Fresh Loaf

HORNY COUPLE: Idris Ackamoor (left) and Rhodessa Jones

In 7 Stages’ The Love Project, Rhodessa Jones and Idris Ackamoor bring their considerable talents to explore that many-splendored thing that makes the world go ’round. Love is an impossibly broad subject — it’s like devoting a show to everything and nothing — but Jones and Ackamoor prove to be such consummate entertainers that they can delight audiences no matter what their ostensible theme may be.

Co-artistic directors of the San Francisco performance company Cultural Odyssey, Jones and Ackamoor wrote The Love Project with Atlanta’s Pearl Cleage and Zaron Burnett. Dancers Dezrica “Star” Murry and Millicent Johnnie occasionally provide hip-swaying accompaniment. Directed by Harriet Schiffer-Scott, the show offers a cabaret-style variety of songs, stories and set pieces, beginning with a spoken-word poem about “love in a time of war,” and how people should cling to each other, romantically and otherwise, at a time of national turmoil. The introductory piece feels more written and less spontaneous than the rest of the show. The segment’s evocations of Gaza and Iraq, while hardly out of date, make The Love Project initially seem less timely than it actually is.

When Jones riffs lustily on Barack and Michelle Obama’s first night in the White House, however, The Love Project proves fresh and funny. Jones croons and scats jazz tunes but turns out to be a born raconteur, chatting up the audience, recounting tense stories of life on the road and celebrating sensuality. (The name of her one-woman show, Hot Flashes, Power Surges & Private Summers, presented at 7 Stages in 2000, hints at her cheerful, frank attitude about sexuality.) She’s the kind of force-of-nature performer who can get audiences to stand up and sing love songs, even at an afternoon show.

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1) Magic Slim plays Blind Willie’s.

2) Wendy Burns-Ardonlino celebrates her book, Jiggle: (Re)Shaping American Women, and Charis Circle’s 34th birthday.

3) The Widow’s Blind Date opens at Relapse Theatre.

4) Young Blood Gallery & Boutique hosts Kraftwork.

5) Throw Pitchfork opens at 7 Stages.

(Photo by Chris Jacobs)

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Today’s Air Loaf features CL’s Chanté LaGon and Curt Holman giving a round up of the upcoming fall 2008 theater season, featuring Theatrical Outfit’s Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Sept. 10-Oct. 5), Horizon Theatre’s Altar Boyz (Sept. 12-Nov. 16), 7 Stages’ The Little Prince (Sept. 27-Oct. 26) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Oct. 18-Nov. 2), and Full Circle, the Alliance Theatre’s two-play/one-cast repertory of August Wilson’s The Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf.

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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Earlier this year, 7 Stages‘ first production of Scott Turner Schofield’s one-man show Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps sold out two performances on Super Bowl Sunday. That impressive statistic begs the question, what kind of man puts on performance art during the Super Bowl, anyway?

Schofield’s show provides answers that are at once engaging and incomplete. “Becoming” a man may be more of a journey for Schofield than for most guys, as he happens to be an actor, writer and female-to-male transgender person (not necessarily in that order). Becoming a Man offers a playful, kaleidoscopic evening of Schofield’s observations, memories and even some physical acrobatics that correspond to Schofield’s balancing act as he transitions from one gender to the other.

Directed by Steve Bailey, Becoming a Man may be the least visually static one-person show I’ve ever seen. The audience enters the small Back Stage space at 7 Stages to find swaths of white and red fabric dangling in the performance area. We hear Schofield’s recorded voice, see projections of embryonic ultrasound footage and realize that all along, Schofield has been hanging in a fetal position, hidden inside the red fabric. He shifts within the material, partially emerges and “swims” in suspension, while meditating on the in utero causes of transgender issues.

Read the rest of this article here.

(Photo by Elliat Graney-Sauke)

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Today’s Air Loaf features CL’s Chanté LaGon and Curt Holman chatting about Scott Turner Schofield’s one-man show Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps. (Through Aug. 24. 7 Stages, 1105 Euclid Ave.)

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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1) Lost Kingdoms of the Nile: Nubian Treasures continues at the Michael C. Carlos Museum.

2) Newberry Jam, Polemic, Hawkeye Pierce and Requiem perform at Lenny’s Bar.

3) Cocktails in the Garden continues at Atlanta Botanical Garden. This month’s theme is Rock Roses and Red Rubies.

4) The Faint, Jaguar Love and Shy Child perform at Variety Playhouse.

5) Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps opens at 7 Stages.

(Photo by Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition)

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Congratulations to Atlanta author David Fulmer, who announced this week that he will collaborate with local theater 7 Stages and New York’s New Federal Theatre for his first-ever script for the stage, Storyville. The play is based both on his Valentin St. Cyr murder mysteries set in New Orleans and the lone history book, Al Rose’s indispensable Storyville, about the city’s notorious red-light district at the turn of the last century.

There are lots of potential stagings for the play, although funding issues prevent Fulmer from revealing specific plans at this time. But options include a staged reading at next spring’s Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, and Atlanta certainly figures in the future.

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