When Lighting The Voids

The dangers of working in the voids on massive ships are well known but often ignored by the titans of industry, the government, and even the workers themselves. An investigation into the causes of a tragic explosion at a Gulf Coast shipyard in 2009 revealed how blatant and systematic the disregard for human life can be.

Constructed as a mystery and culled from interviews with OSHA investigators, shipyard workers and family members of the deceased, the play unravels the story of what happened and reveals the human trauma inflicted by the accident. It also underscores the determination of those still seeking justice to this day.

When Lighting The Voids is a commission by StoryWorks: a documentary theater project from the Center for Investigative Reporting which experiments with new approaches to the portrayal of factual events.

Director: Lauren English

Dramaturg: Roweena Mackay

Producers: Jean and Fergus Bordewich

Jon Bernson – Resident Playwright

Jon Bernson is a playwright, musician and interdisciplinary artist from San Francisco. He is a former artist-in-residence at the de Young Museum and a current member of the RPI program at Playwrights Foundation. Bernson’s prolific and varied works tend to be site-specific and exploratory. In Distant Future Symposium, he fuses science fiction, live music and repurposed YouTube footage. PDX to OAK is an interactive play, written for six actors and fourteen passengers on an overnight train trip from Portland to Oakland. Bernson’s StoryWorks play Overnighters is Over re-imagines Jesse Moss’s Sundance award-winning film as an immersive multimedia experience. Exray’s Logbook is an audiobook which is comprised of twelve pirate broadcasts that interrupted the programming of international television stations between 1986 and 2009.

As a musician, Bernson has released more than twenty albums under several names, including Exray’s, whose music was featured in David Fincher’s Academy-Award winning film The Social Network. Recent installations include Sound Affects, a large-scale multimedia collaboration at the Sonos Studio in Los Angeles and Beautification Machine, his sound-sculpture with Andy Diaz Hope, which opened at Catherine Clark Gallery before it was collected by the Nevada Museum of Art. god(s)(dess)(es)—another collaboration with Hope—was voted Best-in-Show at Richmond Virginia’s 2016 InLight Festival. In addition to his participation in BAPF, Bernson will be in residence this summer at The Growlery in San Francisco working on Third Eye Moonwalk, a large-scale performance and sound installation to be exhibited and staged at Minnesota Street Project in October 2018.