Centre Stage to perform 2 shows during Arts Fest

When Rick Lombardo started working as director of the Penn State School of Theatre and as director of Penn State Centre Stage this past fall, one of his first acts was to bring back Centre Stage’s summer season.

Because of this, Centre Stage will be putting on two different performances during the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts.

“People coming to the Arts Fest are really going to have multiple opportunities to experience top level professional theater with everything that’s going on in the festival,” Lombardo said.

One of the two shows is “Albatross,” a modern adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

“ ‘The Albatross’ is a very strong example of my own work as an artist and I wanted to be able to share that with our own community, to get to know me as an artist,” said Lombardo, who directs the play.

The play centers on a mariner who, while on a voyage at sea, kills an albatross. The senseless killing of the bird sparks a chain of horrifying supernatural events for the mariner and his crew.

Much of the motivation to adapt the long poem into a modern play for Lombardo and writers Matthew Spangler and Benjamin Evett was the worsening state of the environment.

“The central question of in the poem is what happens when we just wantonly destroy this beautiful creature, this albatross, this spectacular bird,” Lombardo said. “We instantly saw that one of our major challenges now is confronting what is our responsibility to the planet. ... That was an easy way to make this story to feel urgent and compelling to a contemporary audience.”

Lombardo and Centre Stage are going beyond presenting their play to make sure the show’s message reaches the audience.

The play will be performed at 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday at the Penn State Downtown Theatre Center.

There will also be a screening of a documentary of the same name at noon Friday and 7 p.m. July 16, followed by a panel with climate change scientists.

For those who are looking for a family friendly theater outing during Arts Fest, Centre Stage will also be performing the musical “A Year with Frog and Toad.”

The musical follows a frog and a toad and the many adventures they have while living together.

While Lombardo was not involved in the production of the musical, it was chosen because it ties in well to the family environment of the Arts Fest.

The musical will also run Wednesday through Saturday, and will have two performances each day at 10 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. at the Playhouse Theatre on campus.

For more information, visit https://theatre.psu.edu/penn-state-centre-stage.