The Marilou Allen Office ofService and Community Collaboration

Lightning Rod Special is a Philadelphia-based original performance company that creates raucous and contemplative works to ask questions of ourselves, our audience, and the world at large. Our work engages a highly collaborative, actor-driven approach; LRS creations are finely crafted extensions of the raw and thunderous discoveries born from spontaneous inspiration.

Like scientists, we start each project with a hypothesis and, following artistic investigations, find our way to completed pieces of theatre that twist the ordinary into the alien, provoke debate, and stir what lies dormant in the corners of an audience’s mind. With big hearts, we tackle lightning rod topics in ways that scramble theatrical conventions and intellectual assumptions.

Exploding complex questions with precision and play, Lightning Rod Special makes live performance from the ground up.