RUN BEN RUN Immersive Satire to Premiere in Philadelphia This Fall
Director Rebecca Wright's immersive production unfolds around audiences at Christ Church Neighborhood House.
What happens when Ben Franklin, Ben Affleck, Benedict Arnold, Ben Vereen, Ben Lay and Bad Bunny walk onto a movie set together? In RUN BEN RUN, Philadelphia immersive theater company Applied Mechanics joins forces with the Christ Church Preservation Trust for a surreal, spectacular satire of the stories America tells about itself. Running October 6 - 18 at Christ Church Neighborhood House, the world-premiere production uses drag, choreography, pastiche and an absurd original script to ask a timely question during the nation's 250th anniversary: What exactly do we mean when we talk about American “progress”?
The Bens have been assembled on a movie set to recreate John Gast's infamous 1872 painting American Progress, an allegorical depiction of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny. There is just one problem: their star, Ben Franklin, has disappeared. Now they have to make the movie without him.
Can Ben Affleck finish his film? Can Ben Vereen dance his way out of danger? Can Benedict Arnold clear his name? Can Benito Antonio Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny, write the song that finally brings everyone together? And without Franklin around to tell them what America is supposed to be, can the Bens rewrite history, or should they just run?
“We're so excited to share this show about fame, failure, absent mentors and the myth of American Exceptionalism with Philadelphia audiences,” says director and creator Rebecca Wright. “It's fanciful and silly and absurd, but it grows out of our sincere grappling with the myth of American Progress and our own very personal relationships with art and failure, fame and inspiration.”
The collaboration places RUN BEN RUN in direct conversation with the history it interrogates. The Christ Church Preservation Trust stewards two significant Philadelphia historic sites, Christ Church and Christ Church Burial Ground, where Benjamin Franklin is buried. At Neighborhood House, just steps from the church Franklin himself attended, audiences are invited to reconsider the familiar figures, myths and ideas that have shaped the American story.
In signature Applied Mechanics style, RUN BEN RUN unfolds all around its audience. Christ Church Neighborhood House becomes a movie set inspired by Gast's American Progress, complete with rolling prairie, wagon beds, telegraph wires and buffalo heads. Rather than watching from a traditional theater seat, audiences are placed at the center of a glittering, chaotic world of simultaneous performances and competing versions of American history.
“In RUN BEN RUN, America has an absentee mentor/Daddy and has to figure out what it can make with the myths, stories and falsehoods we're left with,” Wright continues. “Through all the glitter and jokes, it tells a story of our exact semiquincentennial moment: What are we making? Who are we making it with? What do we need to let go of? And what do we have to work with?”
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