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Illumination Rounds

This play is by Josh Liveright who is one of our writers for The Minstrel Show and runs The Interart Annex where we perform many of our plays. He is an alumni of the ATL apprentice program, he is very good to The Shalimar, and he is from Maine! If you find yourself in need of art and culture Columbus Day weekend or the weekend after, go see it! Support theater!

Plus it stars an Australian actress I met in a sauna...





the interart theatre development series and zena group present

illumination rounds
a play by josh liveright

directed by paul smithyman

featuring mark schulte and freya fox

sets by anita fuchs
lights by lucrecia briceno
sound by david m. lawson
video by william cusick and alex koch
costumes and make-up by tarafawn marek
violence by judi lewis-ocker
stage manager, julie griffith

OCTOBER 4 to 15
thursdays through mondays at 8PM
10 PERFORMANCES ONLY!

interart annex
500 west 52nd street
corner of 52nd and 10th

reserve by return email or call 212 604 4505

suggested donation $15

MONDAY NEWS

We saw a lot of AMAZING men in the last couple of weeks, enough to make Joey and I start seriously thinking about making a straight play, something American and classic, just to accomodate all of these stunning men. And whatever Alabama Shakes MFA program is selling, I'm buying. We saw a couple of guys from that school who were absolutely stunning. Their voices are like butter and they have presence and energy and yowza. I'm not usually one to applaud the theater grad school system here, but these guys maybe changed my mind...

Despite seeing fifty or so gorgeous talented wonderful men, we could only choose one for Hippolytus. We are so thrilled to welcome the incredible and talented Joe Curnutte to the cast.



In other news, on Saturday night we participated in...an off-off Broadway dance off. It was part of a fundraiser for Terra Nova, a company I don't know, but they seem like fun people (the leader of the pack did an amazing Jennifer Beals/Flashdance number. He had great legwarmers...). Allison Prouty grabbed me at her show last weekend and asked me if we would like to participate. To which I replied, "Dude. We will mop the floor with the other companies."

Which we would have. If the other companies, well one company in particular, hadn't played dirty. FILTHY.

We were up against Groove Mama, a company that is run by my buddy Kara and another company who I didn't know. We went first and I will say it... Laura Lee, Marissa, Jen, Kim, and Joey rocked hard. They did My Humps from LA FEMME, ammended slightly for girl-on-girl action (we added in a Showgirls reference). They shook their humps and their lumps and the audience went wild. Mando led the cheering. Charles looked flustered and embarassed. They warmed the room for the next performers. I was so proud.

The next group did an acoustic number from their show. They were high energy and fun.

And then Groove Mama came out, looking like the drag queens they are, in low cut dresses, gloves, boas, etc...and they stripped. All the way down to tap pants and pasties. That's right, pasties. And they swung that shit around. They swung it so hard that a certain husband of a certain Groove Mama said he worried they were going to fly right off. And he wasn't talking about the sequined pasties.

They won. Of course they won. They got their tits out. Our intricate well-rehearsed hip hop number with its tongue-in-cheek irony couldn't compare with tits. Hell, Jen even cheered for them. And they used a fan, an idea we will, of course, be stealing.

It wasn't such a harsh loss. I got to bury my face in Kara's boobs. Which was...ahem...nice. And I was reminded of something I have always believed. You can get anything if you get naked. Really. Nudity will always be rewarded in some form, even be it just for having the balls to show the skin. Later an audience member who had cheered for us told us that we shouldn't trust the masses. But I think the masses are the only thing we can trust. It's the only thing I believe in anymore. A group of people cheering for the most gaudy, the most garish, the most terrible, the most wonderful. When the crowd speaks, you listen. And on Saturday night the crowd was saying WE LOVE TITS.

Next time we'll be butt ass naked, let me tell you.

MONDAY NEWS

Hot off the presses...

We have a new assistant producer coming on. His name is Matthew and we're really excited. It's always amazing to get more people involved. Last year we had Megan and she set a great precedent...we're so busy right now, with 3 productions in the next six months (dear lord), it's great to get new people in the room. People who aren't exhausted. Other new people we love are Brandon Bales (who was in the workshop of Aliens and is playing Ryan in the upcoming stirring production), Rachel Plotkin (playing Laura in stirring), and Shani Colleen Murfin who stage managed Aliens. NEW PEOPLE RULE.

The intern search rages on.

Hilly Hicks Jr. has signed on to write a play for The Minstrel Show. Now the writers involved are Tommy Smith, Michael John Garces, Sharyn Rothstein, Josh Liveright, and Hilly. We are almost ready to go!

Rebecca Brooksher, occasional Shalimar actress (Humidity of Fish reading, 2006) and writer (Preface, 2001), and longtime friend and supporter started previews for her Lincoln Center show this week. Joey and I went to the invited dress. I know better now than to write anything about a show before it officially opens, but I will say that we all support Boo and send her our love.

And Jesse Hooker (Hippolytus in LA FEMME) goes into previews for his off-Broadway show next week. I can't wait to see it. For...ahem...big reasons.

And in other celebrity news, Britney brings sexy back. It's like a car crash. Can't. Look. Away.

Dude, I Saw Her First

Check out the Times Review below. Sound familiar? I do believe The Shalimar did this play this summer. We called it LA FEMME EST MORTE or Why I Should Not F!%# My Son....need proof? Compare our photos (the next four) with their photo...leopard print dress anyone? Anyone?







GREEK TRAGEDY WEARS A NEW, BRASH MASK

By Jonathan Kalb

Published: January 24, 2007

Sophocles’ “Women of Trachis” is packed with sex, gore, desperation and verbal beauty. If it isn’t staged very often, one reason is that the plot hinges on a twist that is hard to swallow today. Why would Deianira, Heracles’ adoring and sensible wife, believe that such a glaringly suspicious character — a centaur that Heracles shot for trying to rape her — would then want to help the couple stay together by giving Deianira a magical love potion?

Hilary McHone

Debargo Sanyal and Heidi Schreck, front, and behind, from left, Jodi Lin, Birgit Huppuch and Rebecca Lingafelter, in “Women of Trachis.”

Readers’ Opinions

Forum: Theater

In Kate E. Ryan’s delightful and perceptive contemporary adaptation, directed by Alice Reagan and produced by Target Margin Theater as part of its Hellenic Laboratory series, obliviousness becomes the play’s central theme, elevated to a kind of hubris. Deianira, played with fabulously distracted lucidity by Heidi Schreck, is a desperate housewife-cum-celebrity-spouse in a sleek, leopard-print dress, who literally itches with longing for her roving-eyed, absentee husband.

The chorus consists of three dreamy, immature young women (Birgit Huppuch, Jodi Lin and Rebecca Lingafelter) in pink dresses and flower bracelets, who drink Diet Coke out of a plastic cooler and react to the increasingly serious situation with twittering, trivialities and bromides. It’s never quite clear why such a smart, worldly queen would surround herself with such airheads, but that problem fades away in the end because the point apparently is that obtuseness, whatever its source, is fatal, particularly to women.

Ms. Ryan is far from the first playwright to update a Greek play with pop songs, casual modern speech and references to things like Xanax and computer games. There’s a special psychological alertness and pungency to this mélange, though, that Ms. Reagan shrewdly strengthens in her superbly cast and infectiously energetic one-hour production.

The two roles deliciously played by Debargo Sanyal — the royal son Hyllus, as a snooty teenager in a golf shirt and hiking boots, and the royal gofer Lichas, as a snide celebrity assistant in white glasses and shoes — are reason enough to see the show.

My one dramaturgical quibble is with the reductive portrayal, in the final scene, of Heracles (Todd d’Amour) dying when the supposed love potion turns out to be poison. Portraying him merely as a bad daddy and a serial adulterer with a secret taste for genital mutilation reads as a cheap shot beside all Ms. Ryan’s other whimsically acute decisions. Luckily, the swipe is fleeting, and never completely drains the ending of its hard-earned gravity.

“Women of Trachis” continues through Feb. 3 at the Ohio Theater, 66 Wooster Street, SoHo; (212) 352-3101.