Mark Lord

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Mark Lord (born June 7, 1961) is an American theater director, dramaturge, writer, and teacher. A pioneer of site-specific performance and dance dramaturgy, he is also a leading interpreter of the works of Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein. He has served as Director of the Theater Program at Bryn Mawr College since 1987.

Potlatch and Big House

In 1992, Lord and designer Hiroshi Iwasaki founded the theater company Potlatch in Philadelphia. The company’s name was later changed to Big House (plays & spectacles). Lord told the Philadelphia Inquirer that with Potlatch they aimed to “reclaim the classics that never were.” Lord and Iwasaki quickly gained a reputation for inspired, highly stylized, site-specific work. “No one in Philadelphia does theater quite like Potlatch,” City Paper reported within a year of the company’s founding.

Lord directed the world premiere of Gertrude Stein’s Pink Melon Joy at the Philadelphia Art Alliance in 1992. Spectators were “led from room to room, floor to floor; new scenes, new angles, new shadows and reflections and silhouettes” continuously appeared in this early foray into ambulatory theater. The production was hailed as “imaginative and funny and beautiful” by City Paper.

In 1993, Lord set a production of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck in the cavernous decommissioned Frankford Arsenal. The tone of the production, the Philadelphia Daily News reported, fell “somewhere between Ingmar Bergman and the Marx Brothers.” Experimenting with different levels of perception and intimacy, Lord staged certain scenes at a hundred-foot remove from the audience in this “visually exciting” production.

Lord’s 1994 Hamlet featured an 18th century-style toy theater as a central element of its mise en scène. In this production, according to City Paper, Lord used “many of his favorite devices (actors alternately speaking aloud and whispering into microphones, characters and speeches shared by several actors…) to alienate the actors from the characters they are playing, and to frustrate the audience’s traditional expectations of emotion and dramatic effect.” Performers were also described as acting “as though they were underwater” and speaking in “a Mark-Lordified whisper.”

In 1996, Lord staged Nothing at the Eastern State Penitentiary. Adapted from Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, Lord described the piece as an “existential vaudeville.” Spectators traveled through the prison, experiencing the final scene of the production via television monitor in their own individual cells. The Inquirer described it as “an immersion in an anguished, endless, impersonal quest—a straining for images, sounds, or ideas to validate not merely the meaning of existence, but the existence of existence.”

Lord’s 1998 Endgame starred Pearce Bunting and Maggie Siff as, respectively, Hamm and Clov in what the Inquirer called “an absorbing reading that no dedicated theatergoer should miss.” Staged in the decrepit basement of the Smoke performance center. City Paper also lauded the production, observing that “Mark Lord’s power as a director comes not only from his willingness to undertake not only difficult texts, but imaginative locations as well.” Years later, Theatermania noted that Lord’s “staging of Beckett’s Endgame continues to be the benchmark against which all festival works are gauged.”

A sprawling, “dazzlingly ambitious” production based on text by Walt Whitman, Lord’s 2000 Across used all of Old City Philadelphia as its set. Spectators followed performers through the streets as other figures appeared “in the distance, high up in the windows of buildings” or rising, “startlingly, out of shrubbery.” The piece prompted critics to pronounce Lord “Philadelphia’s mad genius of site-specific theater” and “King of the Peripatetic Show.”

In 2002, Lord drew praise for his production of Peter Handke’s cerebral The Ride Across Lake Constance, a “sometimes vicious attack on the emptiness of language,” whose characters “exist on a plane tenuously situated between perception and reality.” Lord staged the piece at the Imperial, a run-down movie palace in Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties neighborhood. Allen Kuharski wrote in Theatre Journal that the “imaginative richness, daring, and sophistication of the company's endeavor puts it in a league of its own.”

Lord paired Apollinaire’s poem “Zone” with Beckett’s “A Piece of Monologue” for his 2005 Zone, set in a basement beneath a dilapidated warehouse. Spectators experienced this “funhouse of existential delights” while circulating through a network of underground corridors.

External liinks

• https://www.brynmawr.edu/people/mark-e-lord

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