1) Hop City hosts a Left Hand beer tasting at Octane.
2) Grey Gardens continues at Actor’s Express.
3) Long Shadows play the Earl.
4) The Ones to Watch continues at Alan Avery Art Company.
5) Lenny’s hosts a Guitar Hero competition.
(Photo courtesy Hop City)
SAY IT AIN'T SOW: Norman Vincent Peale (Wade Benson, left) and Big Edie (Kathleen McManus)
In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde wrote, “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy.” The stage musical Grey Gardens emphasizes the tragic transformation of “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale by casting the same actress as both Little Edie and her mother at high and low ebbs of their family fortunes. Both women share a love of music, but in Grey Gardens, the convention of breaking into song at times emphasizes their tenuous grasps on reality.
Big Edie and Little Edie are iconic women — in an eccentric, cautionary fashion — as the subjects of Albert and David Maysles’ documentary Grey Gardens, which has drawn an enormous cult following since its release in 1975. The Edies were the aunt and first cousin, respectively, of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy, but in the early 1970s, they lived in squalor and self-delusion at the once-proud family estate, Grey Gardens. They could’ve been characters from a Tennessee Williams play, and added scandal and a hint of madness to the Kennedy family mystique.
Continue reading “Complex family drama grounds Grey Gardens“
(Photo courtesy Chris Ozment Photography)
1) Clues play Drunken Unicorn.
2) America I AM: The African American Imprint opens at Atlanta Civic Center with host Tavis Smiley.
3) Steve Earle plays the Atlanta Botanical Garden.
4) Vaudeville makes a comeback at Actor’s Express in Have Vaude, Ville Travel.
5) New York Dolls and Black Joe Lewis play Center Stage.
(Photo by Yannick Grandmont)
CL’s Chanté LaGon and Curt Holman discuss Actor’s Express Theatre’s musical Zanna, Don’t!, set in a high school where gay is the norm and straight people are the closeted minority.
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A DIFFERENT WORLD: The Zanna, Don't cast
The Actor’s Express Theatre musical Zanna, Don’t! relies on a premise one might expect from “The Twilight Zone” had it originated on the Logo network. At Zanna, Don’t!’s Heartsville High School (and, implicitly, in the rest of the world) gay is the norm, while straight people are an oppressed, closeted minority.
Creator Tim Acito (who also wrote the musical The Women of Brewster Place) delights in the implications of his alternative-lifestyle universe. Football is less popular than the school’s chess or all-girl mechanical bull-riding teams, and controversy breaks out over whether the library should keep a copy of Heather Has One Mommy and One Daddy. The students stage an original musical about the hard-hitting issue of straights in the military, but when football star Steve (Nick Morrett) and bull rider Kate (Caitlin Smith) sing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” onstage, they feel the love that dare not speak its name at Heartsville High.
Continue reading “High school goes gay in Zanna, Don’t“
(Photo by Eric Hermann)
1) Comedian Andy Kindler performs at Laughing Skull Lounge.
2) Architect Anthony Ames lectures at the High Museum of Art.
3) Park Tavern hosts the River Revival Watershed Sessions to benefit Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper.
Some of Atlanta’s most interesting, envelope-pushing theater typically involves Actor’s Express and/or playwright (and former Creative Loafing employee) Steve Yockey, who collaborated on last year’s world premiere Octopus. At 7 p.m. April 20 and 21, Yockey presents a new play, Disassembly, for the theater’s 2009 intern workshop. According to the web site:
What would you do for love? Probably not as much as the cadre of darkly absurd visitors pinballing around Ellen & Evan’s claustrophobic living room in the wake of a random stabbing. This high-pitched fusion of fable, farce and comedy arrives disguised as realism and quickly sucker punches with laughs and shocks in equally bizarre measure.
Melissa Foulger, who just helped the playhouse’s ace production of Suddenly, Last Summer, directs a young cast that includes Katie Aboudou, Erin Burnett, Derrick Causey, Matt Hambrick, Whittney Millsap, Matt Standley & Annie York.
CL’s Chanté LaGon and Curt Holman discuss two local stage plays that involve strong female characters: Horizon Theatre’s And Her Hair Went With Her and Actor’s Express’ Suddenly, Last Summer.
Air Loaf is broadcast weekdays on 1690 WMLB-AM at approximately 8:10 a.m., 12:20 p.m. and 6:20 p.m.
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LIP SERVICE: Dr. Sugar (Joe Sykes, left) and Catharine (Kate Donadio) share some sweets.
When mental patient Catharine Holly declares “I just think I’m dreaming this. It doesn’t seem real,” she offers convenient advice on how to watch Suddenly, Last Summer.
The 1958 play qualifies as one of the weirdest in Tennessee Williams’ canon. It’s the go-to work for detractors who want to decry the playwright’s penchant for overheated extremes of human behavior. When Suddenly touches on lobotomies and sexual predation, it’s just getting warmed up. Actor’s Express’ compelling production, directed by Melissa Foulger, implicitly suggests that audiences relinquish expectations for realistic roles developed in conventional, satisfying ways. It’s more rewarding to view Suddenly, Last Summer as Williams’ act of self-psychotherapy, energized with a kind of climactic cross-examination scene worthy of courtroom drama.
From the outset, Suddenly presents the stage as a mindscape’s dark jungle more than an everyday setting. Fronds hang over the set of a New Orleans mansion’s overgrown garden, full of Venus flytraps and other primordial life forms. Wealthy Mrs. Venable (Shannon Eubanks) explains to young Dr. Cukrowicz (Joe Sykes), aka Dr. Sugar about her beloved, fortyish son Sebastian. Mother and son had the kind of relationship Oedipus would envy. Mrs. Venable holds a grudge against Sebastian’s nubile cousin Catharine (Kate Donadio) for her “child’s” besmirched reputation and death at a tropical hellhole called Cabeza de Lobo, or “Wolf’s Head.” (Symbolism alert!)
Continue reading “Tennessee Williams’ mind games have Sudden impact”
In Ian Fleming’s famed James Bond novel, Auric Goldfinger declares “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action.” When I attended Sunday’s compelling, opening night production of Suddenly, Last Summer at Actor’s Express, I had to figure out of the play’s apparent connections to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory were happenstance, or what.
I didn’t go looking for Wonka-flavored footnotes in Suddenly, Last Summer by any means. During the Catharine Holly (Kate Donadio)’s big speech at the end, she describes sinister street urchins following her and ill-fated poet Sebastian on the streets of Cabeza de Lobo. On a make-shift musical instrument, the creepy little people play music like a tuba “Oompa, oompa, oompa.” The “Oompas” recur until it’s hard not to think of the chorus of the Oompah-Loompah songs in the 1971 film.
I would have made the association and promptly forgotten it, until I realized that earlier, the play had a line nearly identical to Willy Wonka. At one point “Dr. Sugar” (Joe Sykes) lights the cigarette for Mrs. Venable (Shannon Eubanks), who says, “So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” In the movie, when Charlie Bucket gives the Everlasting Gobstopper back to Willy Wonka in his office, Gene Wilder murmurs, “So shines a good deed in a weary world,” a line not in the book.
Could Roald Dahl, who wrote the original novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 1964, and its screen adaptation in 1971, have been twice quoting from the Tennessee Williams 1958 play? Or was it a coincidence?
Continue reading “Is there a Suddenly, Last Summer/Willy Wonka connection?” »
