“Longing for Grace” is a short play examining the misfortunes of Grace Kelly during her life as the fairytale princess of Monaco and after marrying Prince Rainier III whom she had met while attending the Cannes Film Festival. There are no surprises in the script of the all too familiar story which hailed major publicity about Grace Kelly’s private life…
“And indeed there will be time To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair.” — From “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot Brian C. Petti’s “The Love Song of Sidney J. Stein” is an impressive retelling/re-imagining…
Bereavement is a lengthy and often painful process. Not only does the “next of kin” need to scramble through the thick underbrush of anger, denial, and bargaining – hoping to accomplish some degree of acceptance – but that person also has to cope with the unraveling of the social system of which he or she has been a part often…
Monica Bauer’s one-woman show “The Year I Was Gifted” deals with the heartfelt and endearing themes of loyalty, integrity, survival, and perseverance. It also highlights what occurs when the antitheses of these themes prevail in any segment of the human community and, particularly, in LGBT community and its community of authentic supporters. In “The Year I Was Gifted,” the fifteen…
All goes extremely well in David Koteles’ “After the Chairs” – his inventive reimagining/retelling of Ianesco’s “The Chairs” – until the otherwise well constructed play’s end. Marc (Allen Warnock) and his partner Richard (Don Cummings) are unique re-tellings of Ianesco’s Old Man and Old Woman. Here the couple is trapped in an absurdist cycle of caregiver-patient conversation that serves as…
“Her hair is Harlow gold, her lips sweet surprise / Her hands are never cold, she’s got Bette Davis eyes.” (Donna Weiss, Jackie DeShannon) Jessica Sherr has those Bette Davis eyes along with remarkable Davis lookalike hair and lips. This actor utilizes all of these assets to create a winning retrospective of Bette Davis’ personal life and career. The 1939…
The eleventh annual Fresh Fruit Festival launched its All Out Theatre offerings with Patrick Thomas McCarthy’s “sExtOrtiOn” a complex, multi-layered drama which tackles morally ambiguous themes with a stunning cast portraying equally morally ambiguous characters. In some ways this is an odd “place” for the Festival to begin: the gay characters in this interesting ninety-minute play are neither likable nor…
“Regret that will make you want to set back the clock. And change things— “ (Jenny Glover) In a re-telling/re-imagining of Robert Heinlein’s 1958-1959 short story “All You Zombies,” B. Walker Sampson’s “My Machine Is Powered by Clocks” tackles weighty concepts using a treasure trove of rhetorical schemes and tropes. The artful syntax of parallelisms, juxtapositions, and antitheses (schemes) are…
Reality collides with fantasy in Jonathan Tolins’ new play “Buyer & Cellar” resulting in a near-nuclear reaction of comedy, sentimentality, and sheer brilliance. Some rich and impressive collaboration has ignited the stage of the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater with the opening of Jonathon Tolins’ new play aptly titled “Buyer and Cellar.” First is the combination of the fascinating, well structured script…
“By means of this double, and precisely stratified, dislodged and dislodging, writing, also mark the interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, and the irruptive emergence of a new “concept,” a concept that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime.” – Jacques Derrida, “Positions” (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 42…