POTTSTOWN, Pa. (KYW Newsradio) — Forget what you think a play is supposed to look like. Theater with a View in Pottstown and the Nightdrive theater company are stepping off the stage and doing something different.
“The Grown-Ups” is a play performed around a campfire, where the actors and audience sit together.
“They can make s'mores, they can have a beer,” says director Skylar Fox. “They're going to be able to kind of enjoy that campfire experience and then let us take them on a little journey.”
Fox wrote “The Grown-Ups” with fellow Nightdrive co-founder Simon Henriques out of a need to do theater differently during the pandemic. It was first performed in a backyard in Brooklyn, New York.
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Nightdrive describes themselves as making “rigorously irreverent, demandingly vulnerable, borderline-impossible plays.” In the past, they’ve created an immersive alien movie, a haunted rock concert, and a live interactive graphic novel.
“We're always trying to pull from and play with forms that have nothing to do with theater and feel maybe antithetical to theater as we know it,” Fox says.
Theater with a View has their own way of breaking theatrical expectations. They put on plays at Sycamore Hill Estate using different parts of the property, from the field to the front porch.
Founder Nina Covalesky says these non-traditional performances bring in new audiences who might not go to a regular play.
“The most common comment we get from audiences is that they feel like they're eavesdropping,” she describes, “that they wandered into an event.”
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This is Theater With a View’s first time collaborating with another theater group, but Covalesky says that Nightdrive feels like a great match.
“I was just so psyched to find this play, because it does feel, frankly, that it was written for our site and would allow us to use the space in a completely different way,” says Covalesky.
The show runs August 17-27 and tickets are $35, but Covalesky says that if price is a concern, you can pay whatever you want.
“We don't want that to be a reason that people don't come, especially right now,” she says.
She recommends calling to reserve a space if you can’t buy a ticket. More information and tickets are available at their website.