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HAT TRICKS: Lyford and Sobelle
perform in all wear bowlers.
Greg Costanzo |
geoff sobelle was having
one of his best nights ever, when he nearly broke a
fellow actor’s neck. Sobelle calls himself a practitioner
of “physical theater”—think clowns,
acrobats, mimes or any gesture-driven performance—but
when he tossed Quinn Bauriedel onto a conveyor belt,
he didn’t think it would land him in the ER.
The show, machines machines machines machines machines
machines machines, created by Sobelle, ’98,
and Bauriedel, featured several Rube Goldberg-style
contraptions. In one, a spoon lifts, shaking a plant
that drops a ball that rolls down a gutter and hits
a rake that flies into a bowl that is lowered by a pulley
to tip a cereal box that dumps raisin bran into the
bowl.
“It was this totally absurdist play—the
greatest amount of effort for the least amount of gain,”
Sobelle says. Truly. It took a month of engineering
to put together 37 seconds of action.
Like a Goldberg device, Sobelle seems in constant motion
with one thing leading to another, however improbably.
He belongs to the seven-member Pig Iron Theatre Company
in Philadelphia, stages his own experimental work and
acts in polished productions of conventional stage plays.
In 2004 alone, Sobelle put on his vaudevillian show
all wear bowlers in New York and Germany; performed
in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Proof and Shakespeare’s
Comedy of Errors, both in Philadelphia; worked
on several film projects; and appeared in two Pig Iron
productions—Shut Eye in New York, and
Hell Meets Henry Halfway, which went up in
Philadelphia, New York, Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania.
He plans his schedule almost two years ahead. Not bad
for a theater actor who paid $1 for his 1985 Toyota
van and says his life is held together by duct tape.
Like Goldberg, Sobelle concocts art from whatever is
at hand. The initial 37 seconds of machines
morphed into an intricate show that sold out at the
2002 Philadelphia Fringe Festival. The conveyer-belt
accident yielded a new prop—Bauriedel’s
neck brace.
“It’s like a kid on Christmas Day who plays
with the box instead of the toy,” Sobelle says.
“You use everything in the room. You use the vacuum
cleaner that was never intended to be a prop.”
Sobelle didn’t foresee a stage career, but from
age 5, “I was obsessed with being a magician,”
he says. “I used to perform in Hollywood at this
magic club in the basement of a bank. And I’d
do magic tricks for my cousin’s birthday parties.”
Entering Stanford, the Los Angeles native planned to
be an English professor. But he performed in nine plays
freshman year, and as a sophomore he mounted his own
productions. Sobelle says he became enamored of theater
because it let him apply the “physical specificity”
of magic.
Sobelle stopped out before junior and senior years to
attend the famed L’Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris,
where he met most of his Pig Iron colleagues. The regimen
combined athleticism with the imitation of everyday
behaviors.
Sobelle’s work is informed by modernism, existentialism,
surrealism, and film and theater history. His all
wear bowlers, created with Trey Lyford, has two
Laurel and Hardy-type characters falling out of a silent
film onto the theater stage, whereupon eggs come out
of their mouths, sleeves elongate as hands separate
from arms, and tablecloths dart off like birds. In a
fresh take on the René Magritte painting, a third
bowler-topped headless man—Sobelle’s right
limbs and Lyford’s left—pulls out a Granny
Smith apple and places it under his hat.
Sobelle says his ability to execute physical gags with
intellectual content comes from training with some of
the big names in theater. Besides Lecoq, he worked with
Stanford drama professor Carl Weber, whom Sobelle calls
“the closest thing to Brecht himself.” In
Shut Eye, Sobelle’s first director was
the late Joseph Chaikin, founder of New York’s
Open Theater.
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“I’ve been lucky since Day One,”
Sobelle says. “Very seldom has my work been a
windfall financially, but it’s theater, so it’s
always going to be scrappy. You have to make it out
of the dregs of everything around you. If you don’t,
I don’t think it’s that good.” In
his short career, Sobelle has won three Barrymore award
nominations and the City Paper’s Most
Welcome Newcomer Award in 2002. That says something
for trash, duct tape and a car that leaks antifreeze.
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