Seattle-based group brings noir drama to Balch Street Theatre

Joseph Lavy as Dr. Glas. Photo by Joe Patrick Kane.

Seattle-based Akropolis Performance Lab will bring its production of “The Glas Nocturne” on Friday, Nov. 20, at 8 p.m., and again Saturday, Nov. 21 at 2 and 8 p.m., at the Balch Street Theatre, 220 Balch Street in Akron.

The Glas Nocturne is Joseph Lavy’s adaptation of Hjalmar Söderberg’s  scandalous novel, Doktor Glas. Lavy describes the piece as, “a noir-style monodrama of psychosexual fixation, moral questioning, and murder — instigated by the story of a reverend, his wife, their doctor, her lover and a little potassium cyanide.”

For  Akropolis founders and Co-Artistic Directors Joseph and Zhenya Lavy, the performances in Akron mark a homecoming. Both are University of Akron graduates and founding members of  James Slowiak and Jairo Cuesta’s New World Performance Lab. Slowiak and Cuesta have helmed New World Performance Lab as Co-Artistic Directors from the company’s inception. They say they are pleased to host Akropolis in New World’s home at the Balch Street Theatre.

The Lavys  founded Akropolis in 2000 as an ensemble-based theatre company. Like New World, Akropolis works in the tradition of Jerzy Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theatre.

In addition to “The Glas Nocturne,” Akropolis, will partner with Wandering Aesthetics Theatre Company to offer “The Awakened Voice: Vocal Empowerment through Song,” a workshop that will introduce performers to the vocal practices developed and practiced by Zhenya Lavy through her 25 years of in-depth investigation of voice work. The goal will be to expand the performer’s essential instrument and amplify trust of the body and its responses.

There will be partner and group exercises, discussion of principles of vocal pre-expressivity techniques for engaging the vocal imagination through sound-making as a physical process, and daily practice strategies for the mental and physical tuning of the body/mind through precision, focus and discipline.

The workshop will take place on Sunday, Nov. 22, from 6 to 9 p.m. The location is LifeSource Yoga, 300 N. Cleveland-Massillon Road, Suite 02, in Akron. Cost for the workshop is $50, and previous vocal training is not required.

To learn more about Akropolis and its Akron performances of The Glas Nocturne, go to nwplab.com/the-glas-nocturneakropolis-performance-lab/.

To learn more about The Awakened Voice: Vocal Empowerment through Song, go to www.watheatre.com/events/awakenedvoice.