Tickets on Sale!

Tickets are now on sale for The Boob Tube Plays by Bara Swain. No, I didn't write any of these short plays inspired by television shows, but I am directing one of them.

The evening of short work will be playing at The Tank on West 36th Street at 7pm on November 2nd, 7th, and 8th. It will be in the same space as my own play Foggy Bottom was many years ago.

Each of the five short pieces, I Love Lucy, Folded, Wasted, If You See a Hyena, and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, takes a different television show as its jumping-off point, but the themes of intimacy and loss are universal and shine through whether you know the TV show or not.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, the play I'm directing, stars Megan Greener and Nick Walther as two soon-to-be newlyweds on the night before their marriage. They end up having pre-wedding jitters triggered by too much Law & Order: SVU.

The evening is being produced by American Renaissance Theater Company. Tickets are $22. I hope you can make it out to see these fun and emotional new plays.

Downstate

Last night, I saw Bruce Norris's new play Downstate, which is running at Playwrights Horizons with an absolutely amazing cast.

I went primarily to see Susanna Guzman, who I met when she was in my play Foggy Bottom at the Abingdon Theatre Company. Since then, her career has taken off, including a recurring role on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

In Downstate, she plays a parole officer named Ivy who manages among her other "clients" four convicted sex offenders living in a group home in downstate Illinois. Fred, played by Francis Guinan, is the oldest of the four, and cannot get around without the aid of a wheelchair. At the beginning of the play, he is confronted by one of his former victims, though nothing in that interview goes the way anyone involved expects it to.

That's one of the great things about the play. No matter what our pre-conceived notions about sexual abuse might be, the characters upend them. That's particularly true for Dee, Fred's housemate and caregiver, played by K. Todd Freeman (an accomplished stage actor, though I know him best as Mr. Trick from Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Both Fred and Dee formerly abused boys, which makes their housemate Gio (played by Glenn Davis) look down on them, since he "made a mistake" with a teenage girl, which in his mind puts him in a completely different category.

The fourth housemate, Felix, is generally played by Eddie Torres, but last night the understudy, Matthew J. Harris, had to step into the role. Harris was excellent (as understudies usually are) and his tense scene with Guzman in the first act had the audience on the edge of our seats.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot, so go see it for yourself. Trust me, you won't be sorry.

Act III

I first moved into New York City in 2002. I had a great apartment in Hell's Kitchen. It was there that I wrote Foggy Bottom, which later premiered at the Abingdon Theatre Company, as well as my adaptation of A Christmas Carol done in Saratoga Springs.

Later, when I got married, my beloved didn't want to move into my beautiful Hell's Kitchen apartment. She needed luxury amenities, such as hot AND cold running water. (I always had at least one or the other.) That meant I had to move into her apartment in Harlem at the end of 2012.

Well, during that second act in New York City I wrote Meucci's Message, which premiered on Staten Island. I was also fortunate enough to have my adaptation of Moby-Dick done on Cape Cod and for Detroit Rep to produce my original play Capital. As the years went on, our friends who lived in Harlem moved away and it became time for a new change.

So now I'm beginning Act Three in New York, this time in a co-op apartment in the Bronx. While I can't tell what the future will hold, theatre does seem to be coming back as the pandemic recedes. My play Kew Gardens couldn't be performed live earlier this year, but you can watch it on YouTube.

Kew Gardens begins about an hour and 12 minutes into the video, but it's well worth watching to see Sienna Thorgusen play Kitty. Enjoy!

The Disciple

I just got back from seeing The Disciple, Rachel Carey's bold new play about novelist and philosophical provocateur Ayn Rand and her follower and much younger lover, Nathaniel Branden.

Maja Wampuszyc is chillingly perfect as the domineering Rand. I first got to know Wampuszyc's work when she appeared in my play Foggy Bottom at the Abingdon Theatre Company, but she went on to premiere on Broadway in Irena's Vow and more recently was in James Gray's film The Immigrant.

Cameron Darwin Bossert plays Branden, the devoted acolyte of Rand who went on to make a name for himself as a psychologist and self-help guru. We see him in 1979, leading a self-esteem retreat, and in flashback as a young man manipulated and used by Rand for her own purposes.

The show is playing at the Wild Project until July 25th, and if you join theatre company Thirdwing for a monthly fee, it's ridiculously cheap. Check it out!

Mary Speaks

I just saw Angela Polite's one-woman show Mary Speaks at Theater for the New City. She gives a tour-de-force performance. If you have a chance to see it in the next two weeks, go.

Angela and I first met when she was in my play Foggy Bottom at the Abingdon Theatre Company. She is an extraordinary actress, and as she proves in Mary Speaks, a fine singer as well.

The play utilizes monologues, song, poetry, and dance to tell the story of Mary, mother of Jesus, through the lens of African-American history. We hear Mary's mother tell about the horrors of slavery, see Mary experience the injustice of Jim Crow, and ultimately watch her son die in what could be a scene ripped from the headlines today.

My one criticism is that I wanted more! The death at the end happens suddenly (as death often does) and we never really get a chance to see Mary's son do the great things we all know he is destined to do.

The death leaves us with a tremendous sense of a life with potential that will never be realized, which of course is the point. He is never allowed to grow up to become the man he could be.

Christopher Burris directs this production, which features live music provided by Jeff Bolding. The play runs until February 26th. If you're interested in seeing it, check out:

Mary Speaks at Theater for the New City

Fringe Preview '15

The New York City Fringe Festival opens on Friday, and this year there were quite a few plays I wanted to see. Yesterday I went down to Fringe Central and picked up my tickets. Here are the shows I plan to see, in the order I'll be seeing them:

The Waste Land

This performance piece is a collaboration between two brothers from Austria, actor Christopher Domig and painter Daniel Domig. The Waste Land presents T.S. Eliot's classic poem... with the aid of a giant puppet head. What could be better than that? The Domig brothers have been developing this piece for years, and now New Yorkers are going to get a chance to see it. Though the poem was written by a man, the speaker is (by Eliot's account) the Countess Marie Larisch, so it will be interesting to see the text performed by a man. Fiona Shaw probably did the most famous dramatic performance of the poem.

Lady Macbeth and Her Lover

This play by Richard Vetere (The Engagement) tells the story of two writers who make a suicide pact. One of them lives, while the other posthumously wins the Pulitzer Prize. The dead woman's daughter then demands that the survivor become her literary mentor. Sasha Brat directs this new drama, starring Maja Wampuszyc (Foggy Bottom) and Jenny Ashman (Romance Language).

Fuente Ovejuna

The wicked commander is found murdered. And who committed the crime? "Fuente Ovejuna did it, sir!" Ducdame Ensemble (which was founded by graduates of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts) presents this classic play by Lope de Vega. Previously seen in London, the production plays up the parallels between the 15th-century historical incident in Castile that inspired Lope and the Occupy Movement of recent memory.

The Merchant of Venice

This FREE outdoor production by the Hip to Hip Theatre Company is currently touring the outer boroughs, but it will be settling down in Tompkins Square Park for a Fringe Al Fresca run at the park's bandshell. Hip to Hip artistic director Jason Marr and dramaturg Adriana Alter have adapted Shakespeare's classic comedy as a parable about how not to live in a multi-cultural world. David Mold directs a cast that includes William Oliver Watkins (of Moby-Dick fame) among others.

The Broccoli Murder, DiCaprio Dance and Other Stories From My 20 Years as a NYC Cop

The title says it all. Peter Michael Marino directs this one-man play by Mark DeMayo, a retired NYPD detective with an arresting past. Now a comedian, DeMayo previously worked at the 26th Precinct in Harlem. The New York Post recently cited him in a snarky article about fanny packs. Though this one-man show might not have the gravitas of Freight, it is precisely the type of show the Fringe loves to do.

Venus and Adonis

In this production by Los Angeles-based New Circle Artists, Misha Bouvion adapts and performs Shakespeare's erotically charged poem with the help of director Daniella Caggiano. The show got good reviews in California, and a similar project, a one-man performance of Shakespeare's other long poem, The Rape of Lucrece, recently took Philadelphia by storm. (But Shakespeare's twist on the sexy story from Ovid is probably easier to take than a tale of rape and suicide!)

So there you have it! The Fringe Festival is always hit or miss, but I'm hoping this year my selections won't leave me disappointed.

The World of Extreme Happiness

Last night I went to see Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig's play The World of Extreme Happiness at Manhattan Theatre Club. I mainly went to see Jo Mei, a tremendous actress who appeared in my own play Foggy Bottom back in 2006. Jo was wonderful, as usual, but I was also impressed by the production as a whole.

When I walked in with my friend Susanna, we took one look at the bleak set designed by Mimi Lien and thought, "They're going to perform on THAT?" Yet the grey concrete walls of the onstage factory open up to reveal colorful visions of possibility, an apt metaphor for a play about the promises and realities of contemporary China.

Cowhig, who was born in the U.S. but was raised partially in Beijing, begins the play with a nightmarish depiction of all of the worst images Westerners have of China, as a baby girl is born and then promptly dropped into a slop bucket to die. Determined to survive, however, the child lives, and travels to the city in search of a new life.

After that opening scene, the play takes a delightfully comic turn. The protagonist, whose name is Sunny (played by Jennifer Lim), argues with her crotchety old boss (Francis Jue), meets a wacky new best friend (Jo Mei), and talks on her cell phone with her father (James Saito) and little brother (Telly Leung), who is obsessed with the story of the Monkey King.

The story of the Monkey King, which comes from the classic Tang Dynasty epic Journey to the West, is one of the most beloved stories in Chinese literature. In this play, however, the Monkey King becomes a metaphor for Chinese political dissidents. Able to transform himself into a succession of new identities in order to escape danger, the Monkey King escapes scrape after scrape, and Sunny, too, through her ability to remake herself into whatever others need her to be, moves ever higher in Chinese society.

As Ibsen's Peer Gynt tells us, however, one can only transform oneself so much. Eventually, we have to question if there is any core at all beneath the layer upon layer of onion skin. Sunny ultimately does take her stand, adding her voice to the chorus of other Chinese dissidents who demand to be heard, and she pays an awful price.

The ending is all the more chilling given how funny the play is. It gives us glimpses into the self-help culture (exemplified by the guru Mr. Destiny) prevalent in China as well as the U.S., and before we can dismiss this as idle dreaming, the play presents us with images of the newly rich Artemis Chang (played by Sue Jin Song) who shows us everything that Sunny could one day become.

But is Chang free? Or is she simply free to make money and buy trinkets, as she contends? The World of Extreme Happiness asks this and other important questions, but best of all it does so in a very entertaining fashion.

The play officially opens this month, so check it out here:

Manhattan Theatre Club

The Immigrant

This afternoon I went to see James Gray's new film The Immigrant, which I heartily recommend, in part because it gives a tantalizing glimpse glimpse into the world of burlesque in New York in the early 1920s, and in part because it features two remarkable stage actors I've had the pleasure to work with in the past.

The Immigrant tells the story of Ewa, a young Polish woman who arrives at Ellis Island with her sister, only to find that her sister must be quarantined for lung disease--and that she herself could be deported because of rumors that she is an immoral woman (a charge that is flatly untrue, as we later learn). She finds both an exploiter and a protector in the form of a shady showman, Bruno Weiss, who brings her into his act featuring the Beauties of the World. Ewa becomes "Miss Liberty" in the act, complete with candle-lit torch.

Scenes in the seedy theater do a great job of showing the reality of popular entertainment during that period, including the encroachments of new technologies, like moving pictures, which were threatening the stage at the time, both legitimate and not-so-much. The movie also shows how in an industry that routinely exploited women, certain women sometimes also rose to positions of power.

Dagmara Dominczyk plays Belva, a Polish woman who shares a flat with Ewa, and who also harbors feelings for the slimy burlesque manager Bruno. I know Dagmara from my days at Carnegie Mellon, where I worked with her on my play Betty Thorpe in the Theater Lab class. Dagmara has appeared quite a bit on the New York stage, for me, most memorably in Heidi Schreck's play There Are No More Big Secrets at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.

Closer to my heart, though, is Maja Wampuszyc, who plays Ewa's Aunt Bistricky in The Immigrant. Aunt Bistricky tries to take Ewa in, only to watch in horror as her husband cruelly throws the young woman out the next day. Her character returns toward the end of the film in another very emotional scene.

Maja played the young Uzbek woman Marina in my play Foggy Bottom at the Abingdon Theatre Company in 2006. The sexy, dynamite-wielding terrorist in Foggy Bottom was a far cry from the conflicted aunt in The Immigrant, but Maja has a tremendous amount of range. She is perhaps most famous for playing Ida Haller in the Broadway production of Irena's Vow by Dan Gordan.

The Immigrant opened this month in the U.S. If it's showing at a theater near you, definitely go! There are wonderful performances, wonderful costumes, and a wonderful recreation of a New York City of a different era.

Bio

James Armstrong grew up in Pensacola, Florida, where he became one of the founding members of the Northwest Florida Young Playwrights Society. The Society produced several of his early plays, including "Muddin' in Chumuckla," now published by Eldridge Plays and Musicals, and "To a Steed," which was published in the literary journal Arts & Letters.

James has studied playwriting and theater at Harvard University, Drew University, and Oxford University (Keble College). He also holds an M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from the Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama. In the fall, he will be beginning a Ph.D. program in theater at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

His plays have received productions and staged readings across the country, both by academic institutions and by professional (Actors Equity) theaters such as the Abingdon Theatre Company, Bristol Riverside Theatre, CAP21, the Epiphany Theater Company, New Jersey Repertory Company, Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, and Urban Stages. His teleplay "Cacophony Cookies" aired on local television in Pittsburgh.

The author has received numerous awards for his work. His one-act play "Birdgirl on Walkabout" was voted by the audiences as "Best Play" at Boston Playwrights' Platform's 28th Annual Summer Festival of New Plays. It is now published by Norman Maine Publishing.

New York has seen several of his other plays, including "The New Mrs. Jones" (now published by Brooklyn Publishers) at the Theatre-Studio Inc., "The Mating Habits of New Jersey Wildlife" at Dance Space Center, "The Sign in the Scarlet Prison" at Theater for the New City, "Searching for St. Anthony" at the Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Festival, "When Ladies Go A-Thieving" at the American Globe Theatre, "Better a Beggar" at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre and "The Mysteries of the Castle of the Monk of Falconara" at the Spotlight On Halloween Festival. "The Mysteries of the Castle" is anthologized in The Best American Short Plays: 2005-2006, published by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books.

In 2006, his play Foggy Bottom, which The New York Times called "one of the most international farces around," premiered at the Abingdon Theatre where it played to packed houses, becoming the most successful production in the history of the Abingdon's black box space up to that time.

A number of his plays have been produced on Staten Island, as well, including "Dickens Condensed," now published by Playscripts, Inc., and "The Pirate Princess," now published by Eldridge. In addition, monologues from his plays The Metric System and "Wall Street Hymn" are included in collections published by Smith and Kraus.

The Epiphany Theater Company produced his adaptation of A Christmas Carol in Saratoga Springs, New York. James has also adapted The Romance of Tristan as the play Net of Dreams as well as the Horace Walpole novel The Castle of Otranto.

In 2009, Playwrights' Forum in Memphis, Tennessee premiered his play The Metric System. That summer, his monologue play "The True Author... Revealed" was performed at The Tank in New York City. The Metric System is now published by Original Works Publishing and "The True Author... Revealed" is included in The Best American Short Plays: 2008-2009.

Recently, his short play "The Rainbow" premiered as a part of the 18th Annual NYC 15-Minute Play Festival at the American Globe Theatre. The play is also a finalist for the Actors Theatre of Louisville's 2012 Heideman Award.

James is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, Inc. He currently resides in Manhattan.