“AntiGravity achieves more than nostalgic funpoking, exploring a uniquely turbulent time of life with brutal honesty.”
-Mark Cofta, Broad Street Review
Dear Diary LOL is a comedic theatre performance born verbatim from the real-life, tween-teen, early 2000s diaries of the show’s actual creators and performers. The devising ensemble invites you to cringe, laugh, and cry at their most earnest desires, deepest fears, secret shames, and terrible poetry written as coming-of-age girls in the late 90s/early 2000s. The piece explodes its source diaries with moments of direct address, music, dance, and physical comedy, colliding the style of melodrama with the inherent humor found in the earnestness of young girlhood musings (with all the benefits of hindsight).
These tumultuous coming-of-age years are explored from a female perspective, providing an intimate glimpse of the ways these young girls come to understand the world around them, form a self, and use their voices as they experiment with their malleable identities and budding adulthood.
Get pumped for the show by listening to a nostalgic, specially crafted Dear Diary LOL Spotify playlist!
Click here for the digital playbill!
SPARK: Fringe for Young Audiences
Enrichment materials were developed by Misty Sol.
Supported in part by a grant from Small But Mighty Arts and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Originally conceived under the title of This Song is for You as part of 2015 Pig Iron School’s Dares Festival. 2017 premiere at the Maas Space in the Neighborhood FringeArts Festival. A thousand thanks to our amazing 2017 FringeA-thon donors, without whom we would never have been able to create this work!
The SPARK Series is made possible by a leadership gift from the Virginia and Harvey Kimmel Arts Education Fund.
Photo by Tim O’Donnell
Created and performed by Alicia Crosby, Sarah Knittel, Francesca Montanile Lyons,Gina Elizabeth Murdoch, Jenna Strusowski, Megan Thibodeaux, Michael T. Williams Lead Artist Francesca Montanile Lyons Direction Francesca Montanile Lyons and Michael T. Williams Light Design Megan Thibodeaux Sound Design Francesca Montanile Lyons, Michael T. Williams, and Ensemble Set Artist Alicia Crosby Producers Michael T. Williams, Megan Thibodeaux, Francesca Montanile Lyons, and AntiGravity Theatre Project Photos & Video Timothy O’Donnell Illustration and Graphic Design Francesca Montanile Lyons Source Diaries by Alicia Crosby, Naomi Inoshita, Sarah Knittel, Francesca Montanile Lyons, Megan Thibodeaux Additional contributions Riva Rubenoff and Andalyn Young contributed significantly to an early draft of this piece.
$15 general / $10.50 members
Nerd Out
“The text is deliciously naive, sincere, and honest, delivered with joyful reference.”
-Christopher Munden, Phindie
AntiGravity Theatre Project is an interstate devised performance company, developing and presenting work in Philadelphia, Providence, and New York City. Core members of the company live and root the work in each of these three locations. Since 2012, we’ve developed a shared creative aesthetic rooted in play, movement, image, music, and found text. AntiGravity is: Kym Moore, Michael T. Williams, Francesca Montanile Lyons, Michael Costagliola (Co-Directors) and Megan Thibodeaux, Alicia Crosby, Sarah Knittel, Gina Murdock, Jenna Strusoswki, and Shanti Pillai (Associate Artists).
We develop, produce, design, and perform each other’s Lead Work. The performance works we create do not seek to be tonally homogenous; each piece is radically different than the next. We create across genres and inside genre-collisions. We collectively author our works over long periods of time, guided by collective curiosity and rigorous investigation into socially-conscious subject matters including genocide in Latin America, mental illness and the construction of female “hysteria,” and gender roles and expectations governing emerging womanhood. We work with actor-creators, musicians, writers, poets, composers, dancers, educators, and visual artists that contribute to the evolution of our collaborative creative process. AntiGravity splits its time between Providence, New York City, Philadelphia, and anywhere they can find where artists are bustling.
History
Kym Moore and Michael T. Williams founded the company in 2012 with a three-venue tour of Erik Ehn’s Yermedea, culminating at La MaMa E.T.C. as part of Soulographie: Our Genocides (Lead Artists: Kym Moore, Erik Ehn, Ale Prieto). The company’s second work, Nellie/ Nellie, premiered in Philadelphia’s FringeArts Festival in September 2014 (Lead Artists: Michael T. Williams and Michael Costagliola). Dear Diary LOL (Lead Artist: Francesca Montanile Lyons) premiered in the 2017 Philadelphia Neighborhood FringeArts Festival. Time’s Up (Lead Artist: Kym) and Chub Suits (Lead Artist: Michael) in development. www.antigravitytheatreproject.
Missions
1) To generate evocative, visually-driven, bold performance through an evolving exploration of diverse subject matters, structures, and dramaturgies. 2) To explore the boundaries of theatrical convention in form and content, while cultivating new frontiers in the art of performance-making. 3) To incite and encourage new conversations about the collective human experience that challenge sociopolitical norms.