SEAN LEWIS Killadelphia: City of Numbers
Iowa premiere |
In the summer of 2008, it was often said that Philadelphia had "more
bodies than days." The city, in other words, was in the midst of a murder epidemic.
In his unflinching look at the story behind the statistics of that summer,
playwright Sean Christopher Lewis introduces us to the inmates of
Graterford Prison — men employed to beautify the city with public murals,
even as they're serving out life sentences.
In Lewis' one-man show, the voices of the prisoners, their victims,
Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, local rappers,
conservative talk show hosts, trauma surgeons, and other citizens of the
City of Brotherly Love find a place on the stage to say their piece.
As embodied by Lewis, a performer described by the New York Press as
“explicitly authentic,” these voices come together to form a shocking
portrait of life in America’s toughest town.
Lewis' original intention with Killadelphia was to weave the language and rhythms of hip-hop
together with prison interviews.
But while working on the play, Lewis happened to live in the
same Philadelphia neighborhood as Beau Zabel, a young teacher,
transplanted from Austin,
Minnesota. While walking home from work one night, Zabel was robbed, shot and killed.
Lewis' growing connections with the
inmates, now combined with his evolving identification with the idealistic
teacher, led the playwright to put the Zabel case the center of his
project.
Commissioned by the Mural Arts Project of Philadelphia and Inter Act
Theatre, City of Numbers is the latest work from Lewis, an award-winning
playwright and solo performer with several Eastern Iowa connections. He
earned an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights' Workshop, teaches off and on at Cornell
College, and has worked with Iowa City's Riverside Theatre.
In 2006, Lewis presented I Will Make You Orphans, a portrait of a mixed-up white rapper who yearns to be black. That same
year his Militant Language was produced as part of the Iowa New
Play Festival at the University of Iowa. That play takes place in the Iraq war
zone, where American GIs guarding a private construction site are forced
to explain the disappearance of a local boy who worked there.
Lewis was the inaugural recipient of the Rosa Parks Award for Social
Justice in Playwriting from the Kennedy Center. A former Emerging
Playwright in Residence at Inter Act Theatre, he has toured widely with
the shows City of Numbers, I Will Make You Orphans and
The
Gone Chair. Those and his other plays, including Militant Language and
The Aperture, have been seen in Iowa, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio,
Maryland and Kansas.
He has been a playwriting fellow at the O’Neill
Playwrights Conference and has seen his work developed at Play Penn New
Play Conference, Lark New Play Development Center, Orlando Shakespeare
Festival, and National Center
for New Plays at Stanford University. An actor, he has appeared Off
Broadway; regionally with
companies like the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival; and
in the feature films God Country and Blood Fantasy.
