Sunday, May 19, 2024
Jaclyn Backhaus is breaking bread and building enduring bridges with her epic theatrical feast –India Pale Ale. It’s a story of close knit family claustrophobia, of big dreams never spoken out loud, of lost love, of the rhetoric of “othering”, of ancestors that arrive in the present moment when courage is required and of the ocean of life carrying curious people to new lands. It’s crammed full of everything – a lucky packet of sensations. We zoom into complex, naturalistic family interactions and then suddenly zoom out into a Punjabi Bhangra dance celebration. You are constantly taken by surprise with
Author: Jacquelyn Claire
Do This One Thing for Me at FringeNYC
Jane Elias is a fabulist, a bard, a griot, a fabler – a healer storyteller tasked with bearing the weight of memory. She has started the necessary journey of chronicling and sharing her family’s personal accounts of the Holocaust and it is a life affirming work. Her father was 16-years-old when the British freed him and the other survivors at Belsen-Bergen. The youngest survivors of the Holocaust are now in their 80’s and the need to preserve their experiences becomes a vital mission, so we never forget. Jane Elias gifts us with a deeply personal memoir of her relationship with
Scale 1:5 at The Rehearsal for Truth Theater Festival
The Hungarian theater company HOPPart brought their unique brand of site specific musical work to the streets of Yorkville on the Upper East Side with their production Scale 1:5. The show is part of the annual Rehearsal for Truth theater festival presented by The Vaclav Havel Library Foundation and the Bohemian Benevolent & Literary Association that brings the best of Central European theatre to NYC. HOPPart took audiences on a delightful, musical walking tour in the area formerly inhabited by Czech, German and Hungarian communities. Every audience member had their own wireless headset and you could hear the gorgeous a capella
Do This One Thing For Me – Jane Elias Elaborates
Jane Elias (Playwright/Performer) is performing at FringeNYC 2018 in “Do This One Thing For Me” - a deeply personal story about her poignant relationship with her father, Beni, a Greek Jew who survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. The production blurb explains: “As she realizes she will not be able to grant his wish that he live to dance with his daughter at her wedding, she looks for another way to honor him and his legacy, traveling to Poland to take part in the March of the Living. An acutely observed portrait, filled with tenderness, longing and self-discovery, Do This One Thing for
The Resistable Rise of J.R. Brinkley at FringeNYC
This is a fresh, energetic, biting satire that deconstructs the power of the con man and the charming story teller. It has a Brechtian frame where political ideas are dissected and the audience are encouraged to engage their critical faculties while being entertained by exceptional performances and sublime musical interruptions. The Resistable Rise of J.R. Brinkley has enormous production value for a typical fringe show. It is a polished, innovative piece of political commentary that stays with you and inspires a burst of rampant googling because it’s based on a real person - John R. Brinkey. He was a quack,
Salome at The Irondale Center
James Rutherford’s new translation of Oscar Wilde’s 19th Century play gives us a palatable Salome for 2018 audiences. It interrogates the nature of desire and the fallout that ensues from the repression of self-expression. This production has an intense muscularity that makes you feel like you're a spectator at a gladiatorial fight between the unrequited and the objects of their sexual obsession. It sparks a sense of urgency as you get caught up in the various devices that instigate the unravelling and revelation of the characters true nature. We’ve all heard the story. Herod asks his step daughter to dance for
Interview with Edward Einhorn of Untitled Theater Company No.61
The New York International Fringe Festival has returned after a year hiatus with a phenomenal line-up of original shows. The festival kicked off on October 1st and runs until the 31st. I caught up with Edward Einhorn the playwright and director of The Resistable Rise of J.R. Brinkley - the true story of a 1920's con man told with country music, to find out more about this compelling production. What was the main impetus for choosing to create this work? After the 2016 election, I started hosting “resistance readings,” theater written in countries facing political crises, in order to figure out what
Love Deadline at the 2018 United Solo Theatre Festival
This is the third time I have had the honor of reviewing a show by the colossal talent that is Ji Young Choi. She is a South Korean performer who blends classical Shakespearian texts with rituals and cultural practices from her home country to create an entirely new form. In Love Deadline she tackles the inner thoughts of the character of Desdemona as she stays isolated in her tea room for seven days wrestling with the source of Othello’s unexplained rage. This production had its world premiere at the United Solo Theatre Festival – a perfect platform for a solo
Interview: Lico Whitfield, Producing Director of The Amoralists
Lico Whitfield It was a powerful experience witnessing Gabriel Jason Dean’s production, “Triggered” presented by THE AMORALISTS - (“a diverse collective of uncompromising artists”). The show forms part of their 2018/2019 season entitled RICOCHET: An Amoralists Anthology about Surviving an American Epidemic, that features four original, intersecting plays that follow a community as it copes with the aftermath of a mass shooting. These four plays are being developed through their ‘Wright Club’ playwriting initiative where three writers tackle one unifying event. The three distinct perspectives are created by Gabriel Jason Dean, Charly Evon Simpson, and James Anthony Tyler. The season will
THE AЯTS at the Ellen Stewart Theatre, La MaMa
THE AЯTS makes you want to start a revolution. It’s a powerful wake-up call to take action. The urgent litany at the end of the play - “It’s time to save the NEA, we must save the NEA again,” has become an urgent mantra on repeat in my head since watching this vital production. We’re like frogs in a pot not realizing that the water is getting hotter. With so much political ‘drama’ coming out of Washington D.C., we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that real artists are losing funding. The National Endowment of the Arts is under threat