Lightning Rod Special is a Philadelphia-based original performance company that created The Appointment (Best of 2019 NYTimes, Time Out NY, , and NY Magazine) and Underground Railroad Game (OBIE Award, Edinburgh Fringe First). Our raucous and contemplative theater works ask questions of ourselves, our audience, and the world at large. Like scientists, we start each project with a hypothesis and, following artistic investigations, find our way to completed pieces of theater that twist the ordinary into alien and stir what lies dormant in the corners of the audience’s mind. With big hearts we confront lightning rod topics by scrambling theatrical conventions and intellectual assumptions. 

2020 has delivered some devastating blows to the theater industry and to Lightning Rod Special. Our plans were completely upended and our artists face profound hardships. It will likely be over a year before we are allowed to safely gather and share live performance with in-person audiences, but OUR SUPERPOWER IS ADAPTATION! We believe that every obstacle is an artistic provocation and every cancelled plan is an opportunity to innovate.

In that spirit, we gave ourselves a dare during the summer of 2019: to find new ways to make work in the Covid era. Check out our first experiment SUPERHOST, an audio thriller told via voicemails about a seductive and terrifying Airbnb. Broad Street Review extolled the work saying, “productions like this are a bright spot in the pandemic.”

In 2021 we are launching Sound Break, a new series of raucous audio works helmed by Lightning Rod Special artists with our signature explosive style. We will deliver these works right to the socially-distant safety of your headphones. We also continue to incubate our upcoming theater work SPEECH, a poisonous love letter to cancel culture, which unfortunately was postponed due to the pandemic this year. We plan to premiere it in the fall of 2021 or when safety allows.

We make our work for you and with you. Please consider becoming a sustaining member today. 

With love and lightning,

Alice Yorke, Scott R. Sheppard, and Mason Rosenthal
Co-Directors | LRS

Oona Curley, Alex Bechtel, Katie Gould, and Rebecca Kanach
Company Members | LRS