1) Haverty Marionettes’ As I Lay Dying continues at the Alliance Theatre.
2) Judi Chicago and Noot d’ Noot play Smith’s Olde Bar.
3) Georgia WAND holds Patriots for Peace at Colony Square.
4) Dale Jones performs at the Punchline.
5) Eyedrum hosts WRASfest with Zoroaster, Spooks and Thy Mighty Contract.
(Photo by Joeff Davis)
CL’s Chanté LaGon and Curt Holman chat about three new plays that all seem to have a similar, recurring thread of violence, including Dad’s Garage’s The B-Team, Haverty Marionettes’ The Phantom Limb, and Out of Hand Theater’s Stadium 360.
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TOOTH AND NAIL: A wolf in Red's clothing provides a creepy subplot in Haverty Marionette's The Phantom Limb.
The classic paradox of violence is that no matter how much you abhor it, you can’t look away from it. Ancient Greek dramatists seized audiences’ attention with beheadings or blindings, and then hammered their themes of social instruction. Three new plays by young Atlanta theater artists similarly use violence, or its implications, to provoke the viewer into considering some offbeat ideas.
At Dad’s Garage Theatre, The B-Team follows a band of bumbling jihadists whose members aspire to blow up themselves and/or a prominent symbol of American decadence. At Haverty Marionettes, The Phantom Limb offers an avant-garde study of Albert Fish, an early 20th-century American serial killer. And at Out of Hand Theater, Stadium 360’s satirical look at pro football acknowledges the game’s inspirational power, but decries the physical damage caused by America’s most concussive contact sport.
Continue reading “Violence runs in veins of three new plays”
The content and tone of Haverty Marionettes’ The Phantom Limb spans the spectrum from “disturbing” to “very, very disturbing.” Writer/director Michael Haverty explores the case of Mr. Albert Fish, an American serial killer, child molester and alleged cannibal known by such nicknames as “The Brooklyn Werewolf.”
If the premise alone sounds unnerving, Haverty Marionettes’ avant-garde approach makes The Phantom Limb even more challenging and uncomfortable. Much of the production contains no dialogue and echoes silent movie-era entertainments, so frequently we can only piece together events by implication. Potential audiences should read the historical notes posted outside 7 Stages Back Stage Theatre, or skim the Wikipedia entry, before venturing in.
Patrick McColery plays Fish as tormented but deceptively mild-mannered, while Reay Schloss and Amy Strickland serve as puppeteers and mostly non-speaking, black-garbed supporting performers. When Fish borrows a life-sized little-girl puppet from her mother and makes her dance, The Phantom Limb offers a skin-crawling image of innocence abused. McColery conveys Fish’s vain attempts to keep his unbalanced psyche under control. At one point he reads a 1934, possibly written by Fish himself, describing the man’s unspeakable actions. Later, in a fit of paranoia, he seeks shelter in Bloomingdale’s department store and burst’s into a frenzied, incongruous rendition of “You’ve Gotta Have Heart.”
Continue reading “The Phantom Limb’s puppets hunt a wolf in the fold” »
Of the various hip, edgy plays opening this weekend, including the world premieres of The Phantom Limb at Haverty Marionettes and Stadium 360 at Out of Hand Theater, only Dad’s Garage Theatre’s The B-Team, a satire of Islamist terrorist, has an on-line trailer. Dad’s Garage again proves ahead of the curve in using viral video for theatrical promotion, even though they don’t have quite the same mastery of fake-beard technology. See if you can recall which old National Lampoon magazine cover the trailer references.
