ABOUT THE SHOW

Barnaby Rosenblatt, former luminary of the mythopoetic men’s movement, has long ago hung up his ritual robes and forgotten the dance of his spirit animal. The glory days of his (mostly white) male bonding retreats and self-help cassette empire have given way to public humiliation and calumniation. Until one evening a lost man with no confidence or purpose in life makes a desperate pilgrimage to Barnaby’s South Philadelphia residence seeking enlightenment from his obscure hero. Thus begins a quest into the contemporary male psyche via the forgotten roads of poetry, myth, and inner-wildness. Go Long Big Softie leaves us with two boys struggling to escape a powerful fiction about what it takes to be a man.

Go Long Big Softie is an ensemble-based piece of site-specific theatre that premiered at the Torrent Collective. This South Philadelphia space was chosen because its history expressed an anxious and moribund search for identity and meaning. It existed through the past century as an architectural palimpsest changing from a 7UP bottling plant to Rocky’s Gym to a Vietnamese Cultural Center to a residence for flow artists and vagabonds. Weeks after the show closed, the space was demolished and cleared for the construction of condos.

CREATIVE TEAM

Lead Artist: Scott R. Sheppard

Director: Charlotte Ford

Co-Creators/Performers: Scott R. Sheppard, Mason Rosenthal

Stage Manager: Ilse Zoerb

Set Design: Morgan FitzPatrick Andrews

Lighting Design: Dominic Chacon

Costume Design: Rebecca Kanach

Sound Design: Alex Bechtel

Photos by: Kate Raines + Ben Grinburg