STAGE: Looped (closes 4/11)

Based on a real event, LOOPED takes place in the summer of 1965, when an inebriated Tallulah Bankhead stumbles into a sound studio to rerecord (or ‘loop’) one line of dialogue for her last movie --Die, Die, My Darling. Ms. Bankhead was known for her wild partying and convention-defying exploits that surpassed even today’s celebrity bad girls. Given her intoxicated state and inability to loop the line properly, what ensues is an uproarious showdown between an uptight film editor, Danny Miller, and the outrageous legend.

She answered her front door naked. She went out in public without panties. She drank like a fish, popped pills, smoked like a chimney, cursed like a sailor, slept indiscriminately with men and women – and was eminently and shockingly quotable. Long before today’s misbehaving celebrities, there was acclaimed star of stage and screen, Tallulah Bankhead. (source)

STAGE: August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone

"It is August in Pittsburgh, 1911.... From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city. Isolated, cut off from memory.... They arrive carrying Bibles and guitars, their pockets lined with dust and fresh hope, marked men and women seeking to scrape from the narrow, crooked cobbles and the fiery blasts of the coke furnace a way of bludgeoning and shaping the malleable parts of themselves into a new identity as free men of definite and sincere worth."

Lincoln Center Theater's newest production is the first Broadway revival of August Wilson's JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE, by one of the country's most revered playwrights. Nominated for six Tony Awards in the 1988-89 season, JOE TURNER was named Best Play by the New York Drama Critics Circle.

August Wilson's JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE is set in a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911. Owners Seth and Bertha Holly play host to a makeshift family of people who come to stay, some for days, some longer, during the Great Migration of the 1910s when descendants of former slaves moved in large numbers from the South toward the industrial cities of the North, seeking new jobs, new lives and new beginnings. (source)

August Wilson's JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE opens today (4/14) and runs thru June 13 at:
Belasco Theatre
111 West 44th Street (Between Broadway and 6th Avenue)
New York NY 10036

STAGE: Streamers @ Roundabout Theatre in NYC

David Rabe's award-winning drama, Streamers, is playing at Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre in NYC thru January 11, 1009.

Set in 1965 Virginia, Streamers is the story of four soldiers just out of bootcamp who, according to NY Mag, grapple "with race, class, and sexuality as tensions rise in Vietnam."

STAGE: Dividing The Estate

Texas playwrite Horton Foote has a good old family drama brewing this holiday season at the Booth Theatre on Broadway:

The eternally spry Horton Foote does a nimble Texas two-step in Dividing the Estate. Half the play is a leisurely, courtly, astutely observed portrait of cultural and generational change; the other half is a quick, lively comedy of manners and manors in decline. (source)

"Foote, whose upbringing in a small Texas town during the Depression shaped his enduring world view, is certainly not oblivious to the cruel things people can do to one another. He is keenly aware of the failures and frustrations that are the norms in life, and of the sheer pettiness that can be the only revenge of unhappy people. But in a world that more often than not can be cold, cruel and unforgiving, Foote also shows us how human beings can prevail in little acts of kindness, huge efforts of determination and will, and the magical healing powers (and coincident pain) of memory."--Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times

In the dark comedy Dividing the Estate, matriarch Stella Gordon is dead set against the parceling out of her clan's land despite the financial woes brought on by the oil bust of the 1980s. In the course of the play, the power of petty self-interest and long-held resentments makes even painful compromise an elusive goal. Widely acclaimed in a 2007 production at Primary Stages, the play will run at the Booth Theatre on Broadway until January 4, 2009. (source)