Food Court, a psychological theater work conceived and performed by Australia’s Back to Back Theatre, made its American debut at this fall’s Philadelphia Live Arts Festival with support from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. The production is made notable by its live score, improvised at each performance by Aussie experimental band The Necks, and its unique cast of actors, all of whom are considered to have intellectual disabilities. In Food Court, two women harass and humiliate another woman during and after a chance encounter in a shopping mall, their threats and taunts projected on a scrim that renders the action murky and otherworldly. As a whole, the work raises questions of human vulnerability, disempowerment, and the role of difference in society.

Theater artists Suli Holum and David Bradley attended one of three festival performances of Food Court. They are currently working with Temple University’s Institute on Disabilities for another Center-supported project that explores theater’s potential to engage audiences in dialogue around histories and present-day issues of disability. Holum also attended a performance workshop with the cast members of Back to Back, to learn about their process in creating provocative works such as Food Court. Here, both artists reflect upon the ways disability and difference might be represented, interrogated, and objectified in performance, as they deal with similar issues in their ongoing work.

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As a theater director and a playwright, respectively, currently working with actors with intellectual disabilities, were you as disturbed by the production as others?

Suli Holum: I found most of the event difficult to watch. I felt uncomfortable and I had the urge to avert my eyes; I was being shown things I did not want to see, was listening to music that was jarring.

David Bradley: I had the same sense of watching things I did not want to see. The piece moved so swiftly from the ordinary (an actor coming out, changing placement of spike tape) to the cruel, that it gave the cruelty a kind of cold matter-of-factness, and that made the cruelty even more uncomfortable. This was certainly not a world I wanted to be inside.

SH: Often I find that violence onstage is presented in a way that makes it easy to watch. That was certainly not the case in this work.

This year’s Philadelphia Live Arts Festival featured the world premiere of the first English-language play by Japanese playwright and director Toshiki Okada. The play was made in collaboration with Pig Iron Theatre Company, a 2011 Center grantee. This summer, the members of Pig Iron traveled to Japan to meet Okada and to learn his approach to theater—a process that cast member Alex Torra describes on the Pig Iron blog as marked by “investigating, feeling, and understanding the inner workings of another artist's world and conception.” The end result is Zero Cost House, a highly conceptual and thoughtful play that contrasts with recent Pig Iron productions such as Twelfth Night, which showcased the company’s trademark hyper-physical style.

Murph Henderson asked Pig Iron member Dito van Reigersberg about working with Okada and the “heady themes” that appear in his script—from ruminations on past and present artistic influences to the specter of the 2011 tsunami and subsequent radiation disaster in Japan.

Zero Cost House tours this week to Ringling International Arts Festival in Sarasota/Bradenton, FL, October 11–13.

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Dito, may I begin by saying that you look dashing in a kimono—and in a rabbit suit?

Why, thank you! I try to keep my image versatile. The rabbit suits for Zero Cost House are very hot. When we were first learning our lines, we sometimes had freak-outs in the suits. You’d get so hot that you’d start forgetting your lines. You’re standing in a parka and a fur hat, and it’s not as though the rabbits just hop on and offstage—they have substantial scenes. We all had our diva moments during technical rehearsals, saying, “I just can’t be in this rabbit suit anymore!”

Can you talk about how Toshiki Okada works? As you collaborated on Zero Cost House, what did he do that was new to you?

Well, there were two major things. First, he has a hyper-colloquial way of writing dialogue, not quite cinematic but almost cinéma vérité. There are interruptions. People say little things that come into their heads. Okada drops in kernels of ideas as offhand comments that will turn into major themes. For instance...

Last year, PTI helped to fund a boot camp led by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel and hosted by Philadelphia Young Playwrights. Vogel’s boot camp exercises are designed to spark the creativity of participants—including, in Philadelphia, students as well as professionals like Wilma Theater Artistic Director Blanka Zizka, 1812 Productions Artistic Director Jen Childs, and People’s Light & Theatre Company Associate Artistic Director Pete Pryor—and to generate spontaneity and ingenuity in playwriting.

Last week a New York Times article covered a playwriting boot camp that Vogel led at the Second Stage Theater, the same venue where her Pulitzer Prize-winning play How I Learned to Drive is having a much-heralded revival. As she did during the PTI-sponsored boot camp in Philadelphia, Vogel pushed the New York participants to think outside of the perceived limitations of playwriting, first challenging them to come up with a scene that would be impossible to stage.