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…
There is a remarkable gem playing at the June Havoc Theatre as part of the Midtown International Theatre Festival which needs more audience attention than it received at its first performance. Henriette Rise’s “Trapped” is a provocative, mind-bending play about the importance of not allowing creativity and freedom to be trapped by “structure, normality, society, and authority.” Some characters like…
“It will make me happy to think that my simple narrative may lead some [children] to observe how blessed are the results of patient continuance in well-doing, what benefits arise from the thoughtful application of knowledge and science, and how good and pleasant a thing it is when brethren dwell together in unity, under the eye of the parental love.”…
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…
“So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” – William Shakespeare (Sonnet 18) Globally, it is an easy time to quit. It is an easy time to quit believing in equality under the law; to quit believing in justice; to quit believing in freedom, equal pay for equal…