Category Archives: Bob’s Theatre Reviews

‘QUEENSBRIDGE’ BY MARLIN THOMAS (REVIEW FROM NEW YORK) · Sep 1st

By Bob Shuman

Queensbridge, by Marlin Thomas (now playing at Theater for the New City’s Dream Up Festival, until 9/13–schedule below), is a history of disenfranchisement, an embrace of the rejected: evictions, robberies, murders, exhaustion—a pileup of the disremembered. What unites the characters—for they are real people, in real life, across generations–is their government housing complex, Queensbridge, just a ride away on the F train in NYC, to Queens—actually, the largest group of residential housing in North America, with 7,000 tenants: missing fathers, broken families, discrimination, unemployment, unpaid rent, dislocations, and soul abandonment, drugs. Urban planning on steroids.

 

The play is a gauge of acceptance and shame; its set, in the TNC lower-level Cabaret theater, is only six second-hand chairs—but its lackluster washed-out setting is a microcosm of seating for multitudes. A table. A laptop. A projection of the greenery at the entrance to the apartments, where a jazz bass is playing. DeMone Seaphin has directed the ensemble for choreographic, double-fisted acting (theater students might want to become aware of the scenes and monologues, in Queensbridge, for auditions). American pain. The narrator, Pharaoh (Lionel Russell) looks directly at us, yet the impression is not one of discomfort or intimidation, from the audience’s point of view, but rather, of witnessing. His wingman is Jeremy (Jamil Denard Jr.): he’s a big young man (a very big young man)—wouldn’t want to run into him in a dark alley. But, to his credit, he does love his Mama.

Thomas is embracing everything society wants to reject—the people we move away from on mass transit, the errant, from New York public schools—where little more than half of students, from grades 3-8 are proficient in English or math (and the cost per student is the highest in the country: $35, 796 per pupil in 2024). Wait till they have to do paperwork. The temptation is to see Queensbridge in terms of the past—through the genius of James Baldwin or Claude Brown. Even Thomas might be called by the faraway designation of neorealist, a documentary investigator, examining the intersection of poverty and social reality. The uncomfortable truth, which doesn’t seem to have a genre yet, is the unappealing recognition, that people belong to machines, are tuned out, long gone. Right now: compliant, distracted, or listless—some sociologist’s success story somewhere must have been to keep the subways quiet and, possibly, safer.

Devices; muscle shirts; rings; necklaces; sunglasses in the collar openings;  small earphones, not buds; flowers, a florist balloon; in a row, under the grab rails: brand-new running and walking shoes; sandals; shorts; jeans; baseball hats; t-shirts; a man kisses his son on the head; acne scars on a wide face. The first sight of a tattoo is at 42nd Street; green hair at 8th Street. How can all that life be so humbled?

Maybe Thomas knows all that. He’s talking to me, in the theater lobby: “If you want to shout or make noise, during the performance, go ahead.” A woman keeps saying, “O.K.” (near the box office). Thomas has actually lived at Queensbridge, this monstrosity, most of his life. He writes about the honor a young person can try to have, even when there is nothing.  He also writes about the luxury of honor.  A “wonderful” call comes in: “A lady saw Queensbridge last night: Just wanted to tell you how she loved the performance.” Yet the characters may be the people we must move away from on mass transit (Deric Gochenauer’s enactment of motor stereotypy, or the like), similar to the co-dependent women in Tennessee Williams’s visceral play The Mutilated (that feeling of stale booze and sweat, you want to take a shower after seeing). Queensbridge, is comparable, also, to Grenfell, the story of the tower apartments fire, which ripped through low-income housing, in London, in 2017, the basis of Gillian Slovo’s 2023 verbatim play. Queensbridge, however, is smaller, more pent up.

Ashley Victoria Scott, is the quilter, Mrs.  Treadway, in the drama, a poignant role: “No one’s telling my story but me”; “white people writing about black people don’t seem right.” The petty thieves, thugs of the Manfredos (played by Gochenauer and Levi Buckmaster, as Tony—he’s carrying a baseball bat). Mr. Rosenberg (Sheldon Young) sees money can be made, hauling goods floor to floor. The bureaucrat (Wayne Miller): the Voice of NYCHA. A young woman of today, the Interviewer, getting an A for her academic project on the development complex, the projects, the low-income housing (Sherell Williams). What’s stable for a kid in the world of public housing? Not the Bungalow ice cream truck, which stopped coming. Not the fire hydrants, on a hot summer like this, which you can’t break into and turn on yourself anymore. Only the cops will come consistently, when a fire alarm is pulled.

O.K.

I am talking to a public librarian now, in the Bronx, who is agreeing with my choice of a two-year lease renewal—he did the same recently, a time-saver. He thinks it’s less of a hassle with the landlord. Summer is the busiest rental and moving season in the city, but nothing is changing in Queensbridge.

I should say that I recommend the show;  it is the kind of work, with a social vision, which I find important.

I am also writing to Ms. LaSalle, at the New York Department of Finance, to renew a Rent Freeze: “I hope you are well. I am sending you my new lease (a two year lease), effective 11/1, 2026 through 10/31, 2028, so that my Rent Freeze records can be updated . . .

I have decided to stay, in my current apartment, two more years.”

(c) 2026 by Bob Shuman. All rights reserved.

Visit Theater for the New City. 

“Queensbridge” by Marlin Thomas, directed by DeMone Seraphin

World Premiere, 75 min.

Cabaret Theater, $15

8/29@ 8:00 PM, 8/30 @ 2:00 PM, 8/30 5:00 PM, 9/5 @ 5:00 PM, 9/8 @ 9:00 PM, 9/10 @ 6:30 PM, 9/11 @ 9:00 PM, 9/12 5:00 PM, 9/13 @ 2:00 PM

Queensbridge is the largest public housing project in North America.This production renders it through an oral history project that became a play.

During an oral history interview, a decades-long resident of the nation’s largest housing project recounts the trauma of living there, his complicity in it, and his attempt at redemption.  A man called Pharaoh holds court for an interviewer recording the history of his home. Around him, the neighbors of six decades return. Each interview is a record of how a person arrives in a place like this and what the place makes of them. The play is political but not partisan. Threaded through every memory is the Voice of NYCHA — the smooth, official account of the development, contradicted line-by-line by the people who actually lived there.  https://QueensbridgeStagePlay.US

 

CRYSTAL FIELD: “THE ROOT OF IT ALL: A DENTIST’S TALE” (REVIEW FROM NEW YORK) · Aug 3rd

Procession of teeth. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.

By Bob Shuman

Even in a gentrified East Village (now old news), there is an abandoned mattress on Second Avenue, police barricades at the crossing, the trash of paper shopping bags, and plastic deli containers, strewn across the pavement. It’s fifty years since the Bicentennial—where does the time go?; now it’s Americas 250th birthday—and fifty years, also, since Theater for the New City began taking it to the streets, with plays written by Crystal Field (her first was Mama Liberty’s Bicentennial Party, 1976).  She’s a writer of the light, or what needs to be shone a light on (Shakespeare is one also—his plays typically started at 2:00pm, open-air, as is today’s performance, too, of The Root of It All: A Dentist’s Tale.

L-R: Michael David Gordon, Anton Wagner, Cheryl Wagner. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.

Shakespeare lasted about 20 years in London (not a bad run). For three different NYC theaters, under her aegis, Field has, so far, stayed 50. Shakespeare could hold audiences because, for one, in his time, there were limited recreational alternatives, among cattle, sheep, and beheadings. Here, where the average person’s attention span is 72 seconds, new challenges prevail: figuring out how to keep preoccupied, dissembling humanity focused, as an instance, in the gritty sweat outside in August, during the flow of downtown traffic, among pedestrians, bicyclists (who could kill you), cabs, or even a sudden gust of wind.

The child is apprehended by ICE. L-R: JC Augustin, Anton Wagner, Michael David Gordon, Cheryl Gadsden.

The primary focus of The Root of It All: A Dentist’s Tale, pertains to the dislocations of Immigration and Custom’s Enforcement, ICE. The show is dedicated to Renée Good and Alex Pretti, the gunned-down Minnesota anti-ICE observers. However, the theatrical event also honors Nolan Wells, whose disappearance in Mississippi, over the July 4 weekend of this year, is under investigation as being racially motivated. Add, too, Bonnie Tyler, the husky-voiced Welsh pop singer who died in July, and there are others, in a time of growing anxiety regarding war.  Jesse Wells’s “No Kings,” is one of the song selections of the pre-show; he sounds like Dylan—another example of a hole in time, the ‘60s, ‘70s, right here, free. “No lies and no bullets/ No bombs,” he  intones, rawly,  “and no need for kings, no kings, no kings.”

Snatching of a kid by ICE from Dentist’s office ignites a protest. L-R: Lei Zhou, Asher Cohen, Christina Ramsey, July Choi, Ainsley Hartke-Crotty. Photo by Jonathann Slaff.

Typically, Theater for the New City’s street plays are a celebration of the working New Yorker and the crazy city itself. Today’s performance features characters recognizable, from a dental waiting room; but other works, from half a century of urban observation, have incorporated subways and busses, courtrooms, and employment offices, dancing ethnic populations, stranded commuters, perplexed health care and government workers, Colonial legislators, even figures fantastical, including a living Statue of Liberty. Plots work as fast as the rolling canvas backdrop in this show (by Mary Blanchard, Lytza Colon and Kanako Nagayama), utilizing scenes from American history, pinpointing Lady Liberty, of course. Democracy is important to Field and her audiences, lauding “a Republic, if we can keep it.”

Judge (T. Scott Lilly) issues decision over-ruling deportation of a child. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.

She began writing outdoor theater pieces, against the Vietnam war (working with poor and minority students in Philadelphia), ascertaining that “for poetry to find its true audience, the bonds of authoritarian criticism must and can be transcended.” Call her writing agitprop, political theater, or simply survival in a volatile carnival or circus atmosphere, like Shakespeare, Field has a feel for life in the moment: situations, low comedy, villains, lyrics, as well as movement (actually, Field is a dancer and an actress in theater and film, of importance). Besides writing The Root of It All, she also figured out a way to direct it. Stephen Sondheim once discussed what made theatrical songwriting resonant: He said words had to float above the music so that they could be understood immediately and integrated. Likewise, Field’s are direct enough to hold though a day’s chronobiology, in her case, where an audience is not captive but won’t wander off (the mood enhancing, and shifting, jazz-oriented score in The Root of It All is by Peter Dizozza, and played by his band of extremely fluid musicians: keyboard; trumpet/fugelhorn; sax/percussion/ drums; trumpet; saxophone; and rehearsal piano).

Snatching of a kid by ICE from Dentist’s office ignites a protest. Mayor Mamdani (Arun Saini) attends. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.

L-R: Daniel Wilkes Kelly, Anton Wagner, Arun Saini as Mayor Mamdani. Photo by Jonathan Slaff                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        –

Field’s comedy is absurd, delightfully, positing the fact that all teeth pretty much are the same (and color divisions don’t exist). It’s a joyful insight for the day, where everything can change at the insatiable touch of an iphone. The developing story involves the plight of a child (well played by Anton Wagner), who has been separated from his family; his father; the dentist of record; and his lovelorn dental hygienist.  The action broaches deportation and lowering quality of life, the new mayor, inflation, government-run grocery stores, and the coming elections. Even protests-

Terry Lee KIng, Michael David Gordon. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.

Maybe that’s what we’re watching, I am figuring out: a protest. The metaphor for this production of The Root of It All may be what we’re part of:  a peaceful protest, and it has been implanting itself from the start. Since the Marvin Gaye music and the pre-show, with balletic and acrobatic feats; since the audience participation, where we have been realigning to allow communication—to get on the same wavelength (but not in a “pull-the-wool-over-your eyes,” sneaky way). We’re welcoming it. That’s what this feels like. So much of the messaging in our lives is fractured, incomplete, regarding the Iran conflict, that Gaye’s 1971 song “What’s Going On?” sets a right vibe: the tune was actually cowritten with Renaldo “Obie” Benson and Al Cleveland, as it turns out, after they witnessed police brutality against anti-war protesters.

Center: Ben Harburg. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.

Theater then, however, did feel more important, intelligent, and “adult” (as  the dancer Ann Reinking once pointed out), than it does today, reduced as it is, currently, to a discussion of entertainment value.  At that time, what dramatists wrote really mattered, in a way that people may not understand now, with so much vaporizing information overspilling, 24/7. Eric Bentley’s The Playwright as Thinker, reissued in 1967, but first published in 1946, was a serious hypothesis about social intellect. Going to see Cats, for example, in the ‘80s, could seem like a big step backwards, if someone went at all. But, go they did—and so the stage culture began changing. Others blame Annie. Not that Field won’t “burn it to the ground,” as she sees fit. Her monologue “Let It Go,” (circa 2007), for example, was a startling, blunt response to the price of the Iraq War. In it, a bright teen, nineteen years old, from Anywhere, U.S.A., waits to remeet her brother returning from war. She has been told she must remain cheerful and not talk selfishly about her brother’s accomplishments. She conjectures about how others waiting for the train are considering renewed physical relationships, but she also knows many military people have been wounded, maimed, and suffer from PTSD. Like her brother, many have been sent on multiple deployments, including to Guantanamo Bay: She understands her brother has not been spared tragedy. Then, in front of her family and her brother’s girlfriend, she breaks down, “letting go” of the painful reality she has promised not to feel.        

Finale of show. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.

Michael-David Gordon leads The Root of It All cast of twenty-one, adroitly. I always love it when publicity stills are sent to me, where he participates, comically. I’ve seen him conjure also a perfect, on-the-spot speech by Aaron, from Titus Andronicus. Plus, such a voice. Cheryl Gadsden is knowing/vulnerable as his girlfriend and the opposing ICE bad dudes and dancing enamels, myriad dental patients and students, immigrants, families, and make-believe or dream characters, as well as legal, political, and civic professionals, along with concerned citizenry, make this a stage, as full, active, and overflowing as the Met’s. (Visually, Field has a hilarious penchant for highlighting the odd one out.) Depending on where sights are set, one can see:  actors and musicians; tech people, running boards;  designers; volunteers; administrators; box office; crew; old-timers and those who may have lost teeth, not very long ago—they’re accomplishing amazing feats to which most of the audience is completely unaware (including me). 

How fantastic is it that there is a place to reflect on and contemplate the new city.

This is a victory.

 

(c) Bob Shuman. Publicist: Jonathan Slaff.

Visit Theater for the New City’s Web site.

SCHEDULE 

Saturday, 8/1 @ 2:00 PM – MANHATTAN: Outside Theater for the New City at E. 10th St. & First Ave.

Sunday, 8/2 @ 2:00 PM – BRONX: St. Mary’s Park at 147th St. & St. Ann’s Ave.

Saturday, 8/8 @ 2:00 PM – STATEN ISLAND: Tappen Park, Bay St. betw. 77th & 78th Sts. 

Sunday, 8/9 @ 2:00 PM – MANHATTAN: Central Park Bandshell, 72nd Street Crosswalk

Friday, 8/14 @ 5:00 PM – BROOKLYN: Coney Island Boardwalk at W. 21st Street

Saturday, 8/15 @ 2:00 PM – MANHATTAN: St. Marks Church at E. 10th St. & Second Ave.

Sunday, 8/16 @ 2:00 PM – MANHATTAN: Jackie Robinson Park at W. 147th St. & Bradhurst Ave.

Saturday, 8/22 @ 2:00 PM – MANHATTAN: Washington Square Park

Sunday, 8/23 @ 2:00 PM – QUEENS: Travers Park at 34th Ave. betw. 77th & 78th Sts.

Sat. 8/30 @ 2:00 PM- BROOKLYN: Sunset Park at 6th Ave. & 44th St.

Sun. 8/31 @ 2:00 PM – BROOKLYN: Fort Greene Park, Myrtle Avenue & St. Edwards Street

Saturday, 9/12 @ 2:00 PM – MANHATTAN: Sol Bloom Playground, W. 91st Street btwn. Columbus & Central Park West

Sunday, 9/13 @ 2:00 PM – MANHATTAN: Tompkins Square Park at E. 7th St. & Ave. A

 

DREAM UP FESTIVAL, 2024: 17 PLAYS, REAL INSPIRATION (THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY, 8/25-9/15) · Aug 1st

Stage Voice’s Bob Shuman will have a play running at TNC’S DREAM UP FESTIVAL, but don’t settle for just one–there are 16 more shows to choose from.

 “Tongs and Bones Shakespeare: Tempestuous Amusements, Interludes, Noises, and Drollery,” written by Bob Shuman, directed by Frank Farrell
World Premiere, 90 minutes
$18, Community Theater

September 1 8:00 PM
September 4 6:30 PM
September 6 6:30 PM
September 8 8:00 PM
September 11 9:00 PM

(via Jonathan Slaff)

THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY
Crystal Field, Executive Artistic Director – 155 First Ave., NYC 10003 – (212) 254-1109
www.theaterforthenewcity.net – for immediate release

THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY SETS ITS TWELFTH DREAM UP FESTIVAL
Annual feast of adventurous theater will play August 25 to September 15.
All events at Theater for the New City, 155 First Ave. (at E. 10th Street).


WHERE AND WHEN:
August 25 to September 15, 2024
Theater for the New City, 155 First Ave. (at E. 10th Street)
Presented by Theater for the New City, Crystal Field, Executive Artistic Director
$15-$20, buy tickets: http://dreamupfestival.org
Photos of selected shows: https://photos.app.goo.gl/12dnTHAckMjVByUw9
Festival’s website: http://dreamupfestival.org
Critics are invited to all performances of all shows.
 
NEW YORK, July 26 — From August 25 to September 15, 2024, Theater for the New City (TNC), under the direction of Crystal Field, will present its twelfth  Dream Up Festival, a feast of adventurous theater.  The annual event is an ultimate new works festival, dedicated to the joy of discovering new authors and edgy, innovative performances.
 
The Festival is helmed by the theater’s Literary Manager, Michael Scott-Price.  This year it offers 17 plays, 12 of which are world premieres and one of which is an American premiere. Audiences will savor the excitement, awe, passion, challenge and intrigue of new plays from around the country. 
 
Theater for the New City has consistently been the most inexpensive theater of its caliber and it continues its commitment to affordable tickets with this festival. Dream Up Festival tickets are $15-$20 for all participating productions.
 
The festival does not seek out traditional scripts that are presented in a traditional way. It selects works that push new ideas to the forefront, challenge audience expectations and make us question our understanding of how art illuminates the world around us.
 
Michael Scott-Price (Curator/Festival Director) has directed in New York City at venues including Chashama, Dixon Place and Collective Unconscious. He has written and directed productions that were presented nationally as well as in Canada, Ireland and England. Currently, he is also Curator of TNC’s “New City, New Blood” reading series and “Scratch Night” (works-in-progress). He is Artistic Director of an experimental theater company, Asteroid B612 Theatre Company, which made its debut in the 17th Annual HERE American Living Room Series in August 2006. He has studied at the School of Physical Theatre in London, England, at the Odin Teatret in Hostelbro, Denmark and in the International School Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in Wroclaw, Poland with Eugenio Barba and company. He is an alumnus of Lincoln Center Theater Director’s Lab. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Theater for the New City.
 
Theater for the New City (TNC) maintains a distinctive commitment to high artistic values and community service. In an effort to make theater accessible to all, TNC presents an assortment of distinct, exceptional events each year, including the Lower East Side Festival of the Arts, which celebrates the artistic and cultural diversity of TNC’s Lower East Side community; an annual Village Halloween Ball and an annual summer Street Theater tour that presents a free, live, original musical in thirteen neighborhoods in all five boroughs. Most of these are free of charge to the public.  (www.theaterforthenewcity.net)
 
Theater for the New City is located at 155 First Ave., at East 10th Street. For Dream Up Festival tickets, go to: http://dreamupfestival.org. For additional info, call the TNC box office at 212-254-1109.

DREAM UP FESTIVAL 2024
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF PRODUCTIONS
All events at Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue (at E. 10th Street).
BUY TICKETS:  WWW.DREAMUPFESTIVAL.ORG – (212) 254-1109
INFO AS OF JULY 24, 2024  – SUBJECT TO CHANGE.

Table of Contents
“Adulting for Idiots,” written and performed by Nikki MacCallum, directed by Kelvin Moon Loh
“Apocalypse Truck The musical,” written by Kyle Giller, directed, choreographed and designed by Sarah Cosgrove
“Attorney-Client,” written by Alex Ladd, directed by Pat Golden
“Babel, Babel, Babel,” written and directed by Søs Banke
“Cafe Munich,” written by Anwar N. Suleiman, directed by Barbara Schofield Suleiman
“Colder by the Water,” written by Bri Madden-Olivares
“The Coming Storm-the legacy of Nazism endures,” written and directed by Stephan Morrow
“The Coronation of Queen Jaguar” by Christine Stoddard (writer/director/designer) and Aaron Gold (assistant writer/director/designer)
“Every 6ish Minutes” by Rebecca Kane (writer, primary director & producer), assistance and consultation by Taylor Thomson and Daniel Neiden, props and scenic design by Kelsey Bowens
“If Words Could Talk,” written by Jenn Amelia Martin, directed by Stephanie Stowers
“Leaving Kiev: Coming Full Circle” by Mila Levine, directed by Lissa Moira
“Matt, James, and Ben In Lord Finnington Bus In The Positively Puzzling Case of The Purloined Pelvis: At Vicar’s Gate,” written by James Sweeney and Matt Tanzosh; directed and designed by James Sweeney, Matt Tanzosh and Ben Fletcher
“Pulling It All Into The Current,” written by Letta Neely, created by Greg Allen and Letta Neely, directed by Greg Allen
“roller rink death kink sex cult,” written by Skylar J. Beirne
“Tongs and Bones Shakespeare: Tempestuous Amusements, Interludes, Noises, and Drollery,” written by Bob Shuman, directed by Frank Farrell
“The Void,” directed by Kristen Keim, written by Jonathan G Galvez, fight and movement director Emily Anne Davis
“The Waiting Room,” written by Vel Grande, directed by Dennis Oliveira

“Adulting for Idiots,” written and performed by Nikki MacCallum, directed by Kelvin Moon Loh
75 minutes
$18, Cabaret Theater

August 29 6:30 PM
August 30 9:00 PM
September 4 6:30 PM
September 14 2:00 PM
September 15 2:00 PM

Ever wonder how to get your credit score up? Or how to get your cholesterol levels down? Fear not! Nikki MacCallum is coming to you with “Adulting for Idiots,” a mix of standup and original comedy songs that will teach you everything you’d wish you’d known before reaching adulthood. From learning how to argue with an airline, to the perils of juice cleanses, and coping with loss, this show will make you laugh, cry, and maybe even clarify what a mortgage is.

Cast
Nikki MacCallum

Nikki MacCallum (writer/actor) is a New York City based standup comic, actress, and musician and has been featured on CBS, VH1, and ABC. Her solo show, “Adulting for Idiots,” won Best Musical at the 2023 United Solo Festival. She holds a Bachelor of Music from NYU and has performed at 54 Below and Lincoln Center and has soloed at Birdland alongside Tony Award winners Donna McKechnie and Jerry Mitchell. As a standup, she’s a regular at New York Comedy Club, The Grisly pear, and The Tiny Cupboard. As a solo performer, Nikki was one of eight artists worldwide selected for the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Cabaret & Performance Conference under the Musical Direction of John McDaniel (The Rosie O’Donnell Show). Her memoir, “Dry Run,” was released in 2019. She co-wrote the book to the musical “Matchmaker Matchmaker, I’m Willing to Settle!” with Kelvin Moon Loh, which premiered at the American Reparatory Theatre’s Second Stage, OBERON before transferring to the NYMF Festival in New York. The show went on to have performances at Ars Nova, Merry Go Round Playhouse as part of the PiTCH series, and at NYU.

Kelvin Moon Loh (Director) has performed on Broadway in “Side Show,” “Beetlejuice,” “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “The King And I.” “Adulting for Idiots” is the fourth solo show of MacCallum’s directed by Loh, two of which garnered MAC Award Nominations. The two co-wrote the book to “Matchmaker Matchmaker I’m Willing to Settle!” “A Musical Guide to Internet Dating” (music and lyrics by Brandon James Gwinn), which premiered at A.R.T.’s Second Stage, OBERON, and went on to have productions at NYMF, Merry-Go-Round Playhouse’s PiTCH, Ars Nova, NYU.

“Apocalypse Truck The musical,” written by Kyle Giller, directed, choreographed and designed by Sarah Cosgrove
World Premiere, 85-90 minutes
$18, Community Theater

September 6 9:00 PM
September 7 5:00 PM
September 8 2:00 PM
September 13 9:00 PM
September 14 5:00 PM
September 15 2:00 PM

In a near-future, conservative fever dream, a liberal President has banned gas-powered vehicles to promote the use of electric cars. One Florida Man has surreptitiously hidden away his F150 truck, and when a hacker disables all electric vehicles in the country, the President calls on this truck driver to drive to the one remaining oil refinery and connect the country to petroleum once again. A satire.

Cast TBD

Kyle Giller is a lifelong New Yorker, playwright, singer/songwriter, and lawyer. He has staged works in Portland, Oregon and NYC, including full-length productions and participating in a number of one-act festivals.

Sarah Cosgrove is a multi-hyphenate artist whose goal is to explore the possibilities of the human condition through various forms of media. While her experience is mostly in commercial Musical Theatre (Heather MacNamara, Heathers) (Anita u/s: West Side Story), she is excited to discover other parts of herself as a human and an artist.

“Attorney-Client,” written by Alex Ladd, directed by Pat Golden
World Premiere, 90 minutes
$20, Community Theater

September 10 6:30 PM
September 11 6:30 PM
September 12 9:00 PM
September 13 6:30 PM
September 14 2:00 PM
September 15 5:00 PM

“Attorney-Client “features two actors, each playing two characters. In each scene the actors, one black and one white, alternate between playing either a co-defendant or an attorney involved in the same criminal case. Tom and Lester, two college students, are charged with a hit and run. Tom comes from a wealthy family, and his parents hire an aggressive private attorney, Derek, to defend their son. Lester is assigned Tom, a well-intentioned public defender. The two codefendants become enmeshed in the criminal justice system that tries to pit one against the other, and in the process the play reveals societal fissures in race and class. The play proceeds at a fast clip, which makes it a fascinating challenge both from a staging as well as an acting perspective. Veteran director Pat Golden stages the piece on a minimalist set at a fast tempo, and the result is that the audience is treated to a theatrical high-wire act, meant to raise the already very high stakes in the play to a thrilling level.

Cast TBD

Alex Ladd (author) was a finalist for the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Heideman Award in 2002. He is a four-time finalist in the Samuel French Original Short Play Festival. In 2003, he received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He is the translator of “Life As It Is,” the short stories of Nelson Rodrigues. In 2005, he produced “The Asphalt Kiss” at 59E59 Theaters; the play, based on his translation of Rodrigues’ “O Beijo no Asfalto,” was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. In 2008, he co-produced “Pornographic Angel” (also based on his translation) at the Ohio Theater. The play had its debut at Yale Summer Cabaret 2007. He is a native speaker of Brazilian Portuguese and has translated Nelson Rodrigues’ “The Asphalt Kis” (Nova Fronteira, 2007), Nestor Capoeira’s “The Little Capoeira Book” (North Atlantic Books) and the lyrics for Beleza Tropical II and Tom Zé’s “Fabrication Defect” (compilations of Brazilian music released by David Byrne). He is a member of the Dramatist Guild and PEN.

Pat Golden (director) is a writer, director, producer and award-winning casting director. Trained in theatre and directing at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, Golden has helmed both regional and Off-Broadway productions. While at the University of Pittsburgh, she founded her first theater company, The South Oakland Arts Council. In addition to directing, Golden is an award-winning casting director in film, discovering many now-established actors and offering Blair Underwood, Vincent Gallo, Samuel L. Jackson, Chris Rock, Queen Latifah, LL Cool J, Erika Alexander, Golden Brooks, LisaGay Hamilton and Little Richard their first feature film roles. Her innovative casting style led to the discovery of Dr. Haing S. Ngor, a Cambodian physician whom she cast in The Killing Fields (1984). Dr. Ngor went on to win an Academy Award and a BAFTA for his portrayal. Golden was nominated by the Casting Society of America for its Artios Award for Best Casting for Feature Film, Drama for both David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” and Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” (1986). She won for “Platoon,” which itself went on to win four Academy Awards including Best Picture.

“Babel, Babel, Babel,” written and directed by Søs Banke
American Premiere, 60 minutes
$20, Johnson Theater

August 25 8:00 PM
August 27 9:00 PM
August 28 6:30 PM
August 29 9:00 PM
August 30 6:30 PM
August 31 2:00 PM

A musical journey through the diverse expressions of love, built around music from the ’30s and ’40s. In the first part of the cabaret, the audience is led through the difficult nature of love and in the second part we travel through Europe and the world with its history of war, nationalism, and the desire for freedom.

This cabaret is a musical story about the angel Babylon who, in a Babylonian mixture of languages, tries to find a way out of the human world. In the beginning, everything is a game, but even for an angel, earthly life becomes complicated. In the story of the angel Babylon, humor, irony, and passion are mixed. We meet an angel who talks frantically to himself, the sky, and the audience and slowly you are drawn ever deeper into the labyrinth of love, with both lightness and seriousness.

Cast:
Babel – Søs Banke
Accompanist – Martin Damgaard Kirstensen

Søs Banke is Artistic coordinator, performer, and director at the Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium- Odin Teatret in Holstebro, Denmark. She has worked with theater for more than 30 years on and behind the stage, as an actor, director and coordinator in many contexts and has toured in Denmark, Norway and Germany. Over the years, she has developed the theater character Babylon, which is a recurring character in her cabaret performances.

Martin Damgaard Kirstensen is a multi-instrumentalist and has been associated with Odin Teatret’s activities as a freelancer for more than 20 years, and has contributed to a large number of Holstebro Festuge, Odin Teatret’s performances, Poetry on a Thursday, and many other activities that originate from Odin Teatret and Nordic Theater Laboratory. In addition, he is an active musician in many contexts, and works freelance both as a teacher, composer, project manager and production manager in music and theater.

“Cafe Munich,” written by Anwar N. Suleiman, directed by Barbara Schofield Suleiman
New York Premiere, 60 minutes
$18, Cabaret Theater

August 31 2:00 PM
September 1 5:00 PM
September 5 9:00 PM
September 7 2:00 PM
September 12 6:30 PM
September 14 5:00 PM
September 15 5:00 PM

Set in Munich 1992. A gritty cerebral drama about the far flung consequences of World War 2 in Germany.

Cast TBD

Anwar Suleiman (writer), born to Jewish parents in Basra, Iraq, forced to emigrate at 12 years old. Currently resides on the Upper West Side.

Barbara Schofield Suleiman (director) born to Jewish parents in Liverpool, England, ex member of Treteaux Libre a theatre group in France based on Grotowski technique.

“Colder by the Water,” written by Bri Madden-Olivares
World Premiere, 1 hour 5 minutes
$18, Community Theater

August 25 8:00 PM
August 27 6:30 PM
August 30 6:30 PM
August 31 5:00 PM
September 1 2:00 PM
September 3 6:30 PM
September 8 5:00 PM

A family in Harrisonburg, VA. prepares for Christmas and everything, including the love and the chaos, that comes with the holidays, wintertime, and family.

Cast TBD

Bri Madden-Olivares (playwright) is a storyteller from Spanish Harlem. She works to honor her craft by highlighting the rituals and blessings found in everyday life. She enjoys “street corner theater,” which she uses to describe the type of theater that happens whether someone is watching or not. She is passionate about theater accessibility, believing that it should be as easy and diverse as stumbling upon the type of drama you find on a “street corner,” and enjoys writing snapshots of life in Harlem through plays and poetry. This New York City neighborhood receives more than half of her love letters.

“The Coming Storm-the legacy of Nazism endures,” written and directed by Stephan Morrow
World Premiere, 90 minutes
$15, Johnson Theater

September 4 6:30 PM
September 7 2:00 PM
September 8 5:00 PM
September 12 6:30 PM
September 14 2:00 PM
September 15 8:00 PM

Profoundly disturbed by the atrocities of Oct 7, playwright Stephan Morrow set about creating material that dealt with that horror. This led him back to one of the most disturbing chapters in human history: the rise of the Nazis in 30’s Berlin — a reminder of how brutal anti-Semitism can become. Short episodic scenes give a kaleidoscopic impact to the material, which is not a docudrama but a cautionary tale with a fable-like quality. The frightening narrative starts with a Jewish professor brutally ejected from his post at University. After his deportation his prize student, – a loyal German (historically based on Nobel Prize Winner, Werner Eisenberg) – agrees to work on a fission project for his fatherland. But when he witnesses the evils of the Naizi regime, including the murder of a female family friend as well as the young woman he is in love with, he eventually – at great risk to himself – refuses to continue his work on developing an atom bomb for Germany. (It should be noted that German physicists were two years ahead of Oppenheimer and the U.S.’s efforts at the start of Los Alamos.).”

Cast:
George Lugo, Joe Marshall, Stephan Morrow, others

Stephan Morrow is a proud veteran of the Off Off Bway arena where has acted, directed and written and where he finds the freedom it offers so far from the specious projects of most commercial theater. He has worked with Norman Mailer (“Strawhead: A memory of Marilyn,” “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” and “Deerpark”), with Arthur Miller (“Incident at Vichy”) and directed seven productions for Mario Fratti. He is grateful to Crystal Field for supporting his latest efforts of filming stage productions at TNC–“The Assassination of J.Kaisaar” and “The Rise of Augustus – The Sopranos Meet Mad Max”–which have garnered more than a dozen awards in film festivals including Best Science Fiction Feature Film in ‘The Golden State Film Festival.

“The Coronation of Queen Jaguar” by Christine Stoddard (writer/director/designer) and Aaron Gold (assistant writer/director/designer)
World Premiere, 1 hour 15 minutes
$15, Johnson Theater
Let’s get meta, baby. Christine Stoddard and Aaron Gold play themselves on stage, presenting several colliding character acts. Queen Jaguar, played by Stoddard, is a warrior poetess from the jungle who communicates only through improvised a cappella as interpreted by The Ambassador, played by Gold. Art Bitch, played by Stoddard, is a Bushwick trust fund brat of the contemporary art world, enabled by her wealthy Uncle Cornelius, played by Gold. The Appraisal Lord, played by Gold, and his assistant, Helpy the Helping Jester, played by Stoddard, will allow audience members to choose their interaction with the characters. The audience is also graced by an honest-to-God AUTHOR, played by Gold. Stoddard and Gold navigate a conflict that challenges them to re-examine the dynamics of their relationship. An ensemble cast of characters and the audience gradually guide them back toward meditation and the love that they both deserve. The show is largely improvised and involves audience participation.

September 6 9:00 PM
September 7 8:00 PM
September 8 2:00 PM
September 13 6:30 PM
September 14 8:00 PM

Cast
Christine Stoddard – Queen Jaguar
Aaron Gold – The Ambassador

Christine Stoddard is a Salvadoran-American writer, artist, and performer named one of Brooklyn Magazine’s Top 50 Most Fascinating People. A Ms. Magazine “Ms. Muse” and Miss Subways Finalist, she founded Quail Bell Press & Productions, including Quail Bell Magazine. She has written and performed original work at The Tank, Gene Frankel Theatre, Broadway Comedy Club, The Players Theater, The People’s Improv Theater, the Magnet Theater, and other venues. She co-hosts the comedy TV show “Don’t Mind If I Don’t” with Aaron Gold and created the talk show “Badass Lady-Folk,” both on YouTube and Manhattan Neighborhood Network. She authored the books “Desert Fox by the Sea,” “Naomi & the Reckoning,” “Belladonna Magic” and “Heaven Is a Photograph.” She has been published in Tulane Review, Cosmopolitan, Digital America, MODA Critical Review, Marie Claire, Native Peoples Magazine, Bustle, Rejoinder and Teen Vogue. Her work has been supported by Arts By the People, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chashama, Support Creativity, the Puffin Foundation, ArtBridge, IndieSpace, the Hudson Valley Writers Center, Arts Gowanus, and other fine organizations. A current MS Documentary Film candidate at Columbia University, she earned her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from The City College of New York. YouTube/IG/FB/TikTok @StoddardSays; WorldOfChristineStoddard.com

Aaron Gold (collaborator) is a comedian, actor, writer, and host. He has appeared on Mtv, Nickelodeon, TNT, and NBC, as well as lent his voice to several Disney cartoons. His mental health comedy show, “You Are Not Alone: An Uplifting Show About Depression,” has been enjoying monthly performances at the Magnet Theater for over nine years and has partnered with NAMI NYC to combat the stigma associated with mental health. He is a two-time Silver Telly award winner, appears in the upcoming murder thriller, “The Art of Diversion,” sequel comedy fan film, “The Mask: Gone Viral,” and recently played several dark and disturbing roles in “Mi Abuela, Queen of Nightmares” at The Tank. He is the host of “Don’t Mind If I Don’t,” a podcast-turned-TV show where fans and experts of things he doesn’t like convince him why he is wrong. He co-starred in the limited podcast, “Bad Guys & B-Sides,” playing an angsty teenage guitarist turned magical sorcerer. He starred in the indie features “White People Problems” and “Where Demons Dwell” and is playing a role in an upcoming Untitled Marvel Project.

“Every 6ish Minutes” by Rebecca Kane (writer, primary director & producer), assistance and consultation by Taylor Thomson and Daniel Neiden, props and scenic design by Kelsey Bowens
World Premiere, 40 minutes
$15, Community Theater

August 25 5:00 PM
September 1 5:00 PM
September 5 6:30 PM
September 7 8:00 PM

A combination solo show and naloxone training, with something for everybody (literally – the style of show changes every six-ish minutes).

Cast Rebecca Kane

Rebecca Kane’s writing has appeared in numerous theatres, festivals, and readings in New York City and beyond, with presentations in Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival, Last Frontier Theatre Conference, William Inge New Play Festival, the National Women’s Theatre Festival and many more. Publications include repeated features in Smith & Kraus’s “Best of 2023” and “Best of 2024” collections and internationally published literary magazines.

“If Words Could Talk,” written by Jenn Amelia Martin, directed by Stephanie Stowers
World Premiere, 30-35 minutes
$ 18, Johnson Theater

August 30 9:00 PM
August 31 5:00 PM
September 1 8:00 PM
September 7 5:00 PM
September 8 8:00 PM

Set in a stream-of-consciousness inside the enclosures of Mama’s house, this play explores the dysfunctional relationship between a mother and her deceased daughter paying a visit with distance through closed-door memories. The play follows a sequence of stages: i. Awakening, ii. Denial, iii. Rage, iv. Bargaining, and v. Acceptance. Mama embarks on cycles of grief that collides with the reimagination of her daughter’s lived past– as Ali grieves for her long-deceased father, Mama grieves for her daughter in a return to the dead and (un)buried. The piece explores themes of communicative collision marking a dreamed life of cohesion, raising the myth of beginning, middle & end in the face of old wounds. Here lies the proof: the circularity of a mother’s love transcends names, faces, and places. If only words could speak for themselves– only then, perhaps grief would bend fiction to break the truth.

Cast TBD

Author Jenn Amelia Martin (she/her) is a 19-year-old Chinese-Italian-American artist based in New York. As a rising sophomore at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, she studies Drama (BFA) at Playwrights Horizons Studio (PHTS). With a focus on writing and performance, her work explores themes of navigating mixed culture, communication lost and found, the dual empowerment and disempowerment of words, and the concept of “home.” As a nationally published poet, she is known for blending her artistic disciplines to cultivate theater that embraces multiplicity rather than one-dimensional expression.

Director Stephanie Stowers (she/her) is a Haitian-American, New York City-based director and actress. Stowers strives in her artistic career to provide a platform for diverse art to be appreciated and more accessible. She has acted in many short films and directed productions at Playwrights Horizons Theater School, including If Words Could Talk. Stowers is pursuing a BFA in Drama with a double minor in Producing and Business in Entertainment, Media, and Technology at New York University.

“Leaving Kiev: Coming Full Circle” by Mila Levine, directed by Lissa Moira
60 minutes
$20, Cabaret Theater

September 4 9:00 PM
September 6 6:30 PM
September 8 2:00 PM
September 10 6:30 PM
September 11 9:00 PM
September 13 6:30 PM

An autobiographical one-woman show about a timid, imaginative, and resilient Jewish girl from Kiev, Ukraine, who immigrates to the US and who has always wanted to be an artist – filled with original music and poetry. A play about leaving the home we always carry inside.

Cast
Mila Levine

Mila Levine is a Kiev-born performing artist, poet, singer, songwriter, actor, and playwright. She performed her solo shows, “Leaving Kiev” and “Leaving Kiev, Part 2” at numerous festivals in New York City. A shorter version of this show, “Behind Closed Doors,” was done virtually, and is currently on Mila’s YouTube Channel, @Milochka89. She received multiple honorable mentions in several songwriting contests. The album of her original Russian songs, “My Voyage Back,” written by her as a teenager and then partially translated into English, is currently available online under her first name “Mila.” Mila arrived to the United States when she was eighteen years old with no knowledge of English. She has been writing poetry since she was seven and songs since she was thirteen. In the United States, Mila earned two master’s degrees as well as multiple fitness certifications that allow her to teach various fitness formats. She is also an owner of a nonprofit theater company, Stage Love Theater, Inc. Her YouTube Channel includes several of her music videos, including, “Hometown” dedicated to her hometown, Kiev, and the war in Ukraine.

Lissa Moira (director) is a playwright, screenwriter, director, artist and poet. She is two-time Jerome Foundation grantee and an OOBR Award-winning actress. She directed and was dramaturg of “Siren’s Heart, Norma Jean and Marilyn in Purgatory” by Walt Stepp, which enjoyed a seven-week run at TNC in 2011 and then played 14 months Off-Broadway at the Actors Temple starring Louisa Bradshaw. The following year, she directed “Skybox,” also by Walt Stepp, at TNC. Her direction of “Cocaine Dreams” at the Kraine was described by the NY Post (Chip Deffaa) as “inspired.” Last season, she directed two musicals at TNC: “Who Murdered Love?” a Dadaist musical comedy which she co-wrote with Richard West, and “Bliss Street,” an Indie Rock musical by Abra Bigham from a concept by Rich Brotman with songs by Charlie Sub. The latter show traced the role of the club-owning Sub family in the making of New York’s decade of punk, glam and glitter rock. This February, she has helmed “The Boy Who Listened To Paintings,” a musical theater work based on the memoir of the same name by the late visual artist and poet Dean Kostos (1954 – 2022), an extensively published, award-winning poet.

“Matt, James, and Ben In Lord Finnington Bus In The Positively Puzzling Case of The Purloined Pelvis: At Vicar’s Gate,” written by James Sweeney and Matt Tanzosh; directed and designed by James Sweeney, Matt Tanzosh and Ben Fletcher
World Premiere, 65 minutes
$15, Cabaret Theater

August 25 5:00 PM
August 27 6:30 PM
August 30 6:30 PM
September 1 8:00 PM
September 2 9:00 PM

Inspired in style by Victorian-era “drawing room” plays, this absurd play-within-a-play finds its actors in an Agatha Christie-esque whodunnit so extreme and unhinged that they begin hijacking it from the inside.

Cast
Matt Tanzosh – Lord Finnington Bus, Matt
Ben Fletcher – The Vicar, Ben
James Sweeney – The Chambermaid, The Butler, Vicar’s Nephew, The Constable, Moira, James

James Sweeney (writer, director, actor) is a comedian and writer from New Hampshire. He met Matt Tanzosh and Ben Fletcher as students at Hofstra University, where the three of them spent much of college writing for their campus humor magazine and performing comedy together. After college, Sweeney and Fletcher worked together at the SoHo Playhouse, forcing them to engage with theater and performance in a more profound way than they ever imagined. The three friends have continued to write and perform together a decade later, and now Sweeney has fulfilled a longtime goal of putting them all in a play that’s ostensibly about England.

Matt Tanzosh (Writer, Director, Actor) Is a comedian and writer who is sometimes asked to act in people’s things. Born in the East Village, he spent his time as a teenager hitting the open mics in the neighborhood. He found his creative community in the artistic scene surrounding the Tuesday mic at the Under St. Mark’s theater, where he currently works the door. Tanzosh left for college at 17, where he met Sweeney and Fletcher writing for Nonsense, the campus humor magazine, and developed the original character Lord Finnington Bus, a charming and magnanimous investigator who ALWAYS gets his man! Post graduation, Tanzosh has continued performing in the city, including opening for Gary Gulman and acting in the plays of Roman Primativo Albert. Tanzosh currently hosts and produces shows at the Soho Playhouse, including The Thursday Night Open Mic and Rap Roulette.

Ben Fletcher (actor) is a Queens based actor/writer/director/stand up comic/eligible bachelor originally from Pflugerville, Texas. He met Flletcher and Tanzosh upon joining Nonsense Humor Magazine while attending Hofstra University, where they all instantly decided to be silly together forever. Outside of standup, he is most known for his accomplishments and innovations in the world of Guitar Hero, where he is self proclaimed “At Least Top 30 Active Players In The City, Probably.” He can be found power walking with gumption around the city, loitering at most bar pool tables, and passionately defending the Denver Nuggets on the internet.

“Pulling It All Into The Current,” written by Letta Neely, created by Greg Allen and Letta Neely, directed by Greg Allen
World Premiere, 90 minutes
$20, Cabaret Theater

September 1 2:00 PM
September 3 6:30 PM
September 5 6:30 PM
September 7 8:00 PM
September 8 5:00 PM

This one-woman show uses a fusion of poetry, storytelling, and dramatic performance to bring to life multiple characters–from teenagers to veterans, elders to addicts, and queers to teachers–and creates a series of interconnected narratives that delve into themes of love, struggle, and transformation. The performance is a compelling testament to the power of personal and collective histories, weaving together Letta Neely’s own experiences with broader societal issues, urging viewers to confront and embrace the complexities of their own lives and the world around them.

Cast
Letta Neely

Letta Neely (Co-Creator, Writer, Performer), from Indianapolis, IN, is a Black lesbian playwright, performer, poet, mother, teacher, and community activist. Her artistic pursuits explore the powerful connections and intersections of queerness, Blackness, and consciousness. In 2002, her first play, “Hamartia Blues,” was produced by The Theater Offensive at the Boston Center for the Arts. The production garnered significant recognition, earning two nominations for the IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) awards. Her subsequent plays, “Last Rites” and “Shackles & Sugar,” and a musical, “99% Stone,” were presented in Boston, Philly, and Los Angeles. Her poetry books, “Juba” and “Here,” both published by Wildheart Press, received esteemed finalist positions in the Lambda Literary Awards. Her writings have appeared in anthologies, literary journals, and magazines. She is co-artistic director of Fort Point Theatre Channel. She hosts “FireWater Poetics,” a monthly hybrid open mic event at Emerson College. She directed “Unmasked” by Renita Martin for Revolution of Values, produced by Greg Allen. She has received an NEFA (New England Foundation for the Arts) grant.

Greg Allen (Co-Creator, Director) is an educator, freelance stage director, and producer concentrating on new work. He is currently an Assistant Teaching Professor at Northeastern University. He directed “Pulling It All Into The Current” by Letta Neely, which has been performed in Boston, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and the United Solo Theatre Festival (‘Best Drama’ and ‘Best Direction’ awards) and is now touring the U.S. He created and directed “Thunder – A Musical Memoir,” a one-person show featuring Broadway tap dancer Jimmy Tate, which won the Outstanding Choreography award at the New York International Fringe Festival. His work has appeared on Theatre Row, Ensemble Studio Theater, and Bleeker Street Theater in New York City, as well as various venued in Boston. He holds a theater degree from Sarah Lawrence College, an M.F.A. in Theater Directing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and an M.Ed. from Cambridge College. Currently, he is Co-Artistic Director of ‘A Revolution of Values Theatre Project’ with Letta Neely and a co-Artistic Director at Fort Point Theatre Channel in Boston.

“roller rink death kink sex cult,” written by Skylar J. Beirne
90 minutes
$18, Cabaret Theater

August 31 8:00 PM
September 2 6:30 PM
September 3 9:00 PM
September 9 6:30 PM
September 10 9:00 PM
September 14 8:00 PM
September 15 8:00 PM

It’s exactly what it sounds like – but wait, there’s more! Emma, mourning the “death of her fiancé,” picks up a book called Death: The Final Orgasm. She meets the author, falls in love, and decides to follow him to a community he has created as a safe-space for those with misunderstood kinks. Emma wants to belong to someone other than herself. Almighty Bob is working hard as a small business owner in denial about being a cult leader. There’s 1970’s/80’s music, beach parties, and lots of roller-skating – what more could you want from a death kink sex cult? As Emma navigates the different Levels of the roller rink death kink sex cult, trying to find a place within the community where Almighty Bob, and Almighty Bob alone, will accept her, she is met with murderers, sadists, masochists, necrophiliacs, and a really bitchy woman named Carol, all of whom make Emma question: which “skate” level is she best suited for, and how far will she go to be wanted?

Cast
Allie Donnely, Daniel Oakley, Christina Cotignola, Rose Meehan, Tessie Herrasti, Carl Bindman.

Skylar J. Beirne (playwright, they/she) is a playwright, director, and “performer if you ask nicely” based out of New York City and Milford, Connecticut. Her work strives to provide both a mirror outward, reflecting the grotesqueness of humankind in spectacles of beautiful violence and divine aesthetic, and a microscope inwards, with every artistic venture being another step forward on the journey of self-discovery. “roller rink death kink sex cult” had a staged reading at La MaMa. Other credits include “Press This Button To Elevate to Your Highest Frequency” at The Vino Theater (director), “Jet of Blood via Zoom” (director), “The Elephant Man” at Marymount Manhattan College (director), “Carrier Pigeon” in Theater for the New City’s Dream Up Festival (playwright), and “Man-I-Fest-O” at Manhattan Repertory Theater (playwright). Instagram @skyber and @rrdksc.

“Tongs and Bones Shakespeare: Tempestuous Amusements, Interludes, Noises, and Drollery,” written by Bob Shuman, directed by Frank Farrell
World Premiere, 90 minutes
$18, Community Theater

September 1 8:00 PM
September 4 6:30 PM
September 6 6:30 PM
September 8 8:00 PM
September 11 9:00 PM

“Tongs and Bones Shakespeare” is a work of the imagination, based on Virginia Woolf’s fictional idea that Shakespeare had a sister named Judith, who collected fragments of his works. With this as the conceit, “Tongs and Bones Shakespeare” includes three one acts culled from miscellaneous papers and sides, as well as incomplete early drafts, of the great Bard. The manuscripts, found diluted and corrupted, discovered in Brno, Czech Republic after WWII, were only recognized and identified by collectors in 1993, following the end of the Cold War. The story of the uneducated sibling’s work, with an itinerant actor who helped her organize and compile the pieces, before her untimely death, due to suicide, in London, has largely been ignored and untold. Bob Shuman’s revised versions of the material, directed by Frank Farrell. The fragments highlight characters who do not always play prominent roles in the larger “sister” or well-known companion works, and answer questions such as: What became of the Little Indian Boy in “A Midsummer’s Night Dream”? How did Jacques, in “As You Like It,” lose his mirth? And why did Ariel need to be freed, before ever meeting Prospero, in “The Tempest?” among others. The Tongs and Bones texts have been called “grotesque,” “comic,” and “proto-Brutalist,” and highlight compositions from the recordings of current Congolese musicians.

Cast
Tianna Noni Alley, Eisley Constantine, Meghan Covington, Alejandro Flores, Jennifer Kim, Mychal Leverage, Emily Ross

Bob Shuman (playwright) earned an MFA in Dramatic Writing at NYU/Tisch. He owns the Marit Literary Agency and the Theatre Web site Stage Voices (www.stagevoices.com), which offers video Shakespeare quizzes, world theatre news, Stanislavki quotes, current show reviews and more. He is also a playwright, a senior editor, with experience in mainstream publishing, a college professor, and a recipient of Hunter College’s Irv Zarkower Award for excellence in playwriting. His dramatic work has appeared in four anthologies from Applause Theatre and Cinema Books. He has also co-edited five drama books, including Acts of War, Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays (Northwestern University Press). He has written for the Eugene O’Neill Society and judged work for the New York Innovative Theatre Awards. Shuman is a past fellow of the Lark Theatre Company, and his work has been given readings with the Amoralists, Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, Second Stage, and the WPA, among others. Productions and readings of his work have been given at Ursinus College, Hunter College, and at the Arthur Seelen Theatre at the Drama Book Shop.

Frank Farrell (director) is Artistic Director of the First Flight Theatre Company. He was an actor in Chicago for 40 years receiving three Joseph Jefferson acting nominations and recently returned to NYC where he was born. While in Chicago he directed and produced plays for Free Shakespeare Theatre Company, Temporary Theatre, Shakespeare’s Herd, Steppenwolf Theater, Raven Theatre, Equity Library Theater Chicago, the North Lakeside Players and Theatre-Hikes. For Citadel Theatre in Lake Forest, IL he directed outdoor productions of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “As You Like It,” “Spoon River Anthology,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Scapin.” He formed six theater companies along the way including Theatre-Hikes in Chicago and, in Grand Haven, Michigan, the Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company. In NYC he wrote, directed and produced “Forgotten Soldiers from Our Forgotten War” for the First Flight Theatre Company, the seventh theatre group he has formed. Since 2015 he has published seven books including “Forgotten Soldiers from Our Forgotten War,” all available at Amazon. He has recently directed three short films and one full length.

“The Void,” directed by Kristen Keim, written by Jonathan G Galvez, fight and movement director Emily Anne Davis
World Premiere, 75 minutes
$18, Johnson Theater

August 28 9:00 PM
August 29 6:30 PM
August 31 8:00 PM
September 1 5:00 PM
September 3 6:30 PM
September 5 6:30 PM

In a space just outside our reality, where individuals go in and out of mysterious portals as part of their daily routine, one person starts to question their existence when one of their own doesn’t return.

Cast: Emily Anne Davis, Sophie Hoyt, Robert Maisonett, Joe Marx, Emma Ruth Matthews

Jonathan G Galvez (playwright) is a playwright and performer from the NJ/NY area. He is a co-founder and Artist-in-Residence of Theatrical Gems, a non-profit theater company, and a graduate of the Playwrights Lab at Hollins University. His work has been presented multiple times in the New York International Fringe Festival. His work has also been presented in the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity, the Strawberry One-Act Festival, the Red-Eye International Play festival, and at the Manhattan Repertory Theater. His award winning play, “The Alice of Ward 13,” received its world premiere at William Paterson University. www.jonathanggalvez.com

Kristen Keim (director) is a Brooklyn-based director/choreographer. Directing credits include “Forever Plaid” (Depot Theater), “Lenny Bruce Is Not Afraid” (Frigid Festival 2018), “Stories From September” (SoloCon 2017/Pit Loft), “Waiting…” (PCTF 2017/Winner Congeniality award, Directing Nominee), “Arsenic And Old Lace” (Heights Players), “A Life: TBD” (NYC Int’l Fringe 2015), “Skylar” (NYC Int’l Fringe 2018), “A Hand Across the Bridge” (PCTF 2018), “Return of the Christmas Stars” (Rogue Theater Festival) and a solo show, “Blockbuster Guy.”

Emily Anne Davis (fight & movement director) is a multi-faceted dancer, actor, choreographer and Pilates instructor originally from the L.A. area, where she was featured in numerous dance festivals. She has appeared in cabarets featuring the music of Thomas Hodge and has been a regular performer with the Women on Fire series, with whom she has also served as choreographer. A regular performer and collaborator with Royal Family Productions, she has worked with the company on “Anne of Green Gables,” “The Ugly Duckling” and “COVID Sux: A Musical Parody.” A graduate of UC Irvine, she is also a certified pyrotechnician, working annually for the Macy’s 4th of July fireworks show.

“The Waiting Room,” written by Vel Grande, directed by Dennis Oliveira
World Premiere, 20 minutes
$15, Community Theater

August 25 2:00 PM
August 28 9:00 PM
August 29 6:30 PM
August 30 9:00 PM
August 31 8:00 PM

“The Waiting Room” is a short lighthearted comedy that tells the story of theater goer, Daniel Underwood, who is forced on stage to participate in a play where nothing happens. On stage Daniel navigates a world that doesn’t make much sense, much like our own, while searching for the meaning of why he is here, quite literally in this case. Daniel meets many different people on stage, who share stories and thoughts, some more helpful than others, as he desperately tries to get off stage.

Cast
Brett Fox, Jake Declan, Heather Alzapiedi, Sofia Pastena, Anthony Piccininni, Shaena Kate, A’lysai Robinson, Jess Pace, Khalil Louigene, Max Andrae, Evan Gibley, Jess Sconfienza, Blair Duncan.

Vel Grande (Playwright) was born in Philadelphia and is currently a Utah-based transit executive. He is author of “The Essence – A Ghost Story in Three Days,” a YA serial novel which was a winner of a Moonbeam Children’s Book Award. He has also published two short stories, “Counsel to God” and “Attorney in Time.” He is also author of a one-act play, “Again.”

Dennis Oliveira (Director) is a current student at Columbia University’s MFA Directing program. He is an alumnus of Florida State University’s Grad Opera Directing program, the Institute for American Musical Theatre, the Stella Adler Studio, and Montclair State University (BFA Acting). Other directing credits include Drought (New York Theatre Festival), Mavra, The Magic Flute (Florida State Opera), and The Wild Party (Old Library Theatre).

Art: art: Fight Over the Breeches; Gift of Louis E. Shecter, 1972, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

RALPH FIENNES IN ‘MACBETH’ COMES TO MOVIE THEATERS FOR TWO DAYS ONLY: THURSDAY, MAY 2, AND SUNDAY, MAY 5 (REVIEW FROM NEW YORK) · Apr 29th

By Bob Shuman

Director Simon Godwin’s structured, composed descent into the “defilement of a mind” in Macbeth is objective and clear, filmed unpoetically, yet sustained with uniformly standout performances.  The conception is Brechtian and modern, which allows for hard analysis (the adapter is Emily Burns). Shakespeare’s verbal descriptions, which often start scenes, can be envisioned as eventually forming a base point for the German playwright’s  well-known text above the proscenium.  The uncluttered setting by Frankie Bradshaw, made up of six steps to a platform (with side wings of stairs), uses photography of the audience at a live theatre performance, as well as their laughter and applause.  The story’s plot points register, which, in other versions can get lost, especially as the focus shifts away from the husband-and-wife murderers.  Between the Early Modern English and the supernatural elements, as well as its change from hearth to battlefield, Macbeth is an economic tour de force, but only if you can track it. Because of its precision, this interpretation can be especially helpful for students.

Ralph Fiennes (Tony and BAFTA Award-winner) made an impact  with his ancient Roman conqueror in Antony and Cleopatra (another play he helped disentangle) and, hopefully, that same sense of discovery will inform others who now come to the Scottish play.  The work is straight to the audience and physical:  he kneels at Lady Macbeth’s womb, takes a fetal position on the floor, and engages in heavy swordplay.  He is also an older actor playing the iconic role, which highlights a strange contradiction in the text and challenges anyone playing the part.  The issue is that Macbeth murders in order to become king, and spends a good amount of time preserving his title and succession.  However, the character has no heirs: for all his raging about wearing “a fruitless crown” and “holding a barren scepter,” there is no one to accept a legacy. The audience may be able to rationalize a younger Macbeth as someone who will still be able to start a family, but an older Macbeth, who is childless, has lower chances of becoming a father (he’s worried about succession, when there is none).  If Macbeth does not have a prince, it is a moot point whether Banquo “shalt get kings.”  Imagine also the kind of life Macbeth’s child (if there was one) would have, growing up among killers and the chilling distortions of their minds.

Indira Varma (Olivier Award-winner) makes a formidable Lady Macbeth:  She’s practical, realistic, and goading—and her diction and gestures are impeccable (look at her outstretched arms and hands—she’s unafraid of large physical description and pronouncement). Macbeth can trust her to make untenable choices, and she is bold in their implementation, at least until she, too, succumbs to the nightmare in her mind.  Each of the actors has created very specific, well-thought-out characterizations.  In a sea of impressive work, there really is no mediocre, unindividuated performance–from witches to soldiers to courtiers and advisors, even children.  Two further bright lights are:  Rebecca Scroggs, who takes on a pair of no-nonsense roles:  Lady Macduff, in a brown and yellow checkered housecoat, and Lady Macbeth’s doctor, with a Red Cross armband.  Ben Turner’s Macduff is also exemplary, fusing correct language presentation and valor—for those who appreciate the steadiness of a Shakespearean line expressed, this cast delivers laudably.  Think of how difficult it must be to bring together over twenty cast members, not to mention other theatre professionals, in a high-quality Shakespeare performance.  The sharp work presented here, from The Shakespeare Company, can help make up for the lack of Shakespeare in the Park, in New York City, this season, while the Delacorte Theater is being remodeled.  

A very palpable hit.

 

© by Bob Shuman

Ticketing information:

 

MACBETH

Cinema Release Date: Thursday, May 2, and Sunday, May 5

Cinema Website: MacbethInCinemas.com 

Distributor: Trafalgar Releasing

Adapter: Emily Burns

Director: Simon Godwin

Set & Costume Designer: Frankie Bradshaw

Lighting Designer: Jai Morjaria 

Sound Designer: Christopher Shutt

Composer: Asaf Zohar

Sound System Design: Christopher Shutt & Sam Clarkson

Movement Director: Lucy Cullingford

Hair, Make Up and Prosthetics Designer: Susanna Peretz

Fight Director: Kate Waters

Casting Director: Amy Ball CDG

Children’s Casting Director: Ellie Collyer-Bristow CDG

Voice & Dialect Coach: Jeannette Nelson

Associate Director: Alice Wordsworth

Associate Set Designer: Ceci Calf

Associate Costume Designer: Olivia Ward

Associate Lighting Designer: Tom Turner

Casting Associate: Arthur Carrington

Cast:

Ralph Fiennes , Indira Varma, Ben Allen, Ewan Black, Levi Brown, Jonathon Case, Danielle Fiamanya, Keith Fleming, Michael Hodgson, Lucy Mangan, Jake Neads, Richard Pepper, Steffan Rhodri, Rose Riley, Rebecca Scroggs, Lola Shalam, Ethan Thomas, Ben Turner 

For tickets and a full list of participating cinemas, please visit MacbethInCinemas.com

NYC area theaters where Macbeth will be playing:

Barrymore Film Center: 153 Main Street, Fort Lee, N.J. 07024

Regal New Roc & IMAX: 33 LeCourt Place, New Rochelle, NY 10801

Regal UA Kaufman Astoria: 35-30 38th Street, Long Island City, NY 11101

Regal Times Square: 247 W. 42nd Street, NY., NY. 10036

Macbeth is presented by Trafalgar Releasing. To secure your tickets and witness this must-see event, visit MacbethInCinemas.com.

About Trafalgar Releasing

Trafalgar Releasing, the global leader in event cinema distribution, harnesses the power of cinema to bring fans together in more than 15,000 cinemas across 132 countries.  A subsidiary of Trafalgar Entertainment, Trafalgar Releasing’s operations include production, acquisition, marketing, and distribution of live or pre-recorded content to cinemas worldwide led by an international team based in the UK, US and Germany. Featuring live concerts, music documentaries, award-winning theatre, world-class opera and ballet, and more from leading names in entertainment such as Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, BTS, Coldplay, Billie Eilish, the Royal Opera House, Concord Originals, Hasbro and others, Trafalgar Releasing has repeatedly shattered event cinema box office records, most recently with international distribution for TAYLOR SWIFT | THE ERAS TOUR, the highest-grossing concert film of all time. Information about Trafalgar Releasing can be found at www.trafalgar-releasing.com.

(Photo credit:  © Marc Brenner; via John Singh)

 

‘GRENFELL’ AT ST. ANN’S WAREHOUSE—THROUGH MAY 12 (REVIEW FROM NEW YORK) · Apr 22nd

By Bob Shuman

In the disaster that ensued (Grenfell: in the Words of Survivors, now playing at St. Ann’s Warehouse until May 12), a Syrian man, a disabled man, who in this production is played by a disabled actor, using crutches, waited five minutes next to his front door to see if someone would come to help him: “There was smoke coming, so I decided to use the stairs like everyone else thinking that maybe . . . someone would help.  I was horrified to see that the residents were running at lightning speed.”  That is the human dilemma at the center of Gillian Slovo’s powerful, direct, unmelodramatic, verbatim drama, from Britain’s National Theatre, which transcends nations, nationalities, and boundaries – the idea of how far people are willing to go, or not, to help one another. The play is an examination of the “crack,” the fissure being discussed in the compound term “falling between the cracks,” alluding to those who want to help and can help, as well as to the disjunction between what social services and corporations can do for constituents, in industrialized countries, as well as what our own neighbors can provide, and where they stop.

For those who do not know about London’s high-rise apartment complex, which Americans would recognize as “projects,” and which happened to stand in an area of wealth and affluence, perhaps equivalent, in terms of income for many residents, to zip codes where New York’s Trump Tower stands or Barbra Streisand’s Malibu enclave tans, what happened on June 14, 2017 is a multifaceted story about a badly doctored eyesore and a fire.  The interests, with stakes in such a catastrophic failure, range from those of corporations, politicians, suppliers, and the residents in the Grenville Tower themselves; often the latter being  English-as-a-second language speakers, brown skinned, working, lower, and middle class renters (and those who bought their apartments), dealing with outsized tenant issues that, nevertheless, would be understood by most rent stabilized, or not, apartment dwellers, or owners, as well, in New York and elsewhere.  These concerns include threatening building management, unacceptable fixtures and appliances, and irresponsible maintenance.  A tinderbox in a gilded world, after a botched refurbishment, might be a metaphor for the destruction or better, as one resident described it, the handicapped resident, actually:  it looked as “if you’d taken a cup and covered it in gold.  The cover is better, but that’s all.”

What is intriguing, turning from the historical and civic realities to the way the devastation has been rendered artistically, is the highly original theatre-making that the directors, Phyllida Lloyd and Anthony Simpson-Pike and their production teams have employed, reframing all the ephemera, the debris, the fragments of lost life and personal memory and distilling them into eleven brown, mundane storage boxes (the kind you might buy at Staples).  Thinking creatively, all of the remnant, singed and unrecoverable, smoking, torched, literally, drenched effects of innumerable memories, past ownership, family, dreams, pride, and what was obtained by struggle, distilled into a set of containers, with UPC codes, that become a symbolic, clinicalized setting and its properties.  The minimalism, together with projected photos, interviews and video design (Akhila Krishnan) and film (TEA Films), lighting (Azusa Ono), sound design and effects (Donato Wharton), set and costumes (Georgia Lowe), video clips, documentation—is brutalist, externalized, objectivized, and material.  The spare, icy music (Benjamin Kwasi Burell) is made up of only a few chords.  Grenfell is austere and postmodern, Brechtian, ensuring that viewers are analyzing, accumulating rational, critical thinking, instead of being emotionally drawn in, or, because of the subject matter, overwhelmed. 

Verbatim is a documentary style of drama used infrequently here in the States, perhaps best known to us through the work of Anna Deavere Smith. Viewers do not decide whether the accumulating data makes a character believable or whether the interpretation is “close enough” to reality or the assumptions of an imagined world; it’s blunter than that.  The character is believable because imaginative language is expelled: these are the actual words someone spoke—and because of the challenges of dramatic and literary form, it is exciting when the work, in all its hardness and inelegance and everyday banality, coalesces into an urgent living picture.

Actors are not breaking the fourth wall to enhance a fantasy:  They are part of a real confrontation.   Judge them at your own peril.  Their points of view are not examples of a commonly held belief, which evaporate as soon as we leave the theatre. It is his or her point of view, it is on record, it is part of the historical facts, and it goes with them into the harsh light of day.  Their words are evidence that can be acted upon. The cast, which makes minor costume adjustments, and who are working, at the state-of-the-art St. Ann’s Warehouse, in the round, in the aisles, on the stairs, and with and on their boxes, intensely for over three hours,  are not only excellent because their dictions, accents (Hazel Holder), movement (Chi-San Howard), and behavior  correspond to real people from various countries—they do not even seem to be acting. How would one expect to see these characters played in other ways? The picture does not need to be photoshopped.  Their names are:  Joe Alessi, Gaz Choudhry, Jackie Clune, Hounda Echouafni, Mona Goodwin, Keaton Guimarães-Tolley, Ash Hunter, Rachid Sabitri, Michael Shaeffer, Cominique Tipper, and Nahel Tzegai.

Some of the thoughts that have remained with this reviewer are the following:  how far will people, companies, and governments go to help in communities, in situations far less urgent and dramatic than the ones presented in Grenfell, before they cry “every man for himself” and “abandon ship” or simply throw up their hands?  Or, is the point of abandonment a matter of instinct and human nature?  Importantly, too, has it changed over time?—do people give up earlier now in situations or on each other in life or in extreme situations?  Is the focus more or less than in the past, and is there even a way to ascertain that?  Importantly, especially regarding this drama: can dereliction be traced to accents or race? The Grenfell fire happened seven years ago, and actually, with regard to reparations, and people who lost everything, that is a long time. It is reassuring that the event  has been memorialized, but actually, politicians, who knew the problems with the building design, before the fire ever happened, have, to this day, not been held accountable, as likewise, have companies involved with the building construction.  Grenfell is a problem, which many hope will go away, maybe with time, but that is the point.  Have we become desensitized to modern life and what human beings need and should actually expect?  Or has media normalized us to starving children and brutal attacks, mass destruction and a world of fire, actually addicting us to violent stories that disappear as news and new cycles change?

The Grenfell story is ongoing . . .

© by Bob Shuman

Tickets for Grenfell: in the words of survivors are on sale now and can be purchased at stannswarehouse.org. Performances take place April 13, 16–20, 23–27, & 30 and May 1–4, 7–11 at 7:30; April 14, 21, 28, and May 5 & 12 at 5pm; and April 20 & 27, and May 4 & 11 at 2pm.

The production opened on Sunday, April 21.

Photos: Teddy Wolff

Press: Blake Zidell

Note:  For transparency, Bob Shuman helped compile a drama collection, entitled Acts of War:  Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays (Northwestern University Press), one of which was written by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo: Guantanamo: “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom.”  

                 

AUSTIN PENDLETON:  ‘ORSON’S SHADOW’ (REVIEW FROM NEW YORK) · Mar 20th

By Bob Shuman

The aesthetic issue being explored in Orson’s Shadow (Austin Pendleton’s own play now celebrating its 25th Anniversary) might best be expressed if I show you a picture of the Little Tramp (or the Little Fellow, as Charlie Chaplin and Laurence Olivier might call him). 

My question to you is the following:  Are you viewing a character from Hollywood’s golden age or are you looking at an actor from a Beckett play, 1949 (advertising shot)?  The one was invented during an artistic gold rush, in the early 1900s, and the second, after the devastations of a world war; the first possibility represents the popular entertainment establishment and the second existentialism, socialism or anti-authoritarianism.  The roles of the famous thespians, in Pendleton’s excellent comedy, now playing at Theater for the New City until March 31, are considering the Rorschach, too, with their own bankability at stake, just as the audience, likewise, notices incongruous elements, such as contemporary folding chairs in a play set in 1960, the breaking of the fourth wall, actors seen readying for their entrances, and the disregard of a culminating confrontation with the words: “don’t plead” (and no one is pleading).  Are these characters the same, as before theatre seemed to be changing beneath their feet, are their techniques any different than what they had been, and, if so, why do they feel so lost in the shadows of a theatre rehearsal room?  These are but a few examples.

Examining the film Citizen Kane, critic Pauline Kael noticed also the overlap between commercialism and modernism in her essay “Raising Kane,” from The Citizen Kane Book, and she took sides on the ironies regarding Welles’s film: “The formal elements themselves produce elation; we are kept aware of how marvelously worked out the ideas are.  It would be high-toned to call this method of keeping the audience aware “Brechtian . . . ” (it would also be too early in this review to tell you the point she then makes).

Orson’s Shadow is about the collaboration between Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, and Joan Plowright (and tangentially, Vivien Leigh), in which the great auteur, Welles, is recommended by one of his friends, the English critic Kenneth Tynan, to work with Olivier—a mega star of the ‘40s and beyond–at London’s Royal Court Theatre.  The idea is to have Welles, the pariah, hired as director, for a production of Ionesco’s Absurdist play Rhinoceros (which will also give him a chance to gain funding for a Shakespearean film Chimes at Midnight). Just like today, Ionesco is a hard sell, but his vision is a legitimate and historically critical artistic reaction to World War II (as is Beckett’s) and his empty and little characters illuminate the path to increasing societal conformity.  Ionesco’s revenge is that his insight was valid and, by the ’70s, the hit musical A Chorus Line emphasized the mainstream acceptance of the societal ideal of machine-like uniformity. Brecht, whose characters, for oppositional German theatre, included criminals, sex workers, and the guilty and unapologetic displayed productions that  incorporated machine apparatus, along with film ideas from silents and ‘30s movies: “in the talkies the heroes were to be the men who weren’t fooled, who were smart and learned their way around.”  That’s why Orson’s Shadow is ambiguous—because what appear to be Brechtian ideas are comparable to what was appearing on movie screens, in the early years of the medium. The subject matter of a behemothic Orson Welles and prima dona Laurence Olivier is out of old Broadway, Hollywood central casting, and maybe Warner Brothers cartoons (Brecht would show up there, too, before the House of UnAmerican Activities could decide to kick him out of the country).  Pendleton’s script is not consciously or unconsciously reflecting the captivity of defeated Europe, in either weirdness or depravity.  His characters are too busy and hopeful to be caged in barbed wire. Not gigantic modernism or proto-fragmenting post-modernism, the writing is witty, rat-a-tat-tat typewriter music, with literary repetitions and foreshadowing. Forget Beckett—at its heart this is Hecht and MacArthur, Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Ring Lardner, Moss Hart, Edna Ferber, and dozens of other smart, “wisecracking, fast-talking, cynical-sentimental” screenwriters and literati, to quote Kael, as well as Herman J. Mankiewicz, the man who wrote Citizen Kane, suggesting that Randolph Hearst’s mistress couldn’t sing and who made Welles, the genius, into a roving, homeless, Odysseus.

Patrick Hamilton as Kenneth Tynan, Luke Hofmaier as Sean, the Stage Manager. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.

Pendleton can make you think he’s known you all of your life—you can feel immediately comfortable with him, even if he can enter a room without being noticed, which, oddly, is a descriptor also mentioned in his play. For many he is not a playwright (although two friends and I have loved and laughed with and over this play since 2008) but, of course, a consummate actor and director who acted, as only one example, in Billy Wilder’s 1974 version of  The Front Page, the 1928 newspaper comedy by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur; Pendleton was praised by Pauline Kael for his performance.  In the New York theatre world, everyone will have their stories, but I have known about him since 1972 when my mother came home from teaching in central New Jersey to explain that she had taken her history class to see Nicholas and Alexandra, a movie about the Russian Revolution, at the Criterion Theatre in New York City, on its last day.  Instead, the film had changed and the movie What’s Up Doc? premiered, starring Pendleton—the class was exultant.  Today, at Theatre for the New City, he is sitting two rows in front of me, in a blue sweatshirt and hoodie and blue ski jacket, occasionally chewing an orange-handled toothbrush.  Many will be watching his directing, whether he is part of the casts or not.  From the outside, he seems to allow his companies, often made up of new and unknown talent, to develop their roles from their own insides, in memorable, inhabiting, and complete ways. This is true for Orson’s Shadow, where the roles are luscious, because of the characters we think we know and the aligning interpretations of them.  The actors are facsimiles of who they say they are, handling subtext and rhythms adroitly:  an Olivier who can’t help being prissy and over-balletic (Ryan Tramont); a sane Vivien Leigh holding on and counting before she spirals out of control–a Sondheim line that might apply for her: “Clutching a copy of Life Just to keep in touch” (Natalie Menna); a young, down-to-earth, and, regrettably overshadowed Joan Plowright (Kim Taff); a reticent, stuttering (a difficulty Pendleton knew from his own youth) in-person and bold in-prose Kenneth Tynan (Patrick Hamilton); a compliant stage manager, holding it in (Luke Hofmaier), and, of course, the brilliant, untrustworthy, hammy, eternally damned Welles himself (Brad Fryman). You’d want Hirschfeld to draw them. The mood of the room is cozy.

Austin Pendleton and cast of “Orson’s Shadow.” Photo by Jonathan Slaff.

Shadows are, of course, the central images for the play, and the murky Lighting Design is by Alexander Bartenieff,  incorporating ghostlight, spotlight, footlight, and sidelight; the Costume Design is by Billy Little. Sound Design, using music from the soundtracks of Welles’s films, is by Nick Moore. David Schweitzer is co-director. Mark Karafin is Assistant Director and Company Manager. Jose Ruiz is the Stage Manager.

Oh, yes.  Pauline Kael wrote, by way of Walter Kerr, that in the ‘30s, “A play was held to be something of a machine. . . . It was a machine for surprising and delighting the audience, regularly, logically, insanely, but accountably.  A play was like a watch that laughed.”  That is this play.

She also wrote: It would be wrong to call such a play Brechtian because it comes out of a different tradition.

I leave you to ponder the photo of the little tramp in conjunction with considering Orson’s Shadow.  

© by Bob Shuman.  All rights reserved. (Written without AI.)

WHERE AND WHEN: March 14 to 31, 2024; Theater for the New City, 155 First Ave. (at E. 10th Street) Presented by Theater for the New City in association with Oberon Theatre Ensemble and Strindberg Rep. Thursdays through Saturdays at 8:00 PM, Sundays at 3:00 PM. Wednesdays at 7:30: March 20 & 27. $25 general admission, $15 seniors & students. Pay what you can Thursdays. Box office (212) 254-1109, www.theaterforthenewcity.net Runs two hours with intermission. Opens March 17.

Press: Jonathan Slaff

“THE GOOD SOLDIER ŠVEJK” FROM VIT HOREJS AT THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY (REVIEW FROM NEW YORK) · Feb 22nd

L-R: Sammy Rivas, Vit Horejs, Michelle Beshaw. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.

By Bob Shuman

The Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre (CAMT) has just finished dates at Theater for the New City (from February 1-18) with The Good Soldier Švejk (rhyme that last name with Blake: Schvake).  The company is expert with the wires and strings of their “dummies,” historic creations,  brought from the Old World (the adaptation and direction are by Vit Horejs, who also is an actor; he’s both inside and outside the action). Here,  puppeteers do more than feed lines for jokes or become invisible controllers; the puppets are actually stepping stones to accomplished, freewheeling, and daring performance. The eight thespians, who tell the story, may be in a rehearsal, with their props, within reach—we do know that contrary to the way Eddie Izzard recently inhabited twenty-three characters in Hamlet, they are all playing one hapless soldier    

Perhaps this can be done because Švejk is not of royal lineage and is not trying to stand out (he knows he’s cannon fodder).  He is amorphous, an everyman or every person—he’s rubbery, proletariat, and actors can make him their own. In one sense, the evening asks us to watch dueling stage work—and we are to decide who should play the character in performance. 

Ben Watts. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.

The story, based on a favorite 1921 Czech novel, by Jaraslav Hašek, which was originally written in serialization for newspapers, like works by Dickens were, for example.  Think of the character, too, as a kind of plebeian Don Quixote, on picaresque adventures). As does the gallant, senile would-be knight, also, Švejk has adventures enough for years of dipping into and reading (a current English edition is 752 pages, with classic illustrations by Josef Lada).  There is an acute difference, though, between the undistinguished mass man (he is not too smart, but dumb enough to stay alive, sometimes by stealing dogs to resell) and Don Quixote and many on a list of sentimentalized creations by Charles Dickens.  The distinction is that Švejk is not sentimental in any way; he is an amoral grunt and only knows about surviving in the present (actually, a lying, remorseless character from a Milan Kundera novel may come to mind, as a comparison, where lying is accepted and needed). Švejk does not have great higher aspirations and is not dreaming any impossible dreams; his leitmotif is that he may  be dead by five o’clock.  He is a dummy who has learned that the only way he can survive is by appeasement—which is why, when we meet him in his novel, and here, he confesses to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in an area of the Austro-Hungarian Empire he has never been to, in an incident he knows virtually nothing about.

Gage Morgan (with dog puppet) amd Rocco George (Lieutenant). Photo by Jonathan Slaff.

Adventures with Švejk may have to do with his dognapping and cleaning lady, the police, tavern, and army, Czech common people, and rule-makers and enforcers, even if they aren’t very good at their jobs. The character is the ultimate marginalized untermensch, living in a puppet world where a mop can become a dog; a white cape may become a snowstorm; images of coffins peer out of the set design, and, for the promise of a polka, a miniature stein of beer is not far away. Perhaps the evening could benefit from clearer work with plot, but it may be enough that this is a puppet play for the people, unruly, sometimes raucous, crass, and vital—its uncontainability is part of the experience. Tomorrow a new outrageousness will be pinpointed and need to be performed, spread out all over the floor.

The actors:  Michelle Beshaw, Deborah Beshaw-Farrell, Rocco George, Vit Horejs, Theresa Linnihan, Gage Morgan, Sammy Rivas, Ben Watts.

Production Design by Theresa Linnihan

Press: Jonathan Slaff

Visit The Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre (CAMT) 

Written without AI.

EDDIE IZZARD’S ‘HAMLET’ (REVIEW FROM NEW YORK) · Feb 12th

By Bob Shuman

In Act 3, Scene 2 of Hamlet, the melancholy, introspective Dane instructs the newly arrived players, who will be acting before his new father’s court, “to hold the mirror up to nature.”  For Eddie Izzard, whose one-person show (which runs approximately two hours and twenty minutes, with one intermission, now at the Greenwich House Theater, at 27 Barrow Street, extended through March 16), this means reflecting at least twenty-three characters and two genders. Throughout the performance, she wears black leather pants and beneath a matronly bosom, covered in low-cut black lace, a green-black patterned schoolgirl’s pouf dress.  To show the change between characters, she twirls in it (the costume stylists are Tom Piper and Libby da Costa).  The fashion ensemble’s center is a large button, silver or gold, depending on Tyler Elich’s, Lightswitch’s, lighting design, and the boots are platforms.  Her hair is dirty blonde and short–in a ruminative moment, Dame Judi Dench’s “look” (an actor she has starred opposite) may come to mind, as a comparison (albeit with the addition of extended false eyelashes and long blood red nails and lips).  In short, Izzard is not simply binary, or trans, or female–she can’t be held to any sex.  Instead, she is Shakespeare’s “theatre of others.”

Here, apparently, is what Izzard and her director, Selina Cadell, see when they hold their own mirrors up to reality at the Greenwich House: A solo show clearly makes economic sense, and working minimalistically is supported by the dislocation from unpredictable COVID variations, which can impact a cast and its audience. The set uses white and oatmeal-colored walls, which under certain lighting look weathered (for those who know it, compare  Piper’s set design with the way the BAM Harvey was remodeled, in Brooklyn).  Izzard, who had early experience in street theatre—and who was trained at the University of Sheffield, before receiving two Emmy Awards and Tony and Olivier Award nominations, makes use of a platform, walks and jogs among the audience, in the orchestra, and, inclusively, climbs the stairs to play in the balcony.  Yet she is also giving a streamlined summary of the tragedy, which is much more understandable than enduring multi-performer productions, overwhelmed by great acting (of course, we get the word “ham” from this play) and directorial visions and set pieces. Our sleek technological world has replaced highbrow experts, with the Web and AI, so academics, writers, visionaries, and auteurs now hold on to less power (think of the recent fates of the presidents of Penn, Harvard, and MIT, who weren’t allowed their academic condescension anymore); the questioner, with the right prompt, now holds sway—and is less confused and can be more fully informed. Likewise, Izzard’s Hamlet, won’t get away from you, and the audience will be surprised at how much of the play they really do know, that, culturally, they understand it so well that it can actually be looked at as a lineup of famous quotations. Whether you find that notion appealing or not, this is what democratization looks like, and it is the vision Izzard creates.

Current theatremakers must still battle enough old school obstacles, however, to make their work formidable—finding money and a theatre, dealing with the personalities in a company, complying with union rules, setting ticket pricing, the list goes on.  Izzard has attracted a trendy audience, in early stages of graying hip hair, to this production, pronounced by the naked light during intermission.  A jazz, instrumental version of “Autumn Leaves” helps surround the evening with sax, bass, trumpet, and piano, among other selections, and drinks from the bar are allowed in the auditorium.  Incidental music (by Eliza Thompson), sound effects, and lighting changes, punctuate the recitation. Consider that Stephen Sondheim only became a lyricist and composer because he could not, even in the 1950s, see himself battling to success, as a playwright, his original aim.  He also felt, in the current theatre environments, going back into the twentieth century, that all creators for the stage do not now have enough opportunities and time for commercial practice–and failure—which are required to learn and integrate the lessons of the craft. When those who love the stage feel stymied by the powerful forces at work:  the gatekeepers, swamp, and politics of its world, the bitter pill is that theatre is auxiliary, for everyone, not on a Great White Way or an exclusive vehicle of truth, as proclaimed so many years ago, when there were less diverse options in the arts. Perhaps that is why there is such an incessant cry to see its art as only entertainment, its powerful societal influence, like Hamlet’s real father, only a ghost.     

Izzard uses his opening and closing hands, as if she were playing with puppets, to portray Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet’s old friends. The simplicity of the childhood activity is an example of what Peter Brook identified as the Theatre of the Rough. Izzard gets laughs from the pantomime—as she does with repeating the Bard’s perfunctory lines, “my lord, my lord,” which she throws away.  In fact the six deaths at the end of the play are staged with grimace and observation (Didi Hopkins choreographed the movement and J. Allen Suddeth is the fight director).  Making each character completely individual is impossible and a role like Marcellus, a soldier on the castle watch, is lost, although his famous line about Denmark is intact. Yet Izzard uses hand gestures and a variety of accents, such as cockney and a Scottish brogue to differentiate and offer variegation—perhaps you will never appreciate the Gravediggers as much as you will here. Recall that at over 4,000 lines Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest play, and even skillfully edited, by Mark Izzard (just as a comparison a traditional version of the drama would last over three hours), the immensity of the current endeavor is worth every clap it receives at curtain.  The production is not for cheap laughs, just as the encompassing gender advanced is not synonymous with a drag performance. Hamlet is too pivotal, too entrenched in the Western Canon, for temporal standards of dramatic acceptability to dislodge it. What Izzard’s reflection shows, instead, is a forcible push, from culture to pop culture.

Visit Eddie Izzard Hamlet

© by Bob Shuman. Written without AI.  All rights reserved.  Photo credit: Carol Rosegg. PR: Jackie Green, BONEAU/BRYAN-BROWN.

SHAKESPEARE/PATRICK PAGE: ‘ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE’ (REVIEW FROM NEW YORK) · Oct 22nd

Bob Shuman

I can add colours to the chameleon, Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, and set the murderous Machiavel to school.  Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?  Tut, were it farther off, I’ll pluck it down.–Richard III

Patrick Page’s solo show is a straightforward performance piece of Shakespearean monologues and scenes, in largely chronological order.  The Tony-nominated actor (also writer and editor here) has scrubbed off a good deal of embossed New York political trappings—I would imagine it took muriatic acid—and what remains is an unhacked compilation, with commentary, of the Bard’s villains (including the words of Lady Macbeth), almost in a 19th century arrangement:  a matinee star, howling wind, and low lights and fog (the sound design is by Darron L. West and the lighting design comes from Stacey Derosier).  Page might act the roles in a different manner, should be actually be playing them in specific productions–and he’d no doubt have less quick changes and props–but here he is the consummate pro.  The direction is by Simon Godwin, who probably has a taste for such shadow realms, having once presented a Measure for Measure, which included a tour through a sex club that would make de Sade blush.

Page calls the presentation a séance, and the mood may remind of a setup not only for the swan of Avon but also for a Sweeney Todd or Roderick Usher. Choosing the Halloween season to start All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain is right—and it does not hurt that students might have a chance to see the actor during the school year, while they still may be quizzed and tested for the semester (the title of the play is a quote from The Tempest). The actor is the son of an arts educator, who played at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and he grew up exposed to and reveling in the Bard’s language.  That works for today’s learners, too—and Page knows it.  His first gig for his show was in front of a thousand high schoolers—and the writing held them:  less texting, boredom down.  The show runs at the DR2 Theatre until February (a convenient venue, near the subway, at 103 East 15th Street), but the evening will still be viable as long as the dead walk the earth.  He probably knows that too.

Here is an incomplete list of the dramas Page uses to create real, if often flawed, characters:  Titus Andronicus, Macbeth, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest. Page has done reading on psychopaths and examined the behavior of those in his own life to enable his artistic creations: there’s no surprise that characters who have crossed to the dark side are usually more complicated, and fun, than heroes without warts. What’s surprising is Page’s idea that, in breaking stereotypes, writing such roles may have changed the kinds of parts Shakespeare wrote: they help reveal why the Bard’s evolution looks the way it does, and maybe they changed the dramatist himself. 

The red and black stage design, with a skull and large book of Shakespeare’s plays, is by Arnulfo Maldonado, and the entrance music, for the catalog, is almost every “devil” song you’ve ever heard, from The Charlie Daniels Band to The Rolling Stones.  At the end of the evening, the actor ritualistically cleanses the internal and external space where his villains have come to life—he says the twirling helped when acting in the doomed Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark.  But the play, like Macbeth (or so the theatre legend goes), needs such purification.  Whether it can also help students pass a random and gnarly exam may require further study—but it probably couldn’t hurt.  And older generations will be informed and entertained as well.

© by Bob Shuman.  Photo by Julieta Cervantes.  All rights reserved.

Visit All the Devils are Here

Run time is approximately 80 minutes with no intermission.