It’s been a little over a year since the epic flame out of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ relationship. Along with a lot of tabloid fodder, their hyper scrutinized love story provided a fitting cultural checkpoint, falling smack in the center of the Venn diagram for our celebrity obsession, our fear of oligarchical institutions, and our need to dissect these things via social media. Arriving … Continue reading FRINGENYC REVIEW: THE TOMKAT PROJECT
Five plays in two days? It must be time for the New York Fringe Festival. Some of the best shows I’ve seen in New York have been part of the Fringe: Pulp Shakespeare, which adapted Pulp Fiction into an iambic pentameter Shakespeare play, Theater of the Arcade, which mashed-up 80’s video game icons with the signature styles of famous playwrights, and Invader? I Hardly Know … Continue reading FRINGENYC 2013 PRE-GAME
My roommate from college is a video game designer now, but he was always a big video game guy. Back in the days of Ramen Noodles, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, we used a kind of shorthand. Whenever one of us would have to call our parents for money, we’d express relief later by saying, “my meter was … Continue reading REVIEW: LIGATURE MARKS
I didn’t intend to do a Pre-Game for Gideon Productions’ Ligature Marks, which is being presented as part of the Brick’s Game Play Festival, but my scheduling got crossed up and I found myself with an extra week to think about it beforehand. Also helpful: playwright Mac Rogers posted a couple of blog entries on the Gideon Website that locate this new play as a kind … Continue reading LIGATURE MARKS PRE-GAME
Ever stumble across an old photo that you don’t recognize and wonder where it came from? Who might have taken it? What their story could have been? Admit it: we’re all of us guilty of a little voyeuristic curiosity. Whether your sneaky instincts are fueled by a need for juicy gossip or anthropology, the Story Gym puts them to work in The Photo Album, a … Continue reading REVIEW: THE PHOTO ALBUM
This week, I will be covering two shows in The Brick Theater’s Game Play Festival. Not much to Pre-Game, but I did want to get a few things down before posting reviews later this week. This is the fifth year of the Festival, which highlights works that live at the crossroads of video gaming and performing arts, and I am embarrassed to say this is the first … Continue reading GAME PLAY FESTIVAL PRE-GAME (Bonus Round)
The virtues of Theater in Asylum’s production of #Coriolanus lie, as the Volscian general Aufidius says, “in th’ interpretation.” Though Paul Bedard’s social media savvy staging of Shakespeare’s play occasionally trips over the jittery tech at its center, it consistently redeems itself with wildly inventive maneuvers, including costumes straight out of Aeon Flux, impressively choreographed callisthenic dance fighting, and a surprisingly bubbly sense of humor. … Continue reading REVIEW: #CORIOLANUS
Tomorrow I will be posting my review for Theater in Asylum’s production of #Coriolanus, a 21st Century, social media inspired adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, The Tragedy of Coriolanus. But I must first air some grievances: before deciding to see this I knew nothing about either Theater in Asylum’s work OR Shakespeare’s play. Though I have caught up with the company as much as possible on … Continue reading #CORIOLANUS PRE-GAME: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S CORIOLANUS
Ignoring all of its other virtues, Mac Rogers’ play Frankenstein Upstairs certainly deserves special commendation for including such an intriguing program note: Frankenstein Upstairs is set in Brooklyn in the present day. As the action takes place in the same fictional universe as Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, the novel and its adaptations do not exist in this play, and the name “Frankenstein” holds no associations … Continue reading REVIEW: FRANKENSTEIN UPSTAIRS
Surreal Time Press 