Another East Village loss: Incubator Arts Project

Incubator Arts Project to Close
by Patrick Healy, The New York Times, April 16, 2014

Montclair's Peak Performances: Scottish troupe adapts Woolf's "Orlando"

Judith Williams as Orlando
(photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)

Scottish experimental theater troupe Cryptic, founded and directed by Cathie Boyd, will make its U.S. debut with Darryl Pinckney's music theater adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, April 10-13, for Montclair State University's Peak Performances series.

Described as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” Woolf dedicated Orlando to her friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, whose fictionalized family history, as well as Sackville-West’s own flexible approach to sexuality and marriage provide the subject matter.

In Cryptic’s magical production, the show’s compression of 400 years of packed events, Orlando’s transformation from man to woman, his multiple costume changes without leaving stage, is courtesy of Living Canvas, an interactive real-time tracking and projection technology. The Cryptic version of the play marks the first time the alchemy of Living Canvas has been applied to theater. Orlando’s escape to Constantinople is made vividly real through the use of Point Cloud Data Imaging that generates 3D depictions of buildings.

Original score composed by Craig Armstrong and Antye Greie aka AGF

The Alexander Kasser Theater
Montclair State University
1 Normal Avenue, Montclair, New Jersey
(Click here for Google Map.)

For complete schedule, ticket and transportation information (including shuttle buses from Manhattan), click here.

Beautiful, beastly and renegade: Muz and Fraser at Abrons

Julie Atlas Muz as Beauty
At rear, Mat Fraser as The Beast,
flanked by Jonny Dixon (l) and Jess Mabel Jones
(photo by Sin Bozkurt)

Mat Fraser
with puppeteers Dixon and Jones
(photo by Sheila Burnett)

To be sure, the Playhouse stage at Abrons Arts Center is set up for a fairy tale--here, Beauty and the Beast--with an ornate, antique-y, rose-strewn set drenched in crimson light and gently breathing mist. And so, on a rainy evening perfect for storytelling, begins not one but two uncommon love stories. The familiar one we came for--in which a lovely daughter, having staved off family disaster by agreeing to go away to live in a beast-man's castle--gets charmingly, seamlessly interwoven with real-life details about the show's charismatic stars, Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser.

Muz, former beauty queen and a multi-talented artist best-known for neo-burlesque, and Fraser, a British actor, writer and rock musician, are a married couple who met and fell in love when they were Coney Island sideshow performers and married to other people. Fraser, whose mom took Thalidomide for morning sickness, has the congenital deformation phocomelia with, in his case, missing forearms and thumbs. When these two artists dreamed up a collaborative project, "Beauty and the Beast" immediately sprung to mind. But because they are who they are--both kickass provocateurs, one whose visible disability has long been integral to his art--this "Beauty and the Beast" would have to be a "Beauty and the Beast" like no other.

And so it is.

A very sexy "Beauty and the Beast," indeed, with frequent, matter-of-fact nudity, erotic food play and joyous sexual simulation where even paper puppets get it on. And a hilarious "Beauty and the Beast" in which Muz's sharp talent for comedy--along with Jonny Dixon and Jess Mabel Jones's skillful, innovative puppetry--give extra dimension and brightness to every scene. And a tender "Beauty and the Beast" which, without hesitation, welcomes us into the love that this couple shares. I don't believe I have ever seen this much love (genuine love) in a work on stage.

So, if you think all that might be too much to handle, stay home...or, go anyway, take a chance and see if it changes you.

Directed by Phelim McDermott (Satyagraha, Shockheaded Peter) of the British theater troupe, Improbable

Beauty and the Beast runs through March 30. For information and tickets, click here.

The Playhouse
Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/direction)

*******

Of related interest

Access All Areas--Live Art & Disability (NYC edition), a free, all-day event looking at some of the radical approaches to the representation of disability by contemporary performance artists.

March 29, 10-6pm at Abrons Arts Center

For information, click here.

Martin Gottfried, 80

Martin Gottfried, Theater Critic and Author, Dies at 80
by Daniel E. Slotnik, The New York Times, March 7, 2014

Readings from new anthology of Tina Satter plays, February 17

Join OBIE award-winning playwright Tina Satter and members of Half Straddle theater ensemble for a reading from Satter's new anthology, Seagull (Thinking of you) on February 17, 6:30pm, at McNally Jackson.

Pete Simpson, Susie Sokol, Becca Blackwell, Erin Markey, Emily Davis, Eliza Bent and Julia Sirna-Fest will perform readings of Satter's works. Caleb Hammons will moderate a panel discussion on the ideas currently shaping experimental theater, especially the exploration of surface and superficiality.

McNally Jackson Books
52 Prince Street (between Lafayette and Mulberry Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

A celebration of María Irene Fornés

The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center

The Graduate Center, CUNY

presents

Celebrating María Irene Fornés

Monday, October 28, 6:30pm

The work of Cuban-American avant-garde playwright and director María Irene Fornés (born May 14, 1930) is closely associated with the establishment of the Off-Off-Broadway movement in the 1960s. Her focus on the themes of poverty and feminism catapulted her onto the New York and international theatre scene. In 1965, she won her first of nine Distinguished Plays Obie Awards for Promenade and The Successful Life of 3. She was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize with her play And What of the Night? Other notable works include Fefu and Her Friends, Mud, Letters from Cuba and Sarita. Fornés became one of the most influential and beloved playwriting teachers and mentors in both Hispanic-American and experimental theatre. The evening is co-curated by Morgan Jenness, Lou Moreno, and INTAR Theater, and features an excerpt from Michelle Memran’s documentary in process The Rest I Make Up.

Admission: FREE and open to the public; first come, first served

The Segal Theatre
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street, Manhattan

(map/directions)

Helen Hanft, 79

Helen Hanft, Master of Camp Way Off Broadway, Dies at 79
by Paul Vitello, The New York Times, June 5, 2013