STAGE: The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter closes Sunday (12/20)

ALERT: The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter closes this Sunday (12/20) at NY Theatre Workshop:

Carson McCullers’ classic novel is adapted for the stage by acclaimed playwright Rebecca Gilman (Spinning Into Butter) and directed by Doug Hughes (The Beard of Avon at NYTW, Doubt). The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a beautiful and timeless tale about the universal need for human connection. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter follows the story of a deaf man, John Singer, as he navigates the world without his dearest friend who has been committed to an insane asylum. When Singer moves to a small Southern town, the locals flock to him as a newfound confidant, seeking compassion and understanding from the one person who needs it the most. Singer’s isolation in the world is mirrored in a few of the townspeople he meets along the way – a café owner, a rebellious teenager, a black physician, and an idealistic labor organizer whose dreams have been shattered. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter intertwines the lives of these characters in a surprising way that results in a deeply moving story of outcasts in the South during the Great Depression. (source)

STAGE: 23 Coins

In the world of revivalist preaching, a man on the verge of losing his charisma latches onto a woman and her young daughter. The child he raises up as a child preacher - but what is his hold on them? What is the secret the mother has? This world premiere musical combines live music, DV projections, recorded sound and a cast of 11 to explore the distinction between religion, spirituality, voodoo and true faith. (source)

23 Coins is in production thru 10/25 at Spoon Theater.

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."