Coming in January

January is one of those months that seems to always feel longer than it really is, though this January I have so many things going on that I'm afraid it will fly by this year.

First up is the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, which begins tomorrow. I will not be traveling to Toronto this year, but I will be chairing an online panel on Shavian Family Resemblances.

The online session will apply the MLA Presidential Theme of Family Resemblances to the plays and critical writings of the dramatist Bernard Shaw. It will examine the fictional families in Shaw’s plays as well as the larger Anglo-Irish literary family of writers Shaw belonged to and resembled, even as he clashed with them.

In “‘People with unimproved minds’: Shavian Fathers and Resistance to the Ideal Paterfamilias,” Dibasi Roy will look at the early comedies of Shaw to examine the discursive construction of Late Victorian fatherhood, including how multidimensional aspects of masculinities intersect in varied and complex ways. 

Alice Clapie will examine resemblances among Shaw’s family of Irish writers in “Eugenic Laughter, Universal Laughter: Shaw’s Physiological Dramaturgy.” The paper will explore the uncomfortable notion of “eugenic laughter” in Shaw’s physiological dramaturgy, acknowledging the popularity of eugenics for social progress at the turn of the 20th century, when it was an important crux in the discussion of familial issues.

In the third paper, Dan Stuart will analyze the controversies behind Shaw’s most infamous family drama in “Reconsidering the Unpleasant: Victorian Morality and the Censorship of Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” The play, among Shaw’s most socially significant works, dealt with the then-controversial subject of prostitution, foregrounding the mitigating factors underlying the trade’s proliferation while exploring conflicting attitudes about gender roles and social mobility in Late Victorian society.

Later this month, American Renaissance Theater Company will be presenting Two by Four, two presentations of one-act plays at 124 Bank Street Theater. (If you're looking for the address of 124 Bank Street Theater, it is, in fact, 124 Bank Street.) Presentation A will include Mutual Bond by Mark Levine, Choose! by Bara Swain, Gators by Linda Kampley, and My Handiwork by Robert Kerr. Presentation B will include My Girl by Terri Campion, Eye of the Beholder by Kathryn Grant, The New Pasteur by Michael McGoldrick, and Into the Light by Marc Castle.

I'm directing Into the Light, which stars the author, Marc Castle, as a dead man who meets other departed souls in the afterlife, but not the ones he expected to find. It also features Terri Campion, Jeannie Dalton, and Ralph Pachoda. Today, I had a chance to check out the theater, which is run by HB Studio. It's a great space, and I look forward to having my directorial work there.

Presentation B will be going up January 23rd at 7pm, January 24th at 7pm, January 25th at 3pm, and January 27th at 7pm. Tickets are $25 for general admission. I hope you can come!

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, the short play by Bara Swain that I directed for an evening of her work called The Boob Tube Plays, is closed now, but I just got photos that were taken of my wonderful actors.

That's Megan Greener looking oh-so-chic as her character (Olivia) snores and dreams she's on the television show Law & Order: SVU. Tomorrow is her wedding day, and she's so excited that she went to sleep in her veil!

Here's Lloyd, her husband-to-be, played by Nick Walther. Getting up at 3 a.m. to discover your fiancée sleepwalks and just might want to kill you isn't a very pleasant situation to find yourself in, and please do not ask me if I know this from personal experience.

Thanks to everyone at American Renaissance Theater Company for putting together this evening of short work, and especially to Bara for trusting me with her play!

Coming Soon!

Tomorrow night, November 2nd, Bara Swain's The Boob Tube Plays opens at The Tank, featuring a short play that I'm directing, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

The Boob Tube Plays consists of five short works, all by Swain, all inspired in one way or another by television. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt features Megan Greener as a woman who's watched way too much Law & Order: SVU, and Nick Walther as her terrified husband-to-be.

If you miss the show on Saturday, you'll have two more chances to see it: on Thursday, November 7th and on Friday, November 8th. All shows are at 7:00pm and tickets are $22. The evening is produced by American Renaissance Theater Company (ARTC) and includes work by directors Kim T. Sharp and Vincent Scott, in addition to one play directed by Swain herself.

Next month, we will be entering the season of A Christmas Carol, and I'll be appearing on a virtual program hosted by the Rosenbach Library, speaking about the legacy of Charles Dickens's beloved novella. There have been countless stage adaptations of the classic, including my own, which was produced by the Epiphany Theater Company in New York and Passage Theatre Company in New Jersey.

And if you happen to be in Brazil in December, the short film The Rainbow, for which I wrote the screenplay, has been chosen as an official selection for FINTCH - Festival Internacional de Cinema de Humor in Rio de Janeiro. More information on that coming soon!

Phantasmagoria

Watching a horror story play out live on stage is inherently different from watching one on screen. In a movie, there is no end to the number of possibilities, since either practical or computer-generated effects can produce an unlimited number of severed heads, demonic apparitions, or walking corpses.

On stage, however, the limitations of physical reality can evoke a much eerier sense of fear than anything dreamed up by Hollywood producers. Any terrors you see are more than flickers of light up on the screen. They are here, now, right in front of you, in this very room. The call of horror is coming from inside the house.

That's the advantage of Jack Horton Gilbert's new play Phantasmagoria, playing now at The Tank on 36th Street. Historically, phantasmagoria were actually fore-runners of motion pictures, since they used magic lanterns to project images in front of an audience. This production, skillfully directed by Tom Costello, doesn't need projections to bring you chills, though.

Costello has a long history of developing excellent new plays, including Joshua H. Cohen's The Thirteenth Commandment and Smoke by Kim Davies. He has a knack for bringing a visceral sense of fear and suspense into a small space, which is precisely what Phantasmagoria needs. When stage lights go off during the play, we see actors by candlelight and by the beams of hand-held flashlights, as the rest of the stage is enveloped in a darkness in which anything could be happening.

The play's story is simple enough, and familiar through countless horror stories of the past. At the beginning, we see the cute and likable Pin (Paige Bakke) boarding up the windows of her house against some unknown menace outside. Her obnoxious but oddly endearing friend Otho (Tudor Postolache) shows up at her door, begging to be let in before nightfall. Something has been stalking the people of this unnamed town, taking them at night, and leaving trails of horrifying clues as to what might have happened to them.

That something could be read as a stand-in for any number of menaces emptying out small-town America, from opium addiction to economic collapse to political division. The play is less interested in what it is destroying people, though, and more interested in what our fear of it does to us. This gets illustrated by a number of young people who then arrive at Pin's house for a Halloween party that is clearly a cover for something much more sinister. Each partygoer could be an archetype of a different denizen of horror movies we all know.

We meet the mouthy Fern (Sarina Freda), the loud and threatening Maz (Michael DeFilippis), and the hot girl Isha (Maya Shoham). Joining them is an out-of-towner named Marty (Matthew Yifeng), who seems to have been invited through some less-than-pure motives. Things escalate as they all play a game called dare, which is just what it sounds like and leads to a predictable spiraling out of control. Or does it? The group of friends has a plan for this evening, and like the audience, neither Otho nor Marty knows what it is.

Watching that plan unfold, and then go horribly wrong, is part of the fun of the play. Some characters disappear, while others turn on one another, and the audience is kept guessing who--if anyone--will make it out alive.

Phantasmagoria is playing at The Tank until October 30th, so see it before it closes, then come back for Bara Swain's The Boob Tube Plays, running in The Tank's smaller space from November 2nd to 8th.

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.

American Renaissance

I recently became a member of American Renaissance Theater Company. Last week, they did a reading of the beginning of my new play After an Earlier Incident, and now I'll be directing for them a short play by Bara Swain that will be performed in November.

The Tank will be hosting us as ARTC presents The Boob Tube Plays, five short pieces by Swain all related to television. The evening will begin with I Love Lucy, about two women who meet in the lobby of an OBGYN's office. It will be followed by Folded about a young man's search to know his father, Wasted about a family torn apart by Covid, and If You See a Hyena, a spoof on reality television. I'll be directing the last show of the evening, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

We have a great cast, company members Megan Greener and Nick Walther as a soon-to-be married couple on the eve of their wedding night. Nick read the part of Elliot for me in After an Earlier Incident, so I know he's delightful, and I'm equally excited to be working with Megan. Both have wonderful comic sensibilities that are perfect for the play.

We open on November 2nd, and have two more performances on November 7th and 8th. I hope you can come out to see it!

And next up is...

Thanks to all who came out to see The January Plays at Urban Stages! It was loverly to work with director Ilanna Satzman and actors Heather Massie, Maria de Vries, and Doug Rossi.

It was also an honor to share the stage with other great theatre artists, including Bara Swain, Daniel Damiano, Barbara Blumenthal-Ehrlich, Kim Sharp, Dev Bondarin, and Russell Jordan. Here's a picture of the whole gang!

Now that The January Plays are over, I'm moving on to my next project. My play I Hate You: A Love Story will have a staged reading at 7:00 pm on Sunday, January 15th at IATI Theater, 64 E. 4th Street. Dev Bondarin is directing, and the cast includes Doug Rossi and Sandra Maren Schneider.

The reading is free and open to the public, so please come!

One-Act at Gallery Players

Next month, Gallery Players in Brooklyn will be performing my short play The Trade as part of their Black Box New Play Festival!

This past weekend, I met the actors, who are fantastic. Dennis Gleason is directing. If you've never been out to Gallery Players, you should go. They have a lovely, intimate space, and they do good work.

The performances of The Trade will run from Thursday, June 4 to Sunday, June 7. Performances are at 8pm Thursday through Saturday and at 3pm on Sunday. You can find out more about the Black Box New Play Festival here:

Gallery Players

In addition to The Trade, this year's festival includes plays by Bara Swain, Lily Rusek, Natalie Bates, and Stephanie Keys. I won't be able to see all of them, as I'll be up in Massachusetts most of June for rehearsals of Moby-Dick at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. However, I will be coming back down to catch the performances of The Trade, so if you come, stop by and say hello!