Ice Factory ’09

JUST CHILLING Ohio chief Lyons prepares his summer festival.

Photograph: Carl Skutsch

As this year’s Ice Factory festival gears up for another summer of experimental short runs, we wonder: Shouldn’t Robert Lyons and his Ohio Theatre be history by now? Last we heard, the 21-year-old downtown institution had been given a six-month reprieve by the building’s owners and could continue programming at 66 Wooster Street until…now. Fans have been holding their breath, waiting for the curtain to ring down on a beloved Soho venue where everyone who is anyone has played.

Lyons says we can all exhale. “We just signed a lease, which guarantees us through August 2010,” Lyons reports with evident relief. “So that’s a year, another season and another Ice Factory here.” The fortyish artistic director (who jokingly calls himself “the elder statesman of the summer-festival scene”) doesn’t want to speculate as to whether the city’s real-estate convulsions were benefiting the Ohio. He is sure that next year, he will either try to extend the lease or search for a new home. “Speaking for myself, notwithstanding everything that’s happened in the past year, I’m basically upbeat about things,” Lyons says. “I know it’s easy to get into conversations with people about how tough it is in terms of fund-raising, real estate and everything, and that’s all true.”

To celebrate the good news, we asked Lyons to walk us through his picks for this summer’s Ice Factory. Since it began 16 years ago, the six-week event has featured a combination of known entities and newcomers, making it the prime alternative to the season’s usual tsunami of bad, uncurated and generally random theater orgies.

A Wonderland
Wed 8–July 11
“It’s a deconstruction of Lewis Carroll by Anonymous Ensemble, a company we’ve presented at Ice Factory before. In ’07 we had a great show of theirs called The 7 Battles The Best, which was a weird mix of music—like American Idol—and this fantasy anarchist group. They’re very keen on the whole mixed-media thing, so there’s a lot of live camerawork and live editing.”

Lavaman
July 15–18
“Lavaman is by Casey Wimpee, who writes these really hallucinogenic mindscapes. Again, it’s another punk-rock-driven music-theater piece. They’re gonna have a live band and video animation. Story’s about a graphic-novel illustrator in Queens partying with friends. This will be smaller scale, just three characters rocking out, basically.”

Babes in Toyland
July 22–25
“This group, the Little Lord Fauntleroys, just got David Greenspan to play the Master Toymaker. It’s a big spectacle with lots of people in it. Director Michael Levinton pitched it as low-budget high theatricality. It’s a recession spectacular in the tradition of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company.”

Reconstruction
July 29–Aug 1
“New work by Josh Fox and International WOW. They just did Surrender here, the audience-participation military piece where you actually went to boot camp and then you were deployed to Iraq. This one is on the current housing crisis. I am told that they will be building a house onstage that the audience will help with.”

Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant
Aug 5–8
“They serve an actual five-course meal. This version will be slightly different, because we’re not equipped with a kitchen. It will be summer fare–ish. But they take that part of it very seriously, you know: They actually do serve good food.”

Space // Space
Aug 12–15
“Banana Bag & Bodice has never played at the Ohio, but I’ve wanted to book them forever. This show is about two brothers traveling through space. I just think Mallory Catlett is a fantastic director, and [writer] Jason Craig and [actor] Jessica Jelliffe too. So that’s been a couple of years in the making, trying to get them in here. Finally the stars aligned.”

Ice Factory ’09 is at the Ohio Theatre Wed 8–Aug 15.

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