Rainpan 43 is the collaboration between actors Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford. Their first work, all wear bowlers, created through a residency at HERE Arts Center in New York (HARP) and with support from the Independence Foundation of Philadelphia, premiered in 2003 at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. It was then produced locally by 1812 Productions in Philadelphia before going on to HERE Arts Center in New York, where it ran for 10 weeks, received a Drama Desk nomination for “unique theatrical experience,” and an Innovative Theatre Award for “best performance art piece.” bowlers went on to play regionally at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles, the La Jolla Playhouse, Berkeley Repertory Theater and Princeton University. Internationally, the show toured to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the London Mime Festival at the Barbican centre, and to festivals in Italy, Germany, the UK and South Korea. Rainpan 43 has created two other works, Amnesia Curiosa and machines machines machines machines machines machines machines. R43’s work has been funded by the Philadelphia Theatre Initiative as well as the Phoebe Haas Charitable Trust B. Rainpan 43 is dedicated to creating innovative, actor-driven absurdist plays that are at once deeply profound and at the same time utterly ridiculous.

PLAYS

ALL WEAR BOWLERS
created and performed by Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle, directed by Aleksandra Wolska

all wear bowlers draws from the world of 1930s-era physical comedy to tell the story of two silent film stars who fall off of the screen to find themselves trapped in a clown show. Without a thought in their heads, the duo persists in trying to make sense of their situation, only to succeed in deepening their disorientation until they lose all sense of time, place and self. all wear bowlers is a two-man absurdist play that combines physical comedy routines with visual metaphor, stage magic, filmed images and vaudevillian patter in an exploration of identity and memory, nostalgia and amnesia. The pathos of Laurel and Hardy, the desolate humor of Samuel Beckett, and the quiet poetry of René Magritte collide to create a surreal world of venomous ventriloquists and belligerent bowlers.

“Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the kind of daring and ingenuity in ‘all wear bowlers’ in the commercial theater. It’s one more reason to feel foolish about spending money on a Broadway show.”
– New York Times (Jason Zinoman)

“The breadth of creative vocabulary and command of craft showcased in All Wear Bowlers are impressive in themselves. But it’s the anarchic yet deftly calibrated clowning of Sobelle and Lyford that makes All Wear Bowlers such a terrific entertainment.”
– Jersey Courier Post

AMNESIA CURIOSA
created and performed by Trey Lyford, Geoff Sobelle, co-created and directed by Andrew Dawson

“I keep inside myself, in my private museum, everything I have seen and loved in my life.”
– Andre Malraux

“we, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time….”
- Geoffrey Sonnabend

In this contemporary cabinet of curiosities Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford (all wear bowlers) unearth a museum of absence and artifact where the paranormal is normal and the line between docent and exhibit becomes increasingly blurred.
Drawing from the esoteric worlds of pseudo-science, medical anomaly, and spiritualism, Amnesia Curiosa is a surgical séance, exhuming a repository of familial ghosts, memory and wonder.
Amnesia Curiosa was originally performed at the historic Pennsylvania Hospital in the oldest surgical amphitheatre in the U.S. The show is a collaboration with award-winning physical theatre artist Andrew Dawson (UK),

MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES
created and performed by Trey Lyford, Geoff Sobelle and Gabriel Quinn Bauriedel, directed by Aleksandra Wolska and Charlotte Ford
In a unique blend of clowning and engineering, “machines, machines, machines, machines, machines, machines, machines” reveals the claustrophobic bunker of three paranoid brothers so fixated on protecting themselves from the outside world that they themselves become the objects of suspicion.

In an attempt to simplify their lives, they bury themselves in a cacophonous landslide of ingenious – if poorly made – machines. At the heart of the play are the ridiculously complex machines, based on cartoonist Rube Goldberg’s vision of technology and the equation: the most amount of effort to achieve the least amount of gain.

“The show’s loopy ethos is founded on a celebration of pointlessness, and for most of the running time it is a ticklish pleasure simply to watch these men bicker and pose and play, like kids in a junk-filled garage who’ve consumed too much sugar and haven’t yet discovered the more enervating pleasures of video games.”
-New York Times (Charles Isherwood)

ELEPHANT ROOM
Created and performed by Trey Lyford, Geoff Sobelle and Steve Cuiffo. Directed by Paul Lazar

“Elephant Room” is an absurd performance-art piece that takes the form of an evening-length magic show to embrace and expose the currency of deception in contemporary American culture. In true Rainpan 43 fashion, this is an actor-driven show that is both hilarious and though-provoking, ridiculous and poetic, shameless and sincere. In that order.

“Elephant Room” combines the contemporary clowning of Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford with the advanced magic skills of illusionist/actor Steve Cuiffo. It is an evening of phenomenal spectacle and wonder, dance numbers and then more dance numbers.

At the heart of the show are three world-class jackasses: Dennis Diamond, Louie Magic and Darryl Hannah. While the magic functions and will fool the audience, the magicians begin to fall apart. The more the characters posture, front and hide behind their “smoke/mirrors,” the more they reveal their vulnerability.

“a big ball of hi-larious and mezmerizing artertainment … mark my words – and your calendar- this show is going to be gangbusters. I’m totally serious I can actually see this going to Broadway. Or at least off-broadway.”
– Andy Horowitz, Culturebot