The Brooklyn Rail

Scott Lewis and the Art of the Vibrantly Desperate

Hank’s blue and green face, lined like crisscrossing rail lines, hangs over his booze (“Hank,” 1997). His tears appear to be skin literally dripping off his face into his clutched hands.

Dawgone Shaggy

1993 I walked into SoHo Rep in Tribeca; the set was elevated above the audience on all four sides of the theater. A man in a conductor’s hat flipped open a hatch on the west wall and welcomed us aboard. Characters popped in and out of the dark space: a thief lit by a glowing emerald; a man named Mr. Zendavesta reading apocrypha from the yellow pages.

A Prediction: The Rural Theater Movement

A playwright/actor friend, KK, dips our dim-sum into the pitcher of beer. "Why the glum face?" I ask, as I towel off my dumpling. "You ever get that feeling that the highway you’ve been cruising on has ended and there ain’t nothing on the other side but a deep dark cliff? That you can keep driving off the cliff or you have to turn left and take that road that leads to your step-mom in Pensacola? Well I feel as if I’m at that cliff and I don’t want to make that left turn."

BRIC by BRIC: Experimental Theater Grows in Brooklyn

American Theater Nexus at the BRIC Studio Louise will be speaking today at a gathering of corporate executives. It seems that the regularly scheduled speaker, Alice ("Alice The Magnet"), has had her arms pulled out of their sockets this very morning. Louise’s speech will turn from self-help aphorisms to a detailed account of her recent drunken encounters with a fella who had promised her a six-pack in exchange for sex. A bargain, at any rate.

P#7: CRAWL, FADE TO WHITE

“I dropped the cell phone on a puddle of baby poopy today.” This normally would sound like a snip of dialogue from one of Sheila Callaghan’s plays, visceral and strange, but for the recent mom it’s reality.

Venice Saved: A Seminar

“The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The incautious person, who, having entered, takes a few steps, is after some time unable to find his way back...If he doesn’t lose courage, if he continues to walk, it is absolutely certain that he will arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there, God is waiting to eat him.” —Simone Weil

In Dialogue: A Dream of Making Plays

The house is one of the greatest powers of integration for thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind.

In Conversation

LEN JENKIN’S THE DREAM EXPRESS: The Outlaw Lounge Act Returns

When I first saw Spin and Marlene Milton, aka The Dream Express, I was so enchanted by this lounge act I hopped the next boxcar out of NY and have been following them ever since: Flagstaff, Peach Springs, Spokane, and Memphis; from the infamous Briarpatch Lounge to the world-renowned Thunderbird Lodge.

In Conversation

STAGE MANGERS Lloyd Davis Jr., Cole Bonenberger, and Martha Donaldson with Gary Winter

Over the past 10 years, the Rail theater section has focused its coverage on playwrights—new voices, more established and ever-reinventing voices, the scripts. Recently, we began talking about expanding our vision to embrace all the practitioners who blend their arts and collaboratively come together to make a script become a play.

lifting the Curtain
Sound Designers: Robert Kaplowitz, Cricket S. Myers, and Matt Hubbs

Lifting the Curtain continues the Theater section’s new series which delves beyond writing to explore the collaborative arts that make a play come alive on stage and to give voice to the practitioners who bring it there. The series began in the June Brooklyn Rail with a conversation with stage managers. Here, Gary Winter interviews three top creative artists in sound design.

lifting the Curtain
Costume Designers Melissa Schlachtmeyer, Normandy Sherwood, and Jessica Pabst with Gary Winter

For the holiday season, when Scrooge steps forward in his stocking cap, when sticky pudding is splattered over Victorian smocks everywhere, when Santa clones wearing lumpy Santa outfits are embarrassing themselves in family living rooms across America, who better to consult with than the Costume Designer?

Set Designers Peter Ksander and Mimi Lien with Gary Winter

Following up his series of interviews with Costume Designers (Dec/Jan 2012), Sound Designers (October 2011), and Stage Managers (June 2011), Gary Winter delves into the physical space of theater, exploring how a set grows from concept to design with two of the most highly regarded and versatile set designers contributing their visions to theater today.

Daniel Fish: A (Radically Condensed and Expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (After David Foster Wallace)

In his novels David Foster Wallace wrote copious notes, and at the Prelude Festival performance it was interesting to watch the notes interacting with the narrative. Notes are always the thing one skims over or skips, but during this performance they seemed to take on equal weight.

DANIEL FISH
A (Radically Condensed and Expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (After David Foster Wallace)

Daniel Fish’s A (Radically Condensed and Expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (After David Foster Wallace) runs from March 22–April 7 at The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City

Miranda Huba's Candy Tastes Nice Puts Virginity on the Auction Block.

In terms of research I did not speak to anyone who has tired to sell sex or their virginity online, but I became very interested in cultural and historical obsessions with virginity. The play started with this idea of selling of virginity and then branched out into how women’s sexuality is represented in media culture in general.

TYSON vs. ALI:
Reid Farrington Mashes It Up With Two Heavyweight Icons

In TYSON vs. ALI, live performers in a real boxing ring will be combined with video clips of the boxers’ matches. The Brooklyn Rail interviews Reid Farrington (director), Frank Boudreaux (script), Laura K. Nicoll (choreographer), and Dennis Allen (actor).

In Dialogue

YOUNG JEAN LEE with Gary Winter

In Young Jean Lee’s play Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (produced at The Ontological-Hysteric Theater’s Blueprint Series at St. Mark’s Church in 2003), the father of not-so-helpless damsel Sheila has been kidnapped by Fu Manchu’s henchmen and brought back to China so that he can help Fu Manchu find the mask and shield that will allow Fu Manchu to defeat the West.

The Gallery Players: Brooklyn Theater Grows a Hybrid

Community theater has a long history in America, nurturing local talent and bringing tried and true fare to communities outside the reach of first-run plays. But what happens when the community is Brooklyn’s Park Slope, whose stone-skipping distance from Manhattan has transformed it into a kind of residential boom-town over the past twenty years for working professionals, many of whom are active in the professional theater world?

Nixon’s Secretary STRETCHes: Truth, Tape and History

What’s next for New Georges? The ever-reaching downtown theater company, whose God’s Ear has transferred uptown and is enjoying an Off-Broadway run in a co-production with the Vineyard, is now taking on history in a timely way.

in dialogue: Yesterday’s News

It’s in the remind-me-who-they-were moment that Rob Handel’s new play Aphrodisiac begins. In a slightly jarring flash, we realize how fairly recent and tragic newsworthy events disappear from our daily discourse and are quickly superceded by the steady onslaught of, well, more recent and tragic events.

What Might Not Be Wrong with Kansas Particularly in The Heartland

“I think we’re getting really far away from something important,” says Anna, one of the six characters in The TEAM’s new play, Particularly in The Heartland, which runs through March 18 at PS 122.