STAGE: The Angel In The Trees

Now thru 7/31: The Production Company presents
The Angel in the Trees
A new play by Dan O'Brien
Directed by Mark Armstrong

Less than a year after moving to Lowden, a small town below the Mason-Dixon line, native New Yorker Madeline Singer encounters an unexplained phenomenon while walking through the woods. The Angels in the Trees is an evocative one-woman show about ghosts, God, and the American South. (source)

STAGE: Can you Hear Their Voices

From Theatermania: Before the New Deal's Works Progress Administration and the Federal Theatre Project, there was Can You Hear Their Voices? (A Play of Our Time) written by Hallie Flanagan and Margaret Ellen Clifford. The play, based on the true story of a 1931 Arkansas drought, revealed a rural world of hunger and privation that was horribly neglected by government bureaucracy. With today's frequent and casual use of labels like "Communist" and "Socialist," Peculiar Works Project mines this landmark agitprop play to uncover how such words were interpreted in an earlier--yet remarkably similar--era. The news media constantly reminds us how our current economic situation is the worst "since the Great Depression;" Voices shines a spotlight on the root causes for radical political movements then and now.

Closes 6/27

And speaking of New Orleans...

GP tickets are sold out BUT there are some limited view and benefactor seats still left. Call BAM for more info @ 718.636.4100

A Streetcar Named Desire

Nov 27—Dec 20* @ BAM

"...how often do you get to watch an actress of such virtuosity pulling out every stop of her instrument and then some?" —The New York Times on Cate Blanchett

Tennessee Williams has a way with his women. Both sympathetic and merciless, he cuts to their core, revealing their longing, vulnerability, and pride. His most poignant creation—and the dream role of every leading actress—may be the narcissistic and deeply troubled Blanche DuBois of A Streetcar Named Desire.

An aging Southern beauty, Blanche is all artifice, pomposity, and need, traits that Cate Blanchett, a transcendent performer (who made her New York stage debut at BAM in 2006 as an unforgettable Hedda Gabler), conveys with the most delicate balance of hysteria and pathos. Playing off of Joel Edgerton as the remorseless monster Stanley, and Robin McLeavy, as her conflicted sister Stella, Blanchett and the outstanding ensemble cast of the Sydney Theatre Company bring new life to this celebrated work.

Liv Ullmann—whose own soul-baring performances in the films of Ingmar Bergman defined an era—directs, granting Williams' fraught characters a full spectrum of emotions while witnessing the old South's losing battle against a coarse modern world.

*Nov 27 & 28, Dec 1, 2, 4, 5, 8—12, 15—19 at 7:30pm
Nov 28, Dec 2, 5, 9, 12, 16, & 19 at 2pm
Nov 29, Dec 6, 13, 20 at 3pm
Dec 3 at 8pm (Belle Rêve Gala)

Source - BAM website

STAGE: The Brother/Sister Plays

Photo: Richard Termine/NY Times

Now thru Dec 13 @ The Public Theater:

The Brother/Sister Plays - A trilogy of modern –day stories of kinship, love, heartache and coming of age centered around an extended family and community in the Bayou.


Part 1: In the Red and Brown Water
How far will fast, beautiful Oya go to make a mark in the world? IN THE RED AND BROWN WATER is the intoxicating story that charts a young girl’s thrust into womanhood and her subsequent fall into the murky waters of life.

Part 2: The Brothers Size and Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet
Reconceived since it premiered as part of The Public’s 2007-2008 season, THE BROTHERS SIZE is a taut, rhythmic and playful drama that follows two brothers as they walk the line between law and liberty.
MARCUS; OR THE SECRET OF SWEET is a beautiful and touching tale of a young man’s awakening to his tenuous connections with his history, his friends, his sexuality and himself. (source)

STAGE: Blind Lemon Blues

Playing now thru October 4: Blind Lemon Blues celebrates the legacy of Blind Lemon Jefferson and his profound influence upon the development of American popular music. Jefferson was a blind street musician, who played his guitar at the corner of Elm Street and Central Avenue in Dallas, Texas, until a Paramount Records scout discovered him. Between 1926 and 1929, Jefferson made more than 80 records and became the biggest-selling country blues singer in America.

Blind Lemon Blues is set in New York City in 1948 at the last recording session of the legendary Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, and combines elements of traditional blues, gospel, rhythm and blues, soul, doo-wop, and rap to evoke the enduring legacy of Blind Lemon and his contemporaries, Blind Willie Johnson, Lillian Glinn, Hattie Hudson, Bobbie Cadillac, Lillian Miller and Lead Belly himself. (source)

STAGE: The Savannah Disputation

Resurrect this! When susceptible Catholic spinster Margaret politely admits door-to-door pentacostal missionary Melissa into her home, her seemingly-solid faith starts to waver—much to the chagrin of her feisty sister Mary. But who's the blasphemer and who's the believer? Before long, the God-fearing sisters have ambushed their steadfast “guest” with the aid of an unsuspecting local priest, setting the scene for a smackdown of truly biblical proportions.

The Savannah Disputation is playing thru March 15 @ Playwrights Horizons

STAGE: Blanche Survives Katrina in a FEMA Trailer Named Desire

One natural disaster strikes another! Experience the solo show sensation that took the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival by storm. Winner of the Village Voice Audience Award and FringeNYC's Outstanding Solo Show, this outrageous, politically incorrect comedy imagines Tennessee Williams’s tragic heroine has neither aged, nor left New Orleans. She was there when Katrina hit; she was sent to the Superdome; she was evacuated to Shreveport and entangled in the heartless bureaucracy of FEMA. Hers is a refugee story whose politics and pathos you have read, but one you've never experienced through the eyes of the desperately deliberately fragile, alcoholic, codependent, sex-addicted Blanche DuBois — America’s most broken woman™

Blanche Survives Katrina is playing now thru March 15 @ Soho Playhouse

STAGE: Sex Slaves in Mississippi??

There are 5,218 people living in Aberdeen, Mississippi. This is the story of 17 of them and the men that caused all of the trouble.

The whole thing started when Viola Haygood, the Assistant Librarian at the Charles B. Evans Memorial Library, fell in love for the umpteenth time. This one was new in town.

He was tall.

He was dark.

He was handsome.

And he smelled really good.

It was the dark coincidence of his arrival that caused the locals to comment.
Someone was kidnapping Aberdeen’s young women.

They were eating cheese nachos at Big Otis’s Saloon one night and gone the next. Not so much as a by-your-leave.
The town was getting nervous.

They were locking the stately front doors of their antebellum homes and the aluminum screen doors of their double-wide trailers. For the first time. Ever.

They would have called in the FBI but they didn’t have to, as that particular organization was proud to boast a national office on Aberdeen’s Main Street that runs along the scenic banks of the Tombigbee River.

This was a town in an uproar.

Dirty deeds being done dirt cheap.

Women being snapped up and carted off to who knows where.

FBI running up and down the streets like they knew which way was up.

Reporters descending like locusts.

Lawyers locking and loading.

And actor Frank Blocker plays them all.

Southern Gothic Novel: The Aberdeen Mississippi Sex-Slave Incident runs now through Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at Stage Left Studio Inc. in NYC.

STAGE: The Protestants in Bklyn thru 2/14/09

Now at The Brick Theater in BKLYN: When Scottie, the eldest, returns home to Virginia from his NYC sojourn for the marriage/departure of his chronically negligent mother, he discovers his biologically-ruined brother wilting, his emotionally-untethered brother firing, and his baby ‘brother’ Tippy becoming a woman and the family’s final hope. Tippy’s tough-as-nails best-bud Ruby, a Nurse fallen from the pages of Chekhov, and Scottie’s cosmopolitan girlfriend Virginia round out this frenetic yet heart-blooming world.

Told in evocative, free-wheeling scenes, The Protestants penetrates the rural, central Virginian landscape with characters of big desire, personality, and problem—one part The Royal Tenenbaums, one part Faulkner. It delivers a South where pain and humor intertwine, with both aiming for the last laugh; where the need and the notion of God lurks throughout to order and illuminate things forgiven, things forsaken.

The Old Kent Road Theater (OKRT) is proud to return to The Brick, site of their festival hits The Children of Truffaut (Pretentious Festival) and Death at Film Forum (The Film Festival: A Theater Festival). The OKRT has also produced at the New York International Fringe Festival, Midtown International Theatre Festival, and the Ontological-Hysteric Incubator Program. Its plays have been noted for their ‘vibrant characters…heartfelt passion, and spirited volleys of non sequiturs’ (Village Voice) and described as ‘pure inspiration’ (nytheatre.com) and ‘downtown theatre at its best’ (New York Cool.com).

Eric Bland, writer/director, received his MA in Writing for Performance at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His play Death at Film Forum will be published in the NYTE anthology, Plays and Playwrights 2009.

STAGE: Disfarmer @ St. Ann's Warehouse

In the small mountain town of Heber Springs, the Arkansas artist known as Disfarmer captured the lives and emotions of the people of rural America between 1939-1945. Critics have hailed Disfarmer's remarkable black and white portraits as "a work of artistic genius" and "a classical episode in the history of American photography."

JAN. 27 - FEB. 8 @ St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn: Dan Hurlin, who last presented at St. Ann's Warehouse in 2004 with his award-winning puppet-theater work, Hiroshima Maiden, returns with the World Premiere of Disfarmer. The story is inspired by the over forty-year career (1915-1959) of portrait photographer Mike Disfarmer, who for decades shunned his family and neighbors while operating the only portrait studio for miles around Heber Springs, Arkansas. Using "Table-top puppetry," an oddly funny text by Sally Oswald and an original banjo score by Dan Moses Schreier, Hurlin's Disfarmer seeks to create a visceral sense of the photographer's interior and exterior worlds, illuminating the contradictions in the life of this American hermit whose intimate and revealing portraiture documented an entire community.

In addition, for the first time since the discovery of Mike Disfarmer's unique body of work, archival quality limited edition Disfarmer prints are available for purchase online authorized through Disfarmer.com.

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)

STAGE: Southern Promises

When the master of the plantation dies, he wills his slaves to be freed, but his wife doesn't think that good property should be squandered. Pandemonium ensues. The play is inspired by the true story of Henry Box Brown who escaped to the north by mailing himself in a box. Southern Promises provides a unique portrait of the old south. (Source: P.S. 122)

Southern Promises (90 min., no intermission)

PS122 (150 First Avenue)

Tickets (212-352-3101): $18.00

Performances (through 9/27): Mon. @ 7 Wed.-Sat @ 8:30