Mixed Blood Theatre's COLOSSAL Opens Today

Performed in four 15-minute quarters with a half-time show, featuring a dance company, a drum corps, and a fully-padded cast, COLOSSAL is an epic event that simultaneously celebrates and attacks our nation's most popular form of theater: football.

A star football player - a pro prospect, one of the most graceful runners in the world, in love with a team mate - struggles to move forward in the wake of a catastrophic spinal cord injury. With a cast of two dozen men and full contact choreography, this play about love, ability, and extraordinary feats of strength tackles definitions of masculinity and the male body as a vehicle for language, violence, and silent expression through dance, football, and disability.

Toby Forrest, a quadriplegic actor from Los Angeles, leads an ensemble that includes Stephen Yoakam, Ansa Akyea, Darius Dotch, Torsten Johnson, Josh Wilder, Ian Zahren, Darrick Mosely, Casey Hoekstra, Ryan Colbert, Mathias Becker, David DeBliek and ten others. A half dozen of the cast members have trained for the past 6 months in preparation for the show's extreme physical demands. Mixed Blood's historic firehouse theatre has once again been re-invented, bringing in bleacher seating for this experiential extravaganza. The creative team includes Trevor Bowen (costumes), Joe Stanley (scenery), Karin Olson (lighting), C. Andrew Mayer (video), Angaharad Davies (choreography), and Joe Pulice (composing/musical direction).

COLOSSAL is one of the hottest new plays of the year, and a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere, to be produced in a single year at the Olney Theatre Center, Mixed Blood Theatre, Dallas Theater Center, Company One, and Southern Rep. Critics are hailing it as "a play finding through the laws of physics a thrilling way to tell a story of exquisite pain" -Washington Post, and "emotionally gripping and corporeally inspiring" -DC Metro Theatre Arts.

Artistic Director Jack Reuler: "For me, COLOSSAL is the most ambitious undertaking in 38 years of Mixed Blood's producing history. The space has been reconfigured to create a heretofore new audience-performance relationship. Dancers, drummers, athletes, and actors intersect and collide gently and explosively. The manifestations of our mission - the successful coming together of a multiplicity of peoples - traverses races, people with disabilities, art forms, and unlikely LGBTQI pairings, in unexpected ways. The sheer physicality is, for me as a theatre maker and avid sports enthusiast, breathtaking in countless ways. Above all, the heartwarming story telling will have you leaning forward in your bleacher seats."

Director Will Davis: "I think of COLOSSAL as an endurance sport, I run rehearsal like a practice, you have to train to perform this play. This is true for the body of the performer, but it is also true for the emotional journey of the play, COLOSSAL is unrelenting, it's timed to a game clock, it's scored to a drum line. In this spare stripped down muscular world, we watch a battle of wills as they fight to the finish. COLOSSAL is a full tackle feat of strength for the mind and the body and the audience sits on the 50 yard line for the whole game. COLOSSAL is a play about fathers and sons, and collision and flight. A play about football, feats of strength and fighting for every inch, this is a play about what happens when love knocks the wind out of you and tackles you to the ground."