Commissioned tragicomedy to premiere at Lehigh University
Liz Duffy Adams’ plays take viewers into surrealistic surroundings where misfit characters struggle to make sense of an uncertain world.
Last year’s performance of Duffy Adams’ “Dog Act” by Lehigh University Department of Theatre was a hit among students who embraced the comical but richly textured story of a traveling performer, and her companion, Dog, as they forged ahead in a postapocalyptic world.
Now Lehigh will premiere a brand new play “The Broken Machine” Nov. 15-22 in Lehigh’s Diamond Theater, which also will cap Lehigh theater professor Pam Pepper’s career.
Pepper says the department decided to commission the award-winning playwright to write the play after Duffy Adams was the university’s 20182019 Theodore U. Horger ’61 Artist-in-Residence in the Performing Arts.
She says several members of the theater faculty have worked with or followed Duffy Adams for a number of years.
“Last spring she taught a playwriting class which was hugely popular,” Pepper says. “She knew our students, so she has a good sense of us.”
“The Broken Machine” follows a woman named Mac, who had been a computer programmer who was complicit in a gigantic collapse of the World Wide Web. She flees, with a broken arm, to the woods where she is joined by Gray, a gray fox whose avatar is a human, against a backdrop of a gigantic wildfire that is forcing evacuation. As they flee through the wilderness, they are pursued by would-be rescuers and threatened by a Psychopomp, which is a creature from Greek mythology, who guides a living person’s soul to another world. However, this Psychopomp is a nonbinary punk teenager with an attitude and is coming for Mac.
Pepper directs the climatechaos tragicomedy in which the burnt-out Mac makes lists from memory of endangered species, moments of lost time, and incorrect states of mind.
“Liz Duffy Adams is a creative mind, and a master of language,” Pepper says. “This play is quite moving. It is funny, but also poignant.”
She says Duffy Adams often responds to what is going on in the world and sends a message about the wild fires that have ravaged California.
‘Broken Machine’
“Her plays have environmental undertones,” Pepper says. “The students are fascinated with her writing. They find it provocative and challenging, especially those with a literary sense.”
She says is also is exciting for the students to be premiering a new play that has never been produced before.
“The Broken Machine,” like “Dog Act,” incorporates music in the story, although it is not a musical.
Eugene Albulescu, Lehigh University music professor, has composed the music for the play.
He says during the story, the characters sing a Cole Porter song, which he had to incorporate into the musical score.
“It’s tricky,” he says. “It can’t sound like a musical all of a sudden.”
He says the music ended up being very diverse and he even had to write and record a “punk rock excerpt.”
“I never thought I would have to do that,” says the classically trained Albulescu.
Pepper says scenic designer Melpomene Katakalos, staged the play very simply.
“It’s a beautiful, but minimalist set,” she says. “It’s versatile and shows three locations with Mac’s hut, the woods, and the beach. The simple set lets us focus on the language and words of the playwright.”
She says Adams has returned to Lehigh to work with students during tech week.
The five-person cast includes
Lehigh students Allison Findley as Mac; Ryan Lewis as Gray; Vaughan Kramer as Joe; Leidy Iglesias as Jane; and Aiden Galbraith as the Psychopomp.
Pepper, who is retiring after more than three decades at Lehigh, says this is her final production at Lehigh before she goes.
“For me, this is a perfect culmination to my academic journey.,” she says. “I’ve always been interested in new work and working with playwrights. This is a great way to say farewell to 33 years.”
Pepper is a long time professor in the Lehigh University Department of Theatre, where she teaches acting and directing. Recent Lehigh productions include “Dog Act,” “Urinetown,” “Antigone,” “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” “Macbeth,” “Kind Ness” and “Bad Jews”. She has worked in professional theater as a director, literary manager and an administrator, and came to the Lehigh Valley as the associate director of the Pennsylvania Stage Company. She is active in the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s New Play Development Workshop.
“I have thoroughly enjoyed working here,” she says of Lehigh. “The student are eager, bright and talented.”
She says she plans to get involved in fiber arts and take up painting again after she retires.
“I am looking forward to scheduling freedom,” she says. “I want to do whatever I want, whenever I want to do it.”
Duffy Adams is a graduate of Yale School of Drama and New York University. Her play “Or,”premiered Off Broadway at Women’s Project Theater and has been produced more than 60 times.
She’s a New Dramatists alumna and has received a Women of Achievement Award, Lillian Hellman Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Will Glickman Award, Weston Playhouse Music-Theater Award, and MacDowell Colony residencies. Duffy Adams who has dual Irish and American citizenship, lives in New York City.