Greetings from Hell! Navigate the dark, decadent, and sinful as Found Theater descends into an underworld inspired by Dante’s “Inferno.” Influenced by crime fiction and led by demons, lost souls, and fallen angels, this hybrid performance will investigate nightmarish territory. Will we survive, or abandon all hope?

$15 / 90 minutes

City of Woes is a new work of theater devised by Found Theater Company, a collective ensemble of theater-makers that tests the limits of bodies, music, and performance. Our mission is to take audiences on an immersive journey outside the boundaries of traditional narrative, into a world of visceral and surprising spectacles. We aim to challenge and to entertain. To find joy in getting lost. Found was born in the spring of 2009—then just a group of undergraduate theater students at Temple University who were selected by Felipe Vergara, a Colombian MFA Directing candidate, to train as an ensemble and perform in his thirty minute piece, The Myth Project. The group worked on transforming the material from The Myth Project into a full-length Philly Fringe performance entitled Something With Wings, a vaudevillian meditation on the death of god. The next year brought change and clarity for Found. After the success of the 2009 Fringe, the group solidified as a company, creating a name, a logo, a bank account, and a relationship with press. In the 2010 Fringe, the group added new members and worked to create its next offering, Tales. This performance marked the last collaboration between Found and Vergara, a departure that put the true nature of the ensemble into the foreground. The other company members found themselves filling the shoes their mentor had worn previously, taking on the tasks of directing, producing, and managing money and press. The students discovered what it meant to run a company as opposed to just performing as one.

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They graduated from Temple and began to spread their wings in the Philadelphia theater community. In the intervening years, Found has devised four more full length Fringe shows (Event End in 2011, Electric Jungle in 2012, This is the Twilight Kingdom in 2013, and Deep Blue Sleep in 2014), been commissioned by Painted Bride Art Center and White Pines Productions (performing in the Let’s Make a Ruckus Festival and The Happenings Series, respectively), teamed up with Philadelphia director Brenna Geffers for a guerilla-style musical Nativity scene in the streets of Philadelphia (Found Jesus), been reviewed by Stage Magazine, NewsWorks, Philadelphia Weekly, Philly Metro, Citypaper, FringeReview, and Phindie, and been selected as Sponsored Artists of the White Pines Exchange for 2013-2014. In May 2014, White Pines Productions officially signed on as Found Theater Company’s fiscal sponsor.

Directed by Alison Mae Hoban, Assistant Director and Designer: Emily R. Johnson, Ensemble Trainer: Matt Lorenz, Musical Director: Phoebe Schaub, Dramaturg: Joe Palinsky, Lighting Designer: Will Jonez, Photography by Harish Pathak, ENSEMBLE: Kerry Brind’Amour, Amy Frear, Alison Mae Hoban, Matt Lorenz, Kevin O’Halloran, Phoebe Schaub, and Joe Wozniak.