Robert Quillen Camp
Creative Portfolio



College/University Directing Excerpts 

Love and Information
by Caryl Churchill
Lewis and Clark College, 2016

Video Excerpt (10:49):

In Love and Information, Caryl Churchill asks us to consider whether the idea of information can adequately represent our experience of being in the world. Employing her trademark formal inventiveness, Churchill considers these ideas from dozens of perspectives, creating the theatrical equivalent of the barrage of status updates, shares, and notifications that have come to characterize daily life in an “information economy.” Perhaps Churchill also implicitly asks us to consider what it means to make live theater in a culture that is defined by digital consumption. In this production, presented in a “reverse round” of museum display boxes,  we recognized the traditional communitarian rhetoric that often surrounds theatrical practice and at the same time called it into question. In a formally disjointed play like this, what do we share with one another? Or is our experience, even of something that we all do together, radically particular to each one of us? Love and Information Slideshow 


Exit the King
by Eugène Ionesco
Lewis and Clark College, 2015

Video Excerpt (8:48):

The absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco wrote the witty, raucous, and ultimately deeply moving play Exit the King in 1962 after suffering from a serious illness in his middle age. He wrote that the illness and the fear that it provoked prompted him to see if “one could learn to die.” More than anything else, Exit the King is his attempt to come to grips with the inevitability of death. But it is at the same time a play that celebrates life, delighting in all of its ridiculousness, preposterousness, and fragile beauty. Exit the King Slideshow 

Video Excerpts// Professional

All Hands
“Room / Transnational Global Capitalism” - Music by Dave Malloy, Lyrics by Robert Quillen Camp, Choreography by Dan Safer, Directed by Alec Duffy



Procedures for Saying No Written by Robert Quillen Camp, Directed by Rebecca Lingafelter





LINKS TO REVIEWS


Chekhov Lizardbrain
“Peculiar, hypnotic, and unexpectedly moving... [a] wonderful production... [that] glimmers with a quirky fascination.” - The New York Times Full Review

“As with Chekhov, the things we understand from it hang in the atmosphere, articulated but unspoken, engulfing the characters. The result is a kind of exhilarating despair: Everything in life is hopelessly weird, including the act of building a theater piece; we build on our awareness of that.” - Village Voice Full Review

“ Successfully experimenting with style and substance while retaining heart, Lizardbrain leaves one wandering out of the theater feeling transformed.” - ZYZZYVA Full Review

“Dressed in white long undergarments, top hats, and strap on moustaches (wonderfully assembled by costumer Olivera Gajic), [the performers] ping-pong Robert Quillen Camp's text off each other with a sharpness and grace akin to the Marx Brothers.” - NY Theatre.com Full Review

“Hilarious and brilliant...  Chekhov Lizardbrain is an astounding piece of theatre.”  - Broadway World Full Review

“One of my all-time greatest viewing experiences. I don’t say this often, but you really must see it right away” - Curtain Up Full Review


Pay Up
“Pig Iron has done it again. [Pay Up] entertains with high theatricality while provoking with serious ideas.” - Variety Full Review

“[Pay Up] is highly theatrical and this production puts you in the middle of the action -- or more precisely, the interaction.... a triumph of detail, everything from multi-track recordings... to the many different elements of the script (Robert Quillen Camp's original text).” - WHYY/Newsworks Full Review  

“The execution and performances are in every respect top-notch.... As soon as I hit the sidewalk I was eagerly expressing my desire to see Pay Up again.” - Philadelphia City Paper Full Review

“[A] smart and entertaining immersive show.”  - Philadelphia Inquirer Full Review

“A razor-sharp, insightful investigation of how we interact as human beings...” - Broad Street Review Full Review


All Hands “The other half of the show's appeal comes in the way playwright Robert Quillen Camp and director Alec Duffy tease their audience. Again and again, they find new ways to promise an explanation of their "society," only to defer clarity with a fresh mystification or joke. Learning to enjoy a puzzle with no solution means taking pleasure in the doing rather than in the thing done. Hoi Polloi has made that journey into theatrical magic.” - Backstage Full Review

“A creative mongrel of a show.” - The New York Times Full Review

“Dank warmth and deep weirdness” - Vulture Full Review 


Our Ruined House “Our Ruined House” puts a big idea in a small space, making it easier for us to consider. It asks us to consider what we want our national dialogue to be, how we should relate to each other, and it does it with a thoughtful curiosity and generous humor.” - The Oregonian Full Review

“A glorious colossus of the bizarre.” - Willamette Week Full Review


How to Learn “As slippery as it is engaging, How to Learn is by turns a jeremiad, a self-justification, an explication, an evasion…In one section, the lecturer questions the institution’s ideals and methods, in the next he regales us with tales of his own misadventures as a student, and soon these streams begin to merge in surprising ways. The talk is sprinkled with off-hand references to Dewey and Foucault and the like, but the overall effect keeps drifting from the intellectual and toward the comic and phantasmagoric.”
-OR Arts Watch. Full Review


Procedures for Saying No
Procedures for Saying No is an absurdist salve for the hamster-wheel-cubicle-lives we live. It's like the cast of "The Office" did LSD.”
- OPB State of Wonder

“One of the key questions Procedures for Saying No asks is, are our protocols and procedures sufficient for the abyss yawning down the aisle of our cubicles? Or, how quickly are we reduced to playing the cockroaches left after the annihilation? Short answers: no and pretty fast.... there’s no substitute for seeing it.... perfect.”
-OR Arts Watch. Full Review

“It’s unlikely you will mistake it for any other play in your memory.” - THRU Magazine. Full Review

“A unique experience... I recommend you see this one -- it will give you a lot to think about.” - Broadway World Full Review



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