard fight to stay afloat.

Kate Whoriskey directs this stunning new play about the collision of race, class, family and friendship, and the tragic, unintended costs of community without opportunity.

Sweat is produced on Broadway by Stuart Thompson and Louise Gund.

For more information, visit www.SweatBroadway.com