Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Friday, 15 February 2008
Serving up more than Kiki.
(See entry for 20 February.)
(Photo: Melissa Hom)
I've added Jonathan Kalb's Hot Review to the list of "Other Theatre Web Sites" at right, and glancing over recent entries there have found a few interesting dissents from the critical acclaim accorded some recent Broadway shows: see, for example, Alexis Greene's response to August: Osage County and Shawn-Marie Garrett's short essay on Spring Awakening.
Otherwise, a highly selective, prejudiced look at the theatrical week ahead, along with other items of interest:
Saturday, 16 February: Mark Schultz's play Deathbed is about "the boundaries of human compassion in the midst of personal suffering," in the context of seven people seeking to come to terms with death. Mark's work has appeared in the past at the Public Theater and the New York Theatre Workshop. Deathbed runs through 1 March at the McGinn/Cazale Theatre, 2162 Broadway at West 76th Street; tickets through Theatermania.
Monday, 18 February: Take advantage of your day off and get to your local bookstore for a copy, fresh off the press, of Bonnie Marranca's new collection of essays Performance Histories. Marranca's a broad-ranging critic of extraordinarily catholic tastes, and her new book includes essays on Wallace Shawn, Maria Fornes, the Wooster Group and food, as well as interviews with Romeo Castellucci and Susan Sontag, among others. (Full disclosure: I copyedited the book, quite happily.) You can pre-order the book, which should ship soon, from Amazon.com.
Tuesday, 19 February: Richard Nelson, until recently the head of the playwriting program at Yale, opens his new play, Conversations in Tusculum, at the Public Theatre, 425 Lafayette Street, at 7.00pm. Set during Julius Caesar's reign in ancient Rome, Nelson's story of "the country you love and the values it represents ... being destroyed by a misguided leader" (oh, that old chestnut) includes a tempting cast, among them Brian Dennehy and David Strathairn; Nelson also directs. More information at the Public's Web page for the show; it runs through 23 March.
Wednesday, 20 February: Tonight at 8.30pm, Justin Bond & Friends brings its new show, Lustre: A Midwinter Trans-fest, to PS122, 150 First Avenue at East 9th Street. A celebration of queer cabaret, the show also features Our Lady J, Glenn Marla and other "surprise guests"; you may know Bond better as one-half of the performance duo Kiki & Herb (he's Kiki). The show runs through 9 March; tickets and schedule information here. And on Thursday, 6 March, the 2008 Ethel Eichelberger Award Ceremony will take place just after the performance (Bond won the 2007 Eichelberger award).
Thursday, 21 February: Also at PS122 this week is Welcome to Nowhere (bullet hole road), the latest from Temporary Distortion. The troupe, which "has a reputation for pushing the boundaries of theatre by staging plays in claustrophobic boxlike structures, with little physical movement and a unique restrained style of acting," has staged this piece as a hybrid of theatre and cinema -- an onstage road movie. Earlier iterations of the piece appeared at the Ontological-Hysteric's Incubator series and at the Chocolate Factory; from here it tours to France. Through 23 February only; schedule and ticket information here.
If you find yourself in the West Village instead, troop on over to NYU's Loewe Theatre, where Marilyn Nonken will be performing a program of "New Music for Piano and Electronics" at 8.00pm. Marilyn will be offering world premieres by Chris Bailey and Tom Beyer, along with pieces by Alvin Lucier, Beth Wiemann and Jonathan Harvey; she'll be joined by guest artist Kathleen Supové on the Beyer. While you're there, pick up Marilyn's latest, beautiful recording of Chris Dench's "Passing Bells: Night," just out on Beyond Status Geometry, a compilation album of Dench's music from Tzadik.
Friday, 22 February: It is one of the great problems of having a full-time, non-theatre-related job that I can't get to events like this year's NoPassport conference at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, being held today from 10.00am through 9.00pm. The theme of this year's conference is "Dreaming the Americas/The Body Politic in Performance," and participants in the scheduled panels include Caridad Svich (who founded NoPassport), Erik Ehn, Betty Shamieh, Jay Scheib, Jason Grote, Ken Urban and literally dozens of others. More information on the history of NoPassport is here; the Segal Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue. The program is free, but a $5.00 donation is suggested.
Posted at 8.35 am in /Openings
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