Tag: Vol. 35 No. 16

The “plot” sounds like a drag cabaret act: seven of filmdom’s most outrageous ladies–including Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Liza Minnelli–meet in limbo and for some reason decide to act out scenes from well-known movies and musicals. But here the women are played by women. And not very well. Ann Sonneville’s sexy, bitchy Elizabeth Taylor […]

Three years ago Jimmy Callahan, just out of college and living at home, started getting severe headaches. Two weeks later doctors found a brain tumor and gave him two weeks to live. “Well,” he thought, “I guess I don’t have to go to work tomorrow.” Black comedy anchors this piece about Callahan’s experience, which consists […]

A determined surreality characterizes the Breakneck Speed Theatre Company’s suite of four one-acts, conceived and directed by Patrick O’Brien. Ominous, dreamlike figures persist onstage after their scenes have ended, like retinal afterimages. Scenes with well-established rhythms blow rods just as they’re approaching the finish line. Dialogue falls into recurring loops, and even the most striking […]

Two of the plays in Pegasus Players’ 20th annual showcase are surprising and textured. The strength of Mikal McLendon’s Writing Your Tragedy, directed by Tiffany Trent, is the very real, very raw dialogue among siblings who react to their father’s death by pulling further apart. And Brian Tasch’s An Evening With the Living Dead, directed […]

John Guare’s thinking farce, set on the eve of the pope’s 1965 visit to New York, concerns a thwarted songwriter (Doug McDade), his good-hearted but crackbrained wife (the moving Linda Reiter), and his celebrity-crazed good-time girlfriend (a flipped-out Eileen Niccolai). The trick is to make the play both achingly funny and painfully real–as Guare says, […]

Big Picture Group’s multimedia performance piece aims to explore the obsessions and communication breakdowns inherent in contemporary romantic relationships–relationships also tainted by consumerism and Photoshopped media imagery. But writer-director Andrew Schneider’s aphoristic dialogue and cliched stage pictures seldom rise above the level of a perfume ad. Schneider seems to feel disdain for the desire to […]

Framed by giant portraits of themselves naked (private parts are hidden by graffiti describing what they love and hate about their bodies), six Latinas tell stories about their own experiences and those of other Teatro Luna members. The ensemble-created monologues and vignettes cover sexual encounters with men, falling in love with women, trying to get […]