POWER/TRIP

By, Anne Cecilia DeMelo

Carnegie Mellon University

School of Drama

Directed By: Anne Cecilia DeMelo

Set Design: Evan Frank

Media Design: Julian Kelley

Costume Design: Lily Cunicelli

“Why do we keep doing this?” On a cool fall evening, a group of people gather at a community center in a rural town with plans to rehearse their staging of Shakespeare’s Richard II. As they grapple with questions of authenticity and power, the lines between performance and reality rapidly begin to blur, exposing a world that is stranger and more inexplicable than they could have imagined. Quilting together classic and contemporary text, American political archives, live music, dreams, and drug trips, POWER/TRIP puts an old story about authority and belief on display in a critical context, radically reworking it to examine faith, ecstasy, and cycles of control in the contemporary United States.

-Anne Cecilia DeMelo

Photo Credit: Louis Stein & Dave Rubin

Carnegie Mellon University: Pittsburgh, PA