Theirs is a friendship measured in 28 postcards, 5 horses painted blue, and all those letters from war. On her posthumous search of Franz Marc’s lost masterpiece, Tower of Blue Horses, Else Lasker-Schüler must learn to let go.

IN BLUE performs on
Wednesday 12/4 at 7, Thursday 12/5 at 7, Friday 12/6 at 3 & 7 (Opening), Saturday 12/6 at 7, Thursday 12/12 at 7, Friday 12/13 at 7, Saturday 12/14 at 3 & 7, and Sunday 12/15 at 3 & 7.

Starring Finn Kilgore as Franz Marc and Alyssa Simon as Else Lasker-Schüler, with an original live score by Luke Santy.

Scenic Design is by Sarah Edkins. Lighting Design is by Becky Heisler McCarthy. Costume Design is by Florence LeBas. Production Stage Manager and Assistant Director is Gabrielle Giacomo. Stage Manager is Kelly Teaford. Additional technical consultant is Anthony Sertel Dean.

CAST

CREATIVE TEAM

‘Xia looks through the empty frame at the friendship the two maintained, echoed in the words of their deep (often epistolary) relationship, Lasker-Schüler’s aching, sublime verse, Marc’s letters from the battlefield, and the fertile, intensely felt spaces between every line… As much of Xia’s work remains submerged as visible; script directions prime the canvas in swaths of emotion rather than specifics, as when the actors are advised, “FRANZ paints a stroke of blue. It blossoms, like bloodstreams on a sheet of glass. They watch.” — we can guess at the iceberg underneath these characters’ narrow peak of common ground, but we aren’t meant to know everything, or think everything can be known.‘

– Adam McGovern, HiLoBrow, READ MORE

“Playwright and director Ran Xia has dropped us into an ocean of darkness and coaxes us toward sound and light in this delicate, dreamlike play… It’s a delightful fantasy…” – Jacquelyn Claire, NYTheatreGuide (De Profundis)

“De Profundis’s celebration of sound finds its full expression in writer/director Ran Xia’s lyrical text … Like the hybrid creatures it evokes, beckons from a dreamlike liminal world…” – Emily Cordes, Theatre Is Easy (De Profundis)

Virtuoso director, Ran Xia, conducts this cutting edge collage. Bold choices hammer the play’s ideas into our consciousness. From the moment Independent Study begins, we are bombarded by stimuli. – Hazen Cuyler, Theater Pizzazz (Independent Study)

“…the play is staged expertly by director Ran Xia… the play’s emotional and haunting atmosphere is captured perfectly.” – Anthony Piccione. Onstageblog (Independent Study)

“By placing the action on three sides of The Tank’s black box theatre, and employing impressionistic set pieces and quick, shadowy light changes, director Ran Xia and designers Sean Devare and Anthony Sertel Dean create a liminal memory-space, as malleable and all-encompassing as its characters’ troubled minds.” – Emily Cordes, Theatre Is Easy (The Tallest Man in the World)