Congratulations, Madam President

Last night was the finals of the Secret Theatre One Act Festival, and I'm happy to report that Rebecca Ana Peña won a best performer award for her role in my play My Fellow Americans.

Bec got to play the President of the United States making a televised speech right before important issues intervene. The staff at the Secret Theatre chose to use the one-woman play as the opener each night we performed.

This is the first time I've had an opportunity to work with Bec, but hopefully it will not be the last. It was also my first time working with director Rachael Langton, though I previously saw her work at the Metropolitan Playhouse, where she directed Bec in East Side Stories, Actually.

My Fellow Americans started out as one of eight plays performing on Wednesday nights at the Secret Theatre as "Program D" of the festival, before advancing to the semi-finals, and then the finals. Two other plays that were part of the Wednesday-night line up also advanced: Happier Days by Jennifer Ju and The Gatekeepers by Dan Perry.

I snapped this photo last night after the performance. That's Julie Berndt on the left ("Lady Bredwell" from The Gatekeepers), followed by Jen Lyon ("Actor" from Happier Days"), Susan Jane McDonald ("Lady Teaworthy" from The Gatekeepers), Rebecca Ana Peña ("Woman" from My Fellow Americans), and Qesar Veliu ("Actor" from Happier Days).

Congratulations to all involved!

Finding the Secret

If you haven't seen my play My Fellow Americans at the Secret Theatre yet, you'll have another chance tomorrow, July 27th.

The show starts at 7:30 pm and stars Rebecca Ana Peña as the President of the United States. Rachael Langton directed the piece. I met them both through the Metropolitan Playhouse, where Rachael directed East Side Stories, Actually, which featured Bec as one of the performers.

Our piece is first in an evening of one-act plays that also includes short works by Paul K. Smith, Jennifer Ju, Dan Perry, Lisa Siebert, and Ruth Zamoyta. You can get your tickets here. Make sure you purchase tickets to see Program D, which will be showing both this Wednesday night, and again on next Wednesday, August 3rd.

And how do you get to the Secret Theatre? Well, practice, of course! It also helps to take the 7 train to 61st Street / Woodside. It's a neat neighborhood, with a lot of great Thai food, including Thailand's Center Point, which is recommended by my friend Ike.

Need a map to the theatre? I've provided one here:

Hope to see you there on Wednesday night!

Secret One Acts Open This Week

This week the Secret Theatre in Queens is opening its festival of one-act plays, and you won't want to miss it!

The important thing is to get tickets to Program D, which includes my own play My Fellow Americans. It will premiere on Wednesday, July 13th, and will be repeated the following three Wednesdays, July 20th, July 27th, and August 3rd.

My Fellow Americans features Rebecca Ana Peña as President of the United States. The play is directed by Rachael Langton, who I got to know through her work with the Metropolitan Playhouse. Both have done an amazing job, and I'm eager for people to see the piece.

If you've never been to the new Secret Theatre since it re-opened in Woodside, it really is a delightful place. The theatre is more homey and less industrial-feeling than their old space in Long Island City, which previously hosted my play Burns Night during their 2019 one-act festival.

Curtain time is 7:30, and you can get your tickets here. Also being performed as a part of Program D are Love Locks Bridge by D Lee Miller, A Twilight of Joy by Paul K. Smith, Soar Spot by Allison Fradkin, Happier Days by Jennifer Ju, The Gatekeepers by Dan Perry, Envenomed by Lisa Siebert, and The Mitochondria by Ruth Zamoyta.

That last play is being directed by Kim T. Sharp, who always does good work, so I'm excited about the line-up we're going to have. See you at the theatre!

The President of the United States...

My play My Fellow Americans opens next month as part of the Secret Theatre One-Act Festival, which means it's time to meet the President of the United States... Rebecca Ana Peña!

Okay, so Bec isn't actually President of the United States... yet... but she gets to play the president on stage beginning July 13th. If you can't make opening night, there will be additional performances on July 20th, July 27th, and August 3rd.

Bec is a Cuban American artist based in New York City. Most recently, she appeared in the evening of short plays East Side Stories, Actually at Metropolitan Playhouse. Some of her favorite credits include The Bacchae (The Classical Theatre of Harlem) and Times Square (The Civilians). She also appeared in the Ambie Award nominated film Skinner 1929.

The production is being directed by Rachael Langton, whose credits include A Shot Rang Out by Michael Hagins at Theatre Row; East Side Stories, Actually at Metropolitan Playhouse; Winter's Night by Neith Boyce and Woman's Honor by Susan Glaspell, as well as Graduation by Eugene Grygo, performed in the International Human Rights Festival.

If you haven't been out to the new Secret Theatre in Woodside, Queens, it's a wonderful venue, so be sure to check it out next month!

Radium Girls

Many years ago, when I was an intern at Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey, everyone was talking about a recent hit called Radium Girls.

Though I never got a chance to see that production (it was before I had moved to the area) I remember seeing the publicity stills the theatre used in marketing materials. They had clearly created something special.

That's why I was excited when I found out that Metropolitan Playhouse would be doing a New York City production of the play. D.W. Gregory, who wrote the piece, is also known for the plays Salvation Road and Memoirs of a Forgotten Man, but Radium Girls is her best known work.

Based on a true story, Radium Girls shows a group of young women who work in a factory painting glow-in-the-dark paint onto watch numbers. In order to get the numbers just right, it's important that they use their mouths to wet the brushes. Of course, the paint they're using is radioactive, so this is not going to go well.

Very little of the play features fun-loving radium girls getting up to shenanigans in the factory (though we do get that scene). Instead, we see the long march toward death as the women one by one fall pray to radiation-induced illness. Will there ever be justice? Will the factory's owners have to pay? Will the businessmen who allowed this outrage get away with it all?

Well, we already know the answers to these questions. Still, the play allows us to ruminate on issues of law, morality, and science that are just as relevant in the early 21st century as they were in the early 20th when the play takes place.

Radium Girls is playing until November 21st, so get your tickets now!

Clyde Fitch

As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently saw Clyde Fitch's play The Climbers at Metropolitan Playhouse.

The play is a wonderful depiction of New York social climbers at the beginning of the 20th century. A man risks and loses his entire fortune in a bid to provide for his family in the manner to which they have become accustomed. He dies, and on the day of his funeral, the family discovers they have nothing.

Fitch mines the dark comedy in this absurd situation. It is particularly delightful to watch a pair of women show up the very day of the funeral to see if they can get some bargains by buying the new gowns the family has just purchased in Paris. After all, they'll all have to go into mourning for a while, and by the time they can stop wearing black, the gowns will all be out of fashion, so why let them go to waste?

The scene is doubly funny, because the family is thinking the same thing. Now that they're left with nothing, they need to raise as much money as possible, and what better place to start than by fleecing the neighbors, overcharging them for Parisian fashions? The widow (wonderfully played by Margaret Catov) is anything but grieving during the exchange, but knows precisely which cards to play to get the best price for what she's selling.

Fitch's The Climbers premiered in 1901, three years after his play Nathan Hale about the famous American spy. Metropolitan Playhouse has produced a number of his later works, including The Truth and The City. Fitch also adapted Edith Wharton's novel The House of Mirth, which the Metropolitan Playhouse staged in 2012. Wharton apparently didn't like the play very much, but she and Fitch became friends.

At one point, Fitch had five plays running on Broadway simultaneously. Few people have heard of him today, but the revival of The Climbers proves his works continue to fascinate. If you're interested in seeing the production, check out the theater's website here:

Metropolitan Playhouse

Michael Friedman

So I was going to blog today about the lovely production of The Climbers I saw last night at Metropolitan Playhouse, but unfortunately I have something much more sad I need to say. Yesterday, songwriter Michael Friedman died, and contemporary musical theater is much poorer because of it.

According to Friedman's obituary on Playbill, he was only 41. His death followed complications with HIV/AIDS, which should remind us that the epidemic is NOT over, and people are STILL dying of this disease. As the obituary notes, he was one of the founding members of The Civilians, one of my favorite companies in New York, and was most famous for writing the music to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

The obituary doesn't mention one of my favorite Friedman shows, Love's Labour's Lost, which The Public Theater did at the Delacorte in 2013. Based on the Shakespeare play of the same name, the musical included both original songs and rock-music settings of poems by the Bard. Friedman's music captured the exuberance of youth, and also the melancholy undertone of the play. I recently saw a student production of the piece at Marymount Manhattan College, and by the time they got to "The Tuba Song" at the end, I was in tears.

Friedman also wrote the music and lyrics for This Beautiful City, which explores culture clashes in Colorado Springs. The Civilians, which is an investigative theater company, went out to Colorado because they wanted to do a show on Evangelical Christians, and Colorado Springs has been transformed in recent years from the most "unchurched" city in America to a center of the Evangelical movement. While they were there, news broke that Ted Haggard, leader of a Colorado Springs megachurch, had been involved in a scandal that included male prostitutes and crystal meth. Reaction to the scandal fills the second half of the play.

Though Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson was the only Friedman show to make it to Broadway, he did an amazing amount of work in his short life. He wrote the songs for The Great Immensity, a show by The Civilians investigating climate change, and provided music for The Public Theater's production of The Tempest in Central Park in 2015. He also wrote and adapted songs for Paris Commune, another investigatory piece by The Civilians, this time examining a crucial but often overlooked moment in French history.

Michael Friedman will definitely be missed. I hope, however, that more theaters will produce the plays that he has left us, particularly Paris Commune and This Beautiful City. They have a lot to say that could speak to America in our present moment.