LUCY CASHION
The right amount of chaos.
Artist & researcher
Multimedia performance | collaborative process | theatrical form
HOW I MAKE WORK
I make theatre through experimental processes that investigate how material conditions create unique theatrical situations — in the story, in the room, and in the final theatrical form.
The site moves through the recurring elements of that process: formal experiment, material conditions, divine process, new information, and sustained curiosity.
1. formal experiment
A dramaturgical or cultural problem demands a formal experiment.
Featured Experiment: THE BRECHTFAST CLUB
THE BRECHTFAST CLUB began as a joke at a party, then became a real question: what would The Breakfast Club become if its iconic American high school vacuum were told with Brechtian techniques? The experiment exposed what the film leaves untouched: context, history, politics, the Cold War, and the question of what this story might have been anywhere else in 1985.
2. MATERIAL CONDITIONS
The experiment happens under real conditions.
I work with material conditions on two levels:
Inside the story:
What social, economic, spatial, historical, and institutional structures belong to the story and how are the characters' actions shaped by them?
Inside the process:
What are the actual time, space, resources, collaborators, permissions, technologies, and constraints that determine our process? When we accept these conditions, they create a unique situation for artistic process and the production's theatrical language.
SELECTED WORKS
ROMANOV FAMILY YARD SALE
Producer, Director, Scenic Designer / Equally Represented Arts (2024)
A theatrical commerce experience about class, memory, and cost.
photo by Jason Hackett
The central experiment of ROMANOV FAMILY YARD SALE was formal: to make a real play and a real yard sale occupy the same event. The production was not a play pretending to be a yard sale, or a yard sale used as decorative theatrical business. It had to function as both: a fully realized theatre work and an actual yard sale, with objects, prices, bargaining, spectators, performers, and transactions all operating inside the same frame.
THE BRECHTFAST CLUB
Director, Scenic Designer, Co-Playwright / Equally Represented Arts (2023); SIUE’s Xfest (2023)
A collision of pop culture, historical materialism, and alienation effect.
For me, THE BRECHTFAST CLUB was an experiment in dramatic structure and in the tension between form and content. We took The Breakfast Club—a movie about finding your individuality, set almost entirely inside a high school library, with almost no political context beyond the students’ own social hierarchies—and placed it inside a Brechtian structure of episodes frequently interrupted by moments of entertaining theatricality such as a stand-up set of East German jokes, an absurdly serious dance break, and intermittent direct address explaining the play from the Stage Manager (the real Production Stage Manager).
Antigone: Requiem per Patriarchus
Director / Playwright / Producer
Saint Louis University Theatre & Dance in collaboration with Prison Performing Arts / 2017 at SLU (Main Stage)
PPA in collaboration with SLU Theatre & Dance / 2018 at the Women's Eastern Reception, Diagnostic, and Correctional Center
Equally Represented Arts and SATE with PPA / 2019 at the Chapel (St. Louis)
Antigone: Requiem per Patriarchus is a devised work created and produced by ERA and SATE, in collaboration with Prison Performing Arts and Saint Louis University Theatre. Lucy Cashion and Rachel Tibbetts began developing the piece in 2017 through a playwriting workshop at the Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic, and Correctional Center. Lucy further developed and workshopped the first version at SLU, where the Theatre & Dance Program produced it in 2017 as part of its Social Justice Season. Lucy and Rachel directed and produced a 2018 iteration at WERDCC in Vandalia, Missouri. ERA and SATE then developed a second version in 2019, performed at the Chapel in St. Louis. All versions imagined the play with seven Antigones; the final version places them in prison, sentenced to reenact their story until they can make it end without tragedy.
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