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Staging the American mythos

Many Philadelphia theater practitioners do several things well, and sometimes they do them simultaneously. Even so, James Ijames stands out.

Many Philadelphia theater practitioners do several things well, and sometimes they do them simultaneously. Even so, James Ijames stands out.

The Temple University acting alum has won two Barrymore Awards for outstanding supporting actor, for Superior Donuts (2011) at the Arden and Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches (2012) at the Wilma.

In 2011, he won the F. Otto Haas Award for Emerging Artist.

In 2013, he scored another Barrymore, for outstanding direction of the Simpatico Theatre Project's The Brothers Size.

In 2014, The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington, his magic-realism deathbed portrayal of the first president's wife yakking dizzily to her slaves,received six Barrymore nominations and won the Independence Foundation Award for Outstanding New Play.

This year, at Villanova, where he teaches theater, he directed Rachel Bonds' Michael & Edie.

Two weeks ago, he was awarded a $75,000 Pew Fellowship.

This week, his latest play opens. Moon Man Walk marks the debut of Orbiter 3, a Philadelphia playwrights' producing collective dedicated to creating radical theater. Ijames is a founding member.

"It works for me because I love it," he says of his theater-saturated life in this city. "I work for it because love it."

In announcing his fellowship, the Pew Center for the Arts and Heritage said the North Carolina-born, South Philly-dwelling artist "investigates class, race, and gender, and challenges the conventions of realism and received collective truth."

"You know, I'm not totally sure what I'm doing with the Pew money," Ijames says with a laugh. "I'm still spinning from it, really. As it's designed to help artists make a next step in their artistic journey, I plan to take full advantage of this experience."

This experience - writing about his country's faulty, racially divided history and skewed views of gender equality - engages with the idea of the America mythos and its rigid traditionalism of hard work and achieving the dream.

"I'm interested in taking that mythos and holding it up to what I see on the street, the news, in our lives - the contradictions and conflicts. I'm interested in possibilities those contradictions offer to the theatrical imagination."

Ijames points to a particularly surreal scene in Miz Martha, in which Thomas Jefferson, played by a black man, performs surgery on Martha Washington, who in that moment represents not just the death-rattling first first lady, but also America in all its loudmouth, insecure, racist glory.

In Moon Man Walk - which, like Miz Martha, is directed by his friend Edward Sobel - Ijames reaches for something more personal, while maintaining the ardent hyperrealism ("romantic nationalism and the metatheatrical, too") that's becoming his signature.

"His work and his vision are just so, so, so, so strong," says Douglas Williams, one of Ijames' partners in Orbiter 3.

Inspired by Philadelphia comedic actor Reuben Mitchell, who died at 31 in a 2012 motorcycle accident, Ijames wrote about going to the moon and back with a character named Monarch, who's coming home to Philly to plan a funeral for his mom. Along the way, he falls in love and discovers long-hidden truths about his family.

"If you knew Reuben, you'd know why people write plays for him," says Ijames, who originally penned Moon Man Walk as a vehicle for Mitchell. "His death changed the play. It had started as a bit of a romantic comedy but now it's more deconstructed. He was a greater man than I. I don't want people to forget that."

As for the direction his writing seems to be taking, Ijames says most of the things he's doing "post-Miz Martha are deeply personal, but the magical realism is always there." This includes working on a new play, WHITE, this summer at the play-development organization PlayPenn and performing in An Octoroon at the Wilma in 2016 ("playing a playwright, which is the kind of meta I really dig").

Then there's the reading Sunday of his Kill Move Paradise, a play so "super new" that Ijames only heard it read aloud for the first time Tuesday.

"After all this, I'm going to take a break and just write and teach and become a bit invisible for a while. I love making theater. I don't care much for a great deal of attention."

Disappearing might not be the easiest thing, as Ijames is one of Philadelphia's most in-demand actors, having played nice with Arden, Philadelphia Theatre Company, Wilma, Mauckingbird, People's Light, and InterAct so far. "What's most interesting to me about these companies," he says, "is not their differences, but actually their collective commitment to telling good stories and telling them with truth and beauty."

Then there's the Orbiter 3 collective, where Ijames is in distinguished company. Over the next three years, each of its members/bosses - Ijames, Douglas Williams, Maura Krause, Mary Tuomanen, Emily Acker, and Emma Goidel - will produce a play, representing a range of tastes, aesthetics, experience, and styles. "The diversity of voices in this company is central to its mission," says Williams. After Moon Man Walk comes Goidel's queer-culture-centric A Knee That Can Bend in December.

Right now, Williams is coordinating members, filming video promos for their e-blasts, taking ticket reservations, and writing news releases.

"Next year, I'll get the chance to have a play of mine produced," he says, "and while that play moves forward, other Orbiter 3 playwrights will dedicate themselves to supporting and facilitating my production, just as we're doing for James."

At the end of the six-play cycle, the group will disband, leaving a record of what it has done. But things begin, naturally enough, with Ijames, whose Moon Man Walk, in previews, opens Friday at the Prince Theater.