LEX & GOLDALINE
Honors Directing Thesis
The Department of Theater at Swarthmore College Presents LEX & GOLDALINE: A MIRROR FUGUE IN THREE ACTS, conceived and directed by Swift Shuker. The show will be performed on April 11th at 7PM and 9PM, April 12th at 2PM, 7PM and 9PM, and APril 13th at 1PM and 3PM in the LPAC Frear Ensemble Theater. LEX & GOLDALINE, a devised play, is at once a peaceful meditation on home and the creation of families, as well as a disorienting deconstruction of linear space and time.
The theater has been turned into a house, and each audience member follows one of two corridors into one of two rooms. They watch people live in this house, small and complex moments of love. Sometimes time goes forwards, sometimes backwards. Sometimes, time stops and expands and sings a song. Everyone sees the same show, just not in the same order. Everyone is in the same house, but the house is larger on the inside than on the outside. Throughout this dilation of spacetime, two sisters, Lex and Goldaline, discover sex. LEX & GOLDALINE is a nonlinear, quiet, and ambitious exploration of intimacy, in its infinite complexity, and the limitless storytelling of the touch of another's hand.
Swift Shuker, the director and playwright, is an Honors Theater major at Swarthmore College. Swift has worked with Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA, and New Paradise Laboratories in Philadelphia. They are also a founding member of Unstuck Theater, an experimental company in Philadelphia. LEX & GOLDALINE features the music of composer Alec MacLaughlin, a musician based in Philadelphia and Austin, TX, and composer of New Paradise Laboratories' 27. Scenic, media, and costume design by Matt Saunders, the faculty advisor to the project. Light design by Amanda Jensen. Sound design by Adriano Shaplin. The play was created and co-written by the ensemble of performers, Naia Poyer, Doriana Thornton, Indigo Sage, Fae Montgomery, Leonie Cohen, Sung Won Ma, Caleb Jones, and stage manager Hannah Grunwald.
