Stage

l-r: Rich Hebert, Kittson O’Neill and Kimberly S. Fairbanks. (Photo: Paola Nogueras)

Sweat
By Lynne Nottage
Directed by Justin Emeka
Suzanne Robert Theatre, Philadelphia

http://www.philadelphiatheatrecompany.org

Oct. 17- Nov 4

The Philadelphia Theatre Company is back on the boards at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre after a year shutdown to regroup under the artistic direction of Paige Price, who chose Lynn Nottage’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize winning play Sweat to launch PTC’s new season.

Justin Emeka directs a fine ensemble cast of Philly-based actors- Brian Anthony Wilson, Matteo Scammell, Walter DeShields, Kimberly S. Fairbanks, Rich Hebert, Kittson O’Neill, Suli Holum, J. Hernandez and Damian J. Wallace.

Nottage’s drama bounces back and forth between 2008 and 2000 to explore the impact of economic collapse in Reading, PA where factory and industrial plant workers were watching their wages shrink, their jobs disappear as manufacturers outsourced production lines and  their unions splinter. The  worker squeeze was on and it gets very personal.

Sweat opens in 2008 as Jason, a young white man just out of prison faces off with his parole officer Evan who knows that Jason is probably headed back to prison if he doesn’t deal with his rage quick. Jason’s former best friend Chris, black a young black man, also just out of prison but with a plan to rebuild his life.

What brought these two men to this crossroads is told in flashback as they hang out in the neighborhood bar with their families and and a tight group of friends who all work in the same Reading manufacturing plant.

Chris’s mother Cynthia and Jason’s mother Tracey are at the bar celebrating their coworker Jessie birthday and everyone is plastered.  The party is interrupted when Cynthia’s estranged husband Damien shows up strung out on drugs and in dire straits since he lost his job after a union walkout the previous year. He tries to reconcile with Cynthia and convince her he is clean, but she isn’t having it until he gets help. Jason’s mother Tracey is a lifelong factory worker who feels her job is on the line. When Cynthia gets promoted to management it threatens their friendship as rumors of union busting swirls and Cynthia is caught in the middle.

Meanwhile, her son Chris has decided not to waste his life in the factory and plans to go to college for a teaching degree and Jason tries to talk him out of it. Nottage’s carves out the overt and subtle racial divides that surface through the economic crisis as Reading’s white and black workers are pitted against each other. Oscar, a Hispanic who works in the bar, is invisible to the others until he seeks a job at the factory as temp, while management shuts out the longtime workers.

Cynthia frustration living day to day for the possibility of a promotion to management. When she does get promoted, she is used as a corporate pawn and it ruins her friendship with Tracey and Jessie.

The cast is uniformly excellent. Fairbanks, O’Neill and Holum equally dynamic in conveying their private emotional turmoil feeling betrayed by each other.  Scammell and DeShields turn in powerhouse performances as the broken best friends who must come to terms with lives going forward.

Nottage doesn’t short hand much. She drives home the political points in meaningful, if sometimes heavy-handed ways. The images of news politicians from 10 years ago is a bit overdone. But how ripe it is to see them put forth their own empty promises.

There are some some bumpy transitional scenes and Nottage seems to run out of ideas for Tracey, for instance, and O’Neill seems to be stuck voicing the same rant about losing her job. J. Hernadez’s Oscar is almost a poetic symbol and his fate is resolved a bit too neatly. But even with the rough edges and character slights, but is emotionally earned by this cast.

Wallace brings so much depth as Brucie who escapes his reality through drugs and alcohol to the point that it has ruined his relationship with his wife and son. Walter DeShields and Matteo Scammell (Chris and Jason) Kimberly Fairbanks and Kittson O’Neill (Cynthia and Tracey) all navigating the emotional terrain of broken relationships and the path to reconciliation. Suli Holum punch drunk Jessie, seems like comic relief, but Nottage finally gives her a central heartbreaking moment, as she reminisces about her youthful idealist plans.

The set design of the bar by Christopher Ash seems like a real place, with real history. The pool table alone looks like it’s been slept in and spilled on.  Ultimately, ‘Sweat’ wears its raw edges proudly, Nottage has written another brave play that speaks to some of the root causes of where we are as a nation now.

 

PhillyStage

epic radical faerie realness =

judy

Taylor Mac

judy

A 24-Decade History of Popular Music

judy

at the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts

 The undisputed house down performance at Philadelphia International PIFA was Taylor Mac’s A 24 Decade History of Popular Music at the Merriam Theater.

Mac’s opus features over two centuries of hit songs as a cultural document & interpreted through a social justice lens/ GLBTQueer fantasia by ‘judy’ Mac’s preferred pronoun because “my gender is performer.”

the nomenclature perhaps an homage to the great Judy Garland, who used to be called leather lungs, because of her versatility and vocal stamina, qualities that can certainly apply to Taylor Mac, previously performed in the uncharted time zone of 24 continuous hours, but for PIFA a still staggering 12 hour installments.Popular songs and music that annotate the cultural history of America, from decorous baroque of the late 17th century to our tumultuous and perilous times.

Part 1 covered 1776 to 1896 on June 2 covering music from 1776 to 1896 and on June 9, Philly Pride weeken spanning music from 1896 to the present. judy was joined at various times by over 30 musicians and other guests including Philadelphia Temperance Choir, dance troupes Urban Bush Women, Tangle Movement Arts, Camden Sophisticated Sisters/Distinguished Brothers and drag diva bestie Martha Graham Cracker. And working both shows onstage and in the audience the corps of ‘Dandy Minions’ of dancers, aerialists, burlesque performers and superdivas stomping the aisles.

The 246 song cycle showcasing among other things Machine Dazzle’s devastating radical faerie drag realness with judy transitioned into (with the help of dressers) in front of the audience.

I was only able to attend a chunk of four hours+ spanning the 60s-through the 80s~

by that time, judy had been on the Merriam stage for six or so hours- Here are just a few random highlights

First kudos to the incredible vocals of backup singers-soloists Steffanie Christ’an and Heather Christian.  judy’s blazing version of the Stones ‘Gimmie Shelter’ the scorching  duet with Christ’an was the house down as ‘judy’ turning it into a GLBTQueer anthem of liberte.

Bringing girl group realness to the Supreme 60s gay jukebox DL song “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.”  From “I’m Just a Soul (whose intentions are good)” to Nina’s Simone’s “Mother Goddamn” her searing j’accuse against racism in America.  judy gave the backstory of Simone appropriating an essentially minstrel tune structure in a searing  j’accuse against racism in America.

Judy mused on the parallels (and differences) of the black civil-rights movement of the 60s and the gay rights movement. judy providing local history about a son of West Chester PA, black gay activist Bayard Rustin organizing the march on Washington in 1963 and kept in the background by the movement leaders because he was an out black gay man.

judy talked about the protests in San Francisco and historic Stonewall riots, the queens who fought back on the weekend that Judy Garland died. He sang ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ finished off with “over the rainbow” on piano.  A member of the audience portraying dead Judy Garland, was carried out in a spontaneous cortege over the stage and down the aisles with the Dandy Minions in fab funeral drag.

The gay sexual liberation of the 70s transitioned to the catastrophic decade of death, survival and solidarity in queer America.  Judy inspired by the uncompromised gay firebrands of ACT-UP Larry Kramer and Maxine Woolf as inspiration to create unapologetic confrontation through civil action and public performance art.

Judy exalted the soundtracks sex in 70s gay club backrooms, where between hookups “one minute you could be talking about Foucault, the next Cher.” Refusing to be shamed about anonymous sex, joking that it was indeed an intimate experience, consider the truism “a stranger knows something about you that your mother will never know.”

Looking for songs specifically composed by out gay men during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic in New York, when record producers were blocking any GLBTQ expression. judy found a searing testament of courage with out gay British songwriter Marc Almonds’ dirge ballade about grim realities of the disease and the inhumanity that PWAs faced in the 80s.

judy’s raucous survival manifesto through the AIDS years a mash-up of Led Zeppelin’s titanic Kashmir with the static disco frenzy of ‘Stayin Alive.’ judy’s vocal prowess seems almost in a category by itself, judy can turn something like the musically static ‘Addicted to Love’ turned into a polemic against the ‘moral majority’ movement of Christian evangelists and political hypocrites who demonized the gay community and called for PWAs to be put in camps and branded.

judy was loathe to learn his “Snakeskin Cowboy” (about “fag bashing” Nugent proudly said publicly) judy nevertheless turned the song into an ironic cautionary tale about washed up homopanicked fossil rockers.

Judy slipped into a blinding Purple sequined jumpsuit with a glitter Mohawk headdress to perform “the best make out song ever” singing Prince’s “Purple Rain” perched on the Merriam Theater balcony ledge.

Even after eight hours of performance, perfect pitch, even in an air pocket or two. balladeer, B’way belter, soulful chanteuse, art song artiste. judy’s muscled baritone on Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain is Going to Fall” the song reaches dramatic heights that Dylan’s limited vocal ability could not and all of Dylan’s poetry is realized.

On Bowie’s “Pretty Things” judy is the equally powerful falsetto queen and is the baritone crooner on ‘Heroes’ a manifesto of sexual freedom, and accompanied by the burlesque troupe in leather in the balconies, for some acrobatic sex,

Inflatable Macy’s Day Parade size penises of the American and Russian flags are floated & come together.  judy weighs in with scathing editorial as the gasbags deflate.

The transitions from era to era with judy being changed in Extravaganza symbolic costumes in front of the audience, when judy is near naked, it was symbolic too, of this full throated, thrilling performance. She evokes the ghost of Judy at Carnegie Hall, who told  the audience in 1962, that they can stay all night and she can sing them all. In Philly for Pride Weekend judy took everybody over and back through the GLBTQueer rainbow, not only singing the history of pop music, but reclaiming our history through theater, music and drop dead diva drag.

 

 

 

 

PhillyStage

The Wilma Theater’s premiere run of Christopher Chen’s ‘Passage’ closed earlier this month. & in the days after I wrote my review of the production, I couldn’t stop thinking about it & tinkering, not really sure I was unpacking all that was happening in the play.  While doing this, I let too much time pass to place the review on one of my regular theater outlets, but am posting it finally because it is in the final analysis this production was not only thought provoking, unexpected and brave theater that confronts profound issues of our time, even as it strips off the veil of theatrical conceits~ Lew

Passage
By Christopher Chen
The Wilma Theater
Directed by Blanka Zizka
 

 

At the Wilma Theater, director Blanka Zizka’s HotHouse ensemble of actors develop new material ala a repertory company, working on a continual basis in the studio even  between productions. The theatrical equivalent of dancers taking morning class, exchanging ideas and developing methods and skills in the allied arts.

Since its inception, Hothouse has tackled a wide range of new material that isn’t necessarily trending in regional theaters around the country. Christopher Chen’s ‘Passage’ for instance, busts through a number of conventions- including Chen instruction, for instance, that the actors not be typed by sex or ethnicity, meaning  any actor, can play any role. The characters in the play are identified only by their initials.

‘Chen’s 2014 play ‘ Caught’ was a funny, biting satire about western appropriation and exploitation of Asian Art, and a hit at InterAct.  ‘Passage’ has some inadvertent character humor, but it is a deadly serious, socio-political drama.

A ‘fantasia,’ according to Chen with glancing reference to themes in ‘E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India” about the inescapable injustices ignited by England’s colonization of India in the 19th Century.

Chen deals with our current era of colonization, xenophobia and the politics of ‘the other.’  An ideological axis of evil, however veiled by seditious regimes vying for total control.  In dramatic lit terms, “Passage” is closer to the political theater of such works as Marc Blitzstein’s 1938  ‘The Cradle Will Rock” confronting top to bottom societal corruption (which was shut down initially by the WPA) or Larry Kramer’s AIDS polemic “The Normal Heart”-  productions with undecorated social messages delivered in theatrical confrontational ways.

The citizens of the occupied country are indeed ‘the other’ in their own land and the rulers employ micro- and macro aggressions to strip them of their humanity. Meanwhile the culture wars rage and  Chen’s characters draw ‘us’ or ‘them’ political fights that  are always one sentence away from getting ugly and personal. Sound familiar?

The pawns in this drama are only identified by letters. The play opens as Q (Justin Jain) is traveling to Country X for the first time to join his fiancée R (Ross Beschler) and along the way he befriends F (Krista Apple) on a teacher returning to the colonized country, but can’t really tell him why. Q is looking forward to joining his fiancé but nervous about adjusting to a culture he doesn’t yet know.

H (Taysha Marie Canales) and M (Keith Conallen) are colleagues and soon to be former friends. At a social gathering they get into an ‘worldview’ argument about the political landscape of Country X. The have a circular fight about protesters who are now in the streets over a teenager being thrown in jail for steeling batteries.

They are joined by B (Lindsay Smiling) the most esteemed cardiac surgeon in Country X, who wants to bridge divides at least with his peers and tries to be the diplomat to no avail.  Later, B’s  view changes when he is reprimanded at the hospital where he works for being late due to the roads being blocked because of the protests.  Then when he attacked at gunpoint, but he is the one who ends up in jail, he is a disposable 2nd class citizen. F (Krista Apple) meets him in the Temple and they are attracted to each other but events have them to distrust each other.

Meanwhile, Q and R are reunited lovers, but Q can’t ignore the social injustices he sees in the country and questions R’s acceptance of them.  R asks him coyly “Don’t tell me I have to walk on eggshells around you” and Q responds, “only if you say the right thing.” R and J (Jaylene Clark Owens) justifies the jailing of the teen with her colleague R, and they justify towing Country Y’s nationalist line.  Q sets forth into the ‘cave’ to go it alone, to begin his transformative moment in a new country and  is confronted with a monstrous entity.

Whatever appearance of stability is, the grotesque mask that obscures police state tactics already at work. And indeed the utopian scenarios by Country X fall away to get to the ultimate political end game. Chen keeps the audience on unmoored theatrical footing, as we try to connect with what is happening and unravel the implications.

B seeks refuge in the Temple and talks about a time when people were more meditative and private about their inner lives and now the inner world becomes an outer commodity- or you lose, socially, professionally, emotionally and certainly politically.
The temple and the cave, cultural touchstones are the backdrops for all the unfolding existential journeys of these amorphous characters.  The maze is ultimately unknowable metaphysical space that is in the end no sanctuary from the dystopian void. Adding to the mysteries, Sara Gliko morphs into other creatures,  a gecko and a mosquito, making pointed comments like a survivalist Greek chorus.

As simmering as all of this surreal landscape is, Zizka’s focused direction is naturalized and a balancing act of Chen’s colliding polemics, while respecting Chen’s jarring narrative structure, some scenes striking as overwritten, others  underwritten.  The cast fully committed in every moment.

Meanwhile, Phil Colucci’s sound and music design transports in tandem with Matt Saunders set is sculpted black and white spaces, with geometric floor designs for the temple and the cave labyrinth carved out with lighting.
Zizka continues to develop plays with substantive social justice themes and this is certainly one, even as it almost collapsing under its own weight. Chen seems to abandon his characters and throw a wrench into his own narrative as Sara Gliko directly addressing the audience ala a motivational speaker in an extended, and unnerving way, even inviting us to leave or stay.  I, for one, had a squirming dislike for this final scene & yes wanted to leave the theater. Other audience members who were bounding to their feet to applaud, were clearly moved by this vaporizing of the fourth wall.

A week later any bets I wasn’t the only one still think about Passage and these characters trying to survive the looming monsters of oppression from without and within.

“Passage” is a brave theatrical experiment by Chen and some of it probably should be more narratively focused,  but without doubt it is daring theater by Chen, Zizka and Hothouse players.   They are committed to new theater that isn’t, by design, meant to be easily, or safely, deciphered.  And that’s what living theater in a hostile, anti-intellectual, oppressive and politically insane time is all about.

Stage

RIZZO  by Bruce Graham

directed by Joe Canuso

Theater Exile & Philadelphia Theatre Company

Suzanne Roberts Theatre, extended through Oct. 23

“Love me or hate me… you will never forget me.” So promised legendary Philly mayor Frank Rizzo used at a climatic end line Bruce Graham’s bio-play Rizzo.  Indeed, Rizzo’s rep lives on. At the 2016 Dem Convention in Philadelphia, members of Black Lives Matter placed a KKK hood over the Rizzo statue near City Hall to remind all what Rizzo represented to Philly’s African American population.

Rizzo premiered last year at Theater Exile and the revival with the same cast co-presented at The Roberts Theater by Philadelphia Theater Company.  The Mummers were in the lobby posing with former mayor Ed Rendell, who recounted a few stories about being DA under Rizzo before the play.

As police chief Rizzo was a flashpoint of racial and minority divides and his police state tactics continued when he became mayor.  White majority voters of the time elected him twice to ‘clean up the city’ and shut down crime, despite his own infamous scandals, like his lie-detector stunt which proved he lied, his flagrant cronyism and other abuses of office.

Graham’s explores the dualities of Rizzo’s character as well as the good, bad and ugly of Rizzo’s political life.  RIZZO debuted at Theater Exile last, directed by Joe Canuso and starring Scott Greer as Frank and Damon Bonetti as a political writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer who covered Rizzo’s years in office.

The story is told in flashback as Rizzo is mounting his 3^rd term bid for office. Rizzo tries is muscling a police officer to swear an affidavit that he saw his opponent Ron Castille drunk and out of control. The highs and lows of his career are depicted in flashbacks about his life growing up in South Philly, becoming a beat cop, then police commissioner, and then twice mayor.

‘The showdowns in black neighborhoods, his routine raids on gay bars and hauling in “faggots” in Center City.  He calls on unions to shut down the Philadelphia Inquirer to prevent papers getting out an unflattering story. His enemies list and his publicity stunts to a lie detector test and Rizzo is exposed. Meanwhile, his affability in many neighborhoods and his personal touch out of the public arena, kept him in power.

Graham covers these episodes, many of them ‘told’ rather than ‘shown’, some with more fluency and dramatic fire than others, more consistently interesting is the private man. Graham builds a portrait of Rizzo as not just political myopic, but a man of uncontrolled impulses, private doubts and not to mention an untamable mouth.

One of the strongest scenes is the newly appointed Police commissioner being dressed down by his father, a beat cop, for using bullying tactics, including striking a “hooker” and giving her stitches.   And all too brief scenes with his wife Carmela.  His chess game with the reporter, also in clipped scenes, is eclipsed by big events.  So Graham constructs an erratic theatrical arc. But, they don’t overshadow the play’s many strengths, starting with a great cast.

Director Canuso keeps everything moving with invention and but Graham’s over use of characters describing action, rather than dialogue scenes, but the cast ably glides through some heavy handed monologues.

Damon Bonetti, in a largely narrating role, until the second act, brings wit and naturalism to this old –style nice guy reporter who still keeps digging until he has the real story.   Amanda Schoonover plays all the women’s roles, most impressive in her instant range from the protective Carmela Rizzo to Shelly Yanoff who took Rizzo on by gathering petitions for an election recall of his win.

All of the supporting players Steven Wright, Robert DaPonte, Paul L. Nolan, William Rahill juggling also juggling multiple roles with ensemble ease.  Wright a standout in his wry portrait of black civic leader Cecile B. Moore who goes head to head with Rizzo over the strife he causes in North Philly.

But the night belongs to Scott Greer, a fine musical theater actor, a five time Barrymore Award winner adds another portrait of flawless performances of a complex man.  His Frank accent perfect, without trying to imitate Rizzo, and embodies the image and conveys the inner turmoil of his many masks.

Stage

Inis Nua Theatre Company

The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning
by Tim Price
directed by Tom Reing

The Proscenium Theatre at The Drake through May 15(photo Kory Aversa)

Private Chelsea Manning is a transgender woman serving a 35 year sentence at Leavenworth Prison for leaking classified military secrets to WikiLeaks in 2010 when she was then army tech specialist Bradley Manning serving in the Iraq War. In the eyes of the military, she is a condemned traitor, but for others who champion whistle blowers, including Sweden’s 2014 nominating Nobel Peace Prize Committee, she is a hero.

The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning, a bold 2013 play by Welsh playwright Tim Price is in its US premiere by Inis Nua Theater Company in Philadelphia. Inis director Tom Reing orchestrating a visually compelling production at the Drake Theater and directing a uniformly fine ensemble cast. Price’s visceral, sometimes surreal theatrical account of the key events leading up to Manning’s imprisonment, is more impressive as an incisive character study to investigate what made Manning a born rebel with a cause.

Price intriguingly depicts the psychological journey of Manning, without coming to any quick answers and this device proves powerfully eloquent with this cast, all playing multiple roles, including each portraying Manning at different times. The cast- Trevor Fayle, David Glover, Campbell O’Hare, David Pica, Isa St. Clair and Johnny Smith- each bringing out different aspects of Manning’s character. There is a lot of stage business and physical demands as the actors play soldiers, officers, lovers, family members and a formidable theatrical boot camp. David Glover, for instance, is a nail-hard drill sergeant and minutes later equally believable a scene later as Manning going through a humiliating interrogation.

It opens with Bradley being dressed and undressed, literally and figuratively, by his platoon mates while they hurl a torrent of accusations and slurs about Manning exposed the realities of atrocities and raw war footage; data that was data is cited by some as being a catalyst for anti-American sentiments in the Mideast.
The play bounces back and forth in time, jarringly at times, to the year Manning spent in a Welsh high school. Johnny Smith conveys so much of Manning’s inner turmoil in these scenes and Isa St. Clair is great as the outwardly sympathetic Welsh schoolteacher who nonetheless tries to force Manning to rat out other students for their classroom antics.

In his early 20s, Manning is now stateside trying to get into MIT, while working dead-end jobs. He begs his disdainful father to pay his tuition and his father orders him to join the army to get a free education. Manning signs up and is targeted as the weakest link in boot camp and is continually singled out for rough treatment as a perceived gay soldier under the military’s DADT policies. He even joins protests of Prop 8 in California where he meets a grad student and they fall in love.

Manning was targeted and harassed under the military’s draconian DADT policies, except when his expertise in the field was needed. He was forced to pretend his boyfriend in the states was a woman to his officers and comrades. Trevor Fayle and David Pica has instant chemistry in Price’s economic scenes that establish their relationship and how its emotional reality inspires Manning’s convictions.

But the pressures of military life and his delayed career plans continue to weigh on him. He starts rebelling in the military and protest being bullied by fellow soldiers and has a reputation for being difficult and acting out inappropriately, including charges of striking a female officer.

Expected to be dishonorably discharged, his programming skills are deemed too valuable as the wars in the Iraq spirals out of control. He works in intelligence gathering and has clearance in the repository of raw Intel, electronic and video of massive atrocities and questionable missions and cover-ups. Manning turns whistle-blower and releases thousands of pages of documents on the internet, is incarcerated, put on suicide watch and, in Price’s narrative, subject to psychological torture by the military.

Some of Price’s jarring narrative structure, especially the high school scenes border on redundant. Meanwhile, Reing’s physical theater elements, with fight direction by Glover, are consistently inventive. A droning scene of mental torture that keeps hitting the same blunt note is contrasted with an inspired breakout dance denouement to GaGa’s LGBTQ anthem Born This Way.
Gritty set designs by Meghan Jones in tandem with precision video projections (Janelle Kaufmann), sound (Zack McKenna) and lighting design (Shon Causer) all well orchestrated elements. The disturbing sights and sounds of war, admirably, more thought provoking than facilitating mere flashy effects.

Stage

Michael Castillejos in Gentlemen Volunteers (photo Lindsay Browning)

Pig Iron Theater Company is renowned as one of Philly’s most innovative theatrical troupes. They are celebrating their 20th anniversary by restaging their production of Gentlemen Volunteers by Suli Holum who was also one of PITC ‘s founders. First staged by the company in 1998, its powerful antiwar message resonates more that ever. Set in 1916-17 as America was about to enter the WWI, it follows the lives of Red Cross nurses and soon to be US recruits on the front lines in France.

The play is deftly staged at in the rustic brick and iron foundry space at Christ Church Neighborhood House and co-directed by PITC founders Dan Rothenberg, Quinn Bauriedel and Dito van Reigersberg.
The audience is instructed to move around en la ‘promenade’ around these scenes, which leads to some audience scrambling, but this element, playing to the scene, jars the senses.

There is a captivating musical prologue as the audience files in the theater as Francoise de la Tour (Melissa Krodman) sings a rousing French cabaret song and if followed by Jean (Michael Castillejos) her accordionist who then sings the saucy Ragtime tune “Everybody’s doing it!”

The story starts on the Yale athletics field where a recruiter is looking for volunteers to assist in France in anticipation of the US entry into the war. Yalies Rich Conwell (Bryant Martin) dreams of learning how to drive a Model T, while Vincent Barrington (Scott Sheppard) a budding poet looking to chronicle his experiences in the service of a good cause.

They head ‘over there’ as drivers and assistants in a Red Cross field hospital near the front where Francoise is head nurse, who runs her unit with steely command. Her English cousin Mary Pinknell (Lauren Ashley Carter) has also just arrived to start as a nurse volunteer. She starts off on the wrong foot, but Francoise gets her up to speed without pause. Mary is attending her first patient, with Rich suddenly at her side, who then faints she attends to a wounded soldier’s wound. The chance meeting turns into something more, but not before Francoise walks in admonishes them “this is not a cabaret.” she barks. Later she tells her nurse corps (aka, the audience) “You are here working between life and death….and don’t you forget it.”

Lauren Ashley Carter & Bryant Martin (photo Lindsay Browning)

But Francoise forgets it and falls into a torrid affair with Vincent, after they get drunk in a bar. Now she doesn’t have time to keep an eye on Mary, who spends every off duty hour in bed with Rich.

The directors devise elements of physical theater, mime and ensemble acting to orchestrate Holum’s gritty, economic, sometimes whimsical dialogue, elegiac meditations about war.

Some of pantomime scenes – in the operating room or operating an ambulance crank-shaft on period vehicles are easy to decipher, but there is also more cryptic mime relating to the senses and emotional motives between the characters, who remain tentative under the stress and trauma of war.

The lover scenes are particularly well handled with tension and tenderness of the circumstances. Francoise and Vincent fall in love and their after hours affairs unravels la Tour’s guarded secrets. When they are separated Vincent writes her passionate letters, but she can’t bring herself to read them. Meanwhile Mary has surprising news for Rich, but he has joined up as a commissioned Doughboy off to fight in Italy. Everybody looses. Vincent articulates the pyrhic victories and vows to write about the realities of war.

In brief flashbacks, Castillejos is a dynamic Jean, revealed as Francoise’s husband, a casualty of war. He also is L’Homme d’ Orchestre, playing a Ravel nocturne on clarinet timpani for various precision battlefield effects. He also performs the original (award winning) sound designs by James Sugg. As in the days of radio they are performed manually with such items as paper, fabric, typewriter, eggbeater, enamel basin, surgical instruments, etc.

As Vincent, Scott Sheppard conveys warmth and humor and a sober drive of a writer witnessing fateful events. As Rich, Bryant Martin has the spunk of an All-American and deftly communicates his growing disillusionment observing the real cost of war. Lauren Ashley Carter is all heart and courage as Mary and has a hilarious mis-en-scene doubling as an snarky cockney war photographer. Melissa Krodman gives nothing less than a tour de force performance as the heroic and tragic Francoise de la Tour.

During the run, there are two scheduled benefit performances performed by the original 1998 cast which included Dito van Reigersberg and Quinn Bauriedel as Rich and Vincent, Cassie Friend as Mary, Emmanuelle Delpech as Francoise and James Sugg as Jean.

Gentlemen Volunteers runs through Dec. 27, 2015 with performances at Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 N. American Street, Philadelphia.
http://www.pigiron.org

Political Theater~ GOP doubletalk edition

(LW pic from Philly Pride Parade, June 2014)

Sen. Paul courting gay votes or is it the same two-steppin’ GOP moves?

Earlier this month, at an event in Iowa, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) sent his first gay weather balloon up, sort of regarding his position(s) on marriage equality — he DID support a constitutional amendment defining man/woman only, but if the GOP wanted to win elections they had to have to be more inclusive… that they might, as a party have to at least be willing to agree to disagree.</p>

“I mean, many of these people joined the Republican Party because of these social issues. So I don’t think we can completely flip.” Paul said. Fred Sainz, vice president of the Human Rights Campaign, told MetroWEEKLY that Paul’s comments have proved puzzling. “I can’t decide whether to be disturbed or pleased, so I’ve settled on confused,” he said. Fred is more diplomatic than I am. I’m just pissed at Sen. Paul’s smug ambiguity. His song has been sung with different verses so many times before by politicians of both parties, but the GOP has the worst record on saying they want a ‘bigger tent’ and collapsing that tent once they get in.

In 2000, for instance, at the Republican Convention in Philadelphia, at a press event hosted by the Log Cabin Republicans ostensibly to congratulate itself on the headway it had made courting the GOP, who in turn was starting to count gay votes for George W. Bush. David Greer, then head of the PA Log Cabins who I interviewed for an oped piece in the Advocate (Who’s Afraid of Gay Republicans?) told me that a Bush campaign would welcome qualified personnel who happened to be gay into the “highest echelons of the administration.” Meanwhile, across town on the convention center floor the party was scrubbing an suggestion of pro-gay civil rights language from their platform. Even the loyal and deluded Log Cabin Republicans have given up on believing GOP’s lies about acceptance and tolerance.

Sen. Paul may think he courting a more moderate voting bloc, but, it is in the most cynical way and gay America knows it. If he really feels non-condemning toward gays why isn’t he railing against the 63 Texas GOP legislators who just endorsed “conversion therapy” methods to de-gay youth. Bet they still have those electro-shock kits from the ’50s stashed away.

The GOP makes much fodder out of Barack Obama’s “evolution” on gay marriage, to cover any charges that their party alone is homophobic. The president has turned his page big time and has done more to advance GLBTQ civil-rights initiatives starting with the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and a host of other gay rights initiative. Yet in 2014 we have to hear from the crazed right wing of your party theories about the ruination of straight marriage, indeed, the collapse of America if marriage equality goes national . Wait, I just remembered, I thought that was supposed to happen with the repeal of D*A*D*T*?

Paul’s two-stepping is bad enough, but the soon to be retired, rabidly antigay Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) isn’t so cautious anymore. In an interview with a Christian radio station she proclaimed that the gay “agenda” is to do away with consent laws and that we will promote pedophilia. For this statement alone, Bachmann should be answering to the American people on the floor of Congress. But, because she is viewed as a religious conservative, she gets a pass from her colleagues of both parties.

I wonder if Bachmann or even Paul ever heard of decorated Marine Eric Alva, the first soldier wounded in Iraq, or would care that he is gay and fought for their freedoms on the front line? I wonder if they know that before Edith Windsor won her DOMA case, she took care of her lover Thea, who had progressive multiple sclerosis for 30 years. Windsor had to sue to keep the assets that they had earned together because they were not recognized at the time as a couple in New York.

Course, Bachmann and Paul don’t want to talk about any achievements contributions of GLBTQ artists, writers, scholars, lawyers, doctors, teachers, community leaders, police, senators or even their own colleagues in a respectful way. GLBTQ American citizen who contribute inestimably every day while bigoted ‘preachers’ and politicians are feverishly working to marginalize us.

What would Bachmann have to say face to face to Sgt. Alva? Would she be just as condemning as when she is spouting hate speech from a radio booth wrapped in her barbed – wire flag, bible in hand? And what nerve for you Sen. Rand Paul to think you can politically frame a civil-rights movement that started over 50 years ago? Can you tell us what you have ever put forward that expressed any truth about GLBTQ Americans that you should expect even one vote from us

Booksbooksbooks

Dan Savage’s latest

Columnist Dan Savage, the gay author, activist and relationship guru to a large straight readership via his syndicated column Savage Love, is also a media hottie, seen frequently on CNN and HuffPost.

He is, happily, anathema to the religious right and the GOP hacks, who want to diminish his clout. They are wasting their sanctimonious breath. He is after all the perpetrator of the infamous cyber bomb that will forever, link politician Rick Santorum to…a byproduct of…well you know the rest. He weighed in on many of the words and deeds of all of the toxic spawn of the GOP primaries and he is more popular than ever.

Savage pulls few punches on a whole range of issues in his new book American Savage, a collection of essays about sex, politics, religion, media, gay-parenting, social-networking, realpolitik and homophobia. The book is also a snapshot memoir of Savage’s 17 year marriage with his husband Terry and their 15 year old son DJ, who they adopted at birth. His essays are witty, personal and economic in detangling complex social issues past buzzwords or media scenarios.

Whatever methods Savage uses to expose hypocrisies, he is in fact never more eloquent, lacerating or witty when he goes after anti-gay politicians with facts, history and logic that eviscerates the anti-gay myths, lies and aspersions leveled toward gays and minorities.

For GLBTQ Americans, Savage is no less than a hero, for his most inspired It Gets Better Project, his anti-bullying campaign. His and Terry’s outreach to GLBTQ teens who live in oppressive or abusive circumstances or are struggling with their sexual identity. Everyone from President Obama to the San Francisco ball team have made IGB videos.

In one of the book’s most poignant pieces My Son Comes Out, Savage turns his son’s announcement that he is straight into a snapshot of how normal such a scene now is. A normal a scene as a Norman Rockwell painting. Meanwhile, it is also routine for MJ to get dropped on his grandparents so his parents can attend the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco for a day in the sun for s&m carnivale.

Savage is an absolutist about safe, consensual sex, no matter what kink is explored. He has given tutorials to many a straight young man on the location of the clitoris. Savage writes about sex not only in healthy, practical and clinical terms, but as a vital pursuit of remaining a happy, healthy and fulfilled human being.

His uninhibited scholarship of sex education spills over into politics. Savage, is nonetheless, just as frank in exposing right wing political machinations as they apply to issues not only about gay civil rights, but about physician assisted suicide for terminally ill patients. In his essay ‘Extended Stay’ he writes movingly about his mother’s right to die with dignity and her stated desire to be kept out of pain. “It wasn’t a choice that the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict, or Joel Connelly had a right to make for her.” he writes.

In ‘Bigot Christmas’ recounts Savage’s now infamous ‘dinner table’ debate with Brian Brown, head of the antigay group YouTube debate with Savage faces down the antigay dragon with logic and a money shot provided not by Savage this time, but his husband Terry, who had had enough of suffering fools gladly (even for the famous husband) Terry asked Brown “Do you think our son should be taken away from us?” Let’s just say that the bigot’s answer did not sit well with the gay father, husband and homeowner. Huh… cue Jaws music.

Political theater

Rick, get a gay clue

After he triumphed in a razor-close victory in the Iowa caucus, former PA Senator Rick Santorum is close to the top of the GOP heap and his campaign is $1 millions richer overnight. The next day, Santorum was singing his same old songs to students at the College Convention in Concord, NH, he faced boos and hisses when a young woman asked him how he could be against same-sex marriage and for individual freedoms, he so cherishes as put forth in the US Constitution.

In Rick Santorum’s world, the question of the legitimacy of gay relationships is put in his own hypothetical meat grinder that if you are talking about two men or two women getting married than why not 6 men, four cats, siblings, polygamists and in fact whole communities of people who love to watch reruns of All in the Family.

As soon as the young woman asked, he was countered by the response “we’re not talking about polygamy’ that’s not what we’re talking about’ he shut down the Socratic session ‘I ask the questions and I call on you,” he said, obviously miffed. (Just for the record Rick, Socrates was gay.)

Of course, Santorum was infamous when he was PA Senator, for his homophobic views and his antigay agenda, more than anything else he did. Although he is claiming to have brought a $1 billion in urban renewal revenue to the blighted Chester, Pa., which bears repeating if it is in fact, true. He’s been singing this marriage equality threatens real straight marriage as a logical dictum to anyone who will listen.

But now I feel like it can’t be dismissed as morbid stupidity. Santorum is obviously a mouthpiece for the ultra-conservative, evangelicals who get rich demonizing gays. What Santorum does in effect is not address the fact that you can’t win elections by demonizing a class of people in 2012.

Rick, do you really think that millions of GLBT identified, tax paying, law-abiding Americans are going to stand by and let you trash them with hackneyed myths and lies about their lives in a national presidential campaign? Who does he think he is going to be facing on stump speeches in New York City, San Francisco and other gay populated metropolis? He also completely ignores their thriving communities, locally, statewide, nationally and internationally.

No matter how hard you try Rick, the world if full of people with same sex attractions and they are going to live their lives. The closet will exist only in tyrannical, oppressive regimes, not in ostensibly free societies. You forget, even in the queer baiting 50s and 60s, of J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy, when gays were summarily rounded up and thrown in jail (a right of passage for gays, lesbians and drag queens of a certain age) the sub-culture thrived and grew into the political force it is today. No one is talking about marriage to their pets, or multi-partners ala old-time Mormonism, they are talking about committed consenting adults, who in some cases have been together for decades.

Marriage equality will not lead to the disintegration of the institution of heterosexual marriage. Straights will still be able to get weekend arranged Elvis officiated weddings in Vegas in between Barry Manilow shows. Marriage equality is a reality that is happening all over the globe.

But, Rick, politically, if you want to advance, you are being too stupid to be an idiot. Even Michele Bachmanm, the other hysterical homophobe among the candidates, immediately started to pull out of her previous antigay statements, because she knew that even though that queer baiting money got her where she was, it would cost her on the national political stage.

Yes, Rick, even if you do end up at the bottom of a Romney ticket you still have to accept that there are radical, lesbian, feminist Americans who have a power base now. The military didn’t fall apart when DADT was repealed and when there is marriage equality everyone who is in a healthy heterosexual marriage is going to continue on. That Rush Limbaugh even paid the biggest queen in the world $2 million to sing “Your Song” at his wedding.

You have survived in your homophobic, no contraceptive bubble for so long that you refuse to accept certain facts. If you want to continue your campaign, seek therapy for your homophobic tendencies, it is not normal to harbor such negative views about individuals that you obviously know nothing about.

Boyle&Palin Schticking Points

In vaudeville, everyone got a chance, even an untested act. Course that is one of the reasons vaudeville died, but everyone loves that backstage story. If someone is a big success and get too big, they have to be knocked down. Everybody loves that story too, but it doesn’t always play out like that, which brings me to the meteoric careers of Sarah Palin and Susan Boyle.

Boyle burst on the scene belting out ’I Dreamed a Dream’ from Les Miz which went viral on the internet overnight and propelled her to international stardom. Unused to instant success and pressured to repeat it, she instantly suffered a backlash from overexposure and her voice started cracking, and her make-over looked draggy from the kleiglights.

Boyle did the only thing a diva in training should do at that point– she had a public nervous breakdown and used the time to become media savvy enough to make such a comeback that it made her star shine even brighter. The fact that she sings everything the same way, with dodgy range to boot is beside the point. People love her story.

More improbable than Boyle’s international success is the iconic political status Sarah Palin achieved in one election cycle. She was a cynical VP pick by a desperate John McCain who cared about nothing but winning and when he saw that was impossible, deflected the attention to someone who would recharge his campaign. McCain was jaded enough to know that she would become an instant media star, however untested. Maybe the only credential she could show as a future Veep.

After the election Palin didn’t shrink back to Alaska after the election. She proved transformational enough to broker big money and influence in back of her for staying power no matter how vaporous her politics. People loved her story and she was able to walk on all of the political quicksand that was engulfing Republicans and Democrats alike. She cast herself as the antiObama and saw an opening for his job. She stalked away from her governorship to lay the groundwork for the presidency.

Her premature retirement may have been the first real ripple in the tide turning against her. Even people who thought Katie Couric was ’out to get her’ because she pressed Palin on what magazines she read, didn’t like it when Palin walked away from an elected position. Still, she endured as the economy got worse. People didn’t seem bothered that she made up facts to attack the Obama presidency. They hung on her every word.

They weren’t disturbed by her incendiary creative rhetoric or that the only death panel was the one in her head. They listened to her vaporous speeches and didn’t demand that she articulate what she was advocating. She never gave policy speeches. Her calling card was to attack, ridicule and tear anyone on the left apart.

People also didn’t seem bothered that when there was a pushback, even in the form of a policy rebuttal Fox News would report that Palin was being attacked. Her ‘you betchas’ and ‘lame-stream media’ shtick stuck.

But earlier this year there started to be reports of fickle fans tired of her same old record and the fact that she was being paid big bucks to lip-sync it all over the US. She didn’t offer any solutions, just hits and runs against Obama and homilies about taking back the ‘real America.’

Her Tea Party picks did very well and just weeks ago Palin studiously told Barbara Walters that she would run for president if the people wanted her. If there were a void. She filled that void for two years as the voice of the conservative movement. Her conclusion to Walters was that she could beat Obama.

That was so two weeks ago. That was before the American public saw the Congress and the Senate actually working. In the year end polls, Palin’s backlash is starting to take hold. Of the most compressive CNN and PPP end year polls tracking her chances for a 2012 Presidential bid, she clocked only a 33 percent approval in her home state Alaska. She would be the loser, by large margins, in every state. So you have to wonder if the public is thinking that Palin just sings the same old song. Is her reality show being canceled or optioned? In politics one never knows, do one.

My prediction is that Palin will end up on American Idol in 2012. Boyle should be a judge by then. Maybe Susan can lend her the sheet music.