Senior Cecilia Corrigan’s Play Memorial Day to Be Performed Across Philadelphia in May

An original play by undergraduate English major Cecilia Corrigan will be performed five times at five different locations in Philadelphia during the month of May. Her production of Memorial Day. mixes live performance with video “news reports.” “I was interested in getting as many different types of audiences and types of performance experiences as possible,” she says. “I’m interested in how the performance will come across in, say, an art gallery versus a lecture hall or a warehouse.”

Paid for by grants from Arts & the City Year and the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Memorial Day has a cast of 10 professional and first-time actors. The videos that will be projected during the performance are interviews Corrigan conducted with Philadelphians about their patriotism. “I like the idea of incorporating this sort of straight-faced investigation of local ‘patriotism’ into a play called Memorial Day,” she says, “the holiday which embodies a notion of national patriotism.” Several local artists have offered their time and talent to make the set and costumes. Audience members and Web surfers can interact with the characters on facebook (their profiles are accessible from the play’s website). “Ideally,” Corrigan notes, “I envision this piece being performed in many different cities but retaining a consistent Internet evolution and following via facebook and the website.”