Past Work (partial)

The Wall

An original, collaboratively created multimedia theater event
Inspired by a vision of contemporary Sufi mystic Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee and performance styles of Vaudeville and Butoh, The Wall explores a dreamscape of our individual and collective longing, asking what creates walls of separation between us? In the play, a woman enters her dream and faces a wall. Beyond it, light. How do we get from here to there? Premiered July 2012 at the Santa Cruz Fringe Festival.

The Heart of a Bell

Poetic Documentary and Travelogue
Co-Produced and Co-Directed by Aleksandra Wolska and Eric Thiermann
Written by Aleksandra Wolska

The Heart of a Bell explores the cultural and spiritual function of sound in world cultures. The movie takes the viewer on a journey across four continents and fifteen countries of Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The film centers on the philosophy of sound as a unifying force, expounded by Zen Master's Thich Nhat Hanh who, throughout the film, speaks about the significance of bells in the practice of ​inter-being, the art of profound connection with all of life.
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Theheartofabell.com

All Wear Bowlers


“Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the kind of daring and ingenuity in ALL WEAR BOWLERS in the commercial theater. It’s one more reason to feel foolish about spending money on a Broadway show.” – The New York Times

“The breadth of creative vocabulary and command of craft showcased in All Wear Bowlers are impressive in themselves. But it’s the anarchic yet deftly calibrated clowning of Sobelle and Lyford that makes ALL WEAR BOWLERS such a terrific entertainment.” – Jersey Courier Post
Created and performed by Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle
Directed by Aleksandra Wolska

​ALL WEAR BOWLERS draws from the world of 1930s-era physical comedy to tell the story of two silent film stars who fall off of the screen to find themselves trapped in a clown show. Without a thought in their heads, the duo persists in trying to make sense of their situation, only to succeed in deepening their disorientation until they lose all sense of time, place and self. ALL WEAR BOWLERS is a two-man absurdist play that combines physical comedy routines with visual metaphor, stage magic, filmed images and vaudevillian patter in an exploration of identity and memory, nostalgia and amnesia. The pathos of Laurel and Hardy, the desolate humor of Samuel Beckett, and the quiet poetry of René Magritte collide to create a surreal world of venomous ventriloquists and belligerent bowlers.

Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines​ Machines

“The show’s loopy ethos is founded on a celebration of pointlessness, and for most of the running time it is a ticklish pleasure simply to watch these men bicker and pose and play, like kids in a junk-filled garage who’ve consumed too much sugar and haven’t yet discovered the more enervating pleasures of video games.” 
– The New York Times
Created and performed by Trey Lyford, Geoff Sobelle and Gabriel Bauriedel
Directed by Aleksandra Wolska
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In a unique blend of clowning and engineering, MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES reveals the claustrophobic bunker of three paranoid brothers so fixated on protecting themselves from the outside world that they themselves become the objects of suspicion.

In an attempt to simplify their lives, they bury themselves in a cacophonous landslide of ingenious – if poorly made – machines. At the heart of the play are the ridiculously complex machines, based on cartoonist Rube Goldberg’s vision of technology and the equation: the most amount of effort to achieve the least amount of gain.