by Stephen Tortora-Lee on November 16, 2011
15 months ago I had the opportunity to review 23 Feet In 12 Minutes as it premiered in the 2010 NYC Fringe Festival. Since then this show has made it to New Orleans and back with some wonderful work-shopping in the Cape Cod Theatre Project along the way. It came back to New York as part of the All For One Festival and I was lucky enough to see the newly evolved work. While the show only had a 2 day run I thought I’d do an in-depth exploration of the piece highlighting the evolution from the version I saw 15 months ago. I hope 23 Feet In 12 Minutes will continue to be performed and developed in the future, and continue to have a wider and wider audience, because while it gives gripping stories of many of the tragic human consequences that happened following the touchdown of Hurricane Katrina, it also shows us the best of humanity.
Written by Mari Brown, performed by Deanna Pacelli, and directed by Pamela Berlin and David Travis this new revision moves from the free-flowing stream of conciousness writing and performing in the premiere version, to a well thought out piece where every action (or inaction) seems carefully weighted and balanced to tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and a NOW. At the end I think anyone who sees this will want to do whatever they can to help prevent disasters – wherever they happen in the world – from getting this out of control again by emulating the people they’ve seen represented in this show. Last time I wrote a review, I compared everyone to heroes. This time I think it is more apt to compare them to saints both because the Saints are the New Orleans team, but also because I hope that these stories can help others learn to live by the examples given by Saints in the spiritual sense. The fact that all of these characters in 23 Feet In 12 Minutes came from interviews of real people makes it even more inspiring — and akin to the history of what elevates a person to sainthood.
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by Stephen Tortora-Lee on August 28, 2011
When is a tragedy not a tragedy? When we realize the Only Way Is Forward and healing takes place on a lot of levels.
In the folk-rock musical Pawn, by Karmia Chan Cao (playwright, director, and composer) we see a Canadian family split apart twice in 10 years, first by the oldest son being taken from them in the crumbling of the Twin Towers on September 11th and later on when the younger son volunteers to go overseas for three years to Afghanistan. The eldest son, Kai, is now just a picture on the top of a shelf in the family’s convenience store (the picture is of Eric Tran who plays piano with the rest of the band).
Now their other son, Abraham Niu (Alex Kaneko) will be finishing his second and final tour of duty in Afghanistan in 5 days and the story of this play circles around the end of his journey home and how he he finds resolution from his brother’s death by making a the most important choice of his life. It is a lush play with many different layers: cultural, spiritual, and that of personal redemption … of many types. It has truly been finely crafted and I hope this play get to “make it big” and spread its message: to accept the moment we are in and use it to make the future brighter to a larger audience sooner rather than later.
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by Stephen Tortora-Lee on August 26, 2011
Schadenfreude, the German word meaning pleasure derived from the pain and suffering of others could almost be a word to describe the dry, witty, quite thoughtful, and generally dark comedy of 74 Minutes of Stereo Radio Theater. This concept was wonderfully explained in Avenue Q in 2003, but has been referenced in many other places including the Simpsons in 1991. However I think this play requires the audience to utilize schadenfreude differently – as rather a recognition or appreciation of suffering (which would be something like Schäden Anerkennung OR recognition/appreciation of pain). Since there is always a lesson to be learned or an observation to be had by the characters in Stereo Radio Theater, it plays much more like a parable than a satire of people’s lives.
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by Stephen Tortora-Lee on August 24, 2011
As we get closer and closer to the futuristic realm of cyberpunk, that has been active in our collective imaginations since we first started understanding what computing was or what it could be, one has to ask the questions:
What about the people it could hurt? Would we even know what it meant to feel that way? Would dysfunction be the first glimpse into a greater ability to truly live on or beyond “the net”? If the first person in this new space were alone, would he make friends with virtual projections of himself?
Virtual Solitaire written and performed by Dawson Nichols is a fast paced drama which does an amazing job of exploring these themes in a very real and human way — in an artificial world.
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by Stephen Tortora-Lee on August 21, 2011
Photo by Chelsie Lloyd of Juliet (Kyra Corradin), Romeo (James Waters), and Rosaline (Katie Jeffries)
Just about everyone in Western culture has read or seen a rendition of Romeo and Juliet, and one thing that resonates most about this Shakespearean classic is the unfairness of the couple’s tragic ending. But what if you could jump in at critical times and nudge the characters into making different decisions? Would that be enough to uncross the star-crossedness of these famous lovers? Would it at least be enough to pull one of them out of the the jaws of ironic death? Or would all that meddling mess up the whole point of the story?
Romeo & Juliet: Choose Your Own Ending attempts to explore that question.
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by Stephen Tortora-Lee on August 20, 2011
Meet Anna. In Anna & The Annadroids: Memoirs of a Robot Girl - an interesting combination of modern dance, techno music, social commentary, science fiction, multimedia, and a bit of burlesque – Anna is an android who is made of ”pure synthetic organic flesh”. So instead of being made only of metal with a “mind full of microchips” she’s got a heart filled with “…love…passion…confusion…pure sexuality”. The dancing and aerial acrobatics of Anna Sullivan (Anna), are accompanied with ambient, driving techno beats created by various artists which she performs while wearing beautiful costumes created by Elizabeth Harzoff. The acrobatics seem to correspond to times of dreams (whether regular or daydreams) as something seems to be making her concentrate on something other than reality.
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by Stephen Tortora-Lee on August 18, 2011
Once upon a time... How that can roll off one’s tongue with a savor that is like the sun kissing your forehead on a sweet summer’s night, as the glowing orb burrows into its deep red cave in the sky. This is truly storytelling (with properly credentialed and sincere storytellers from the world famous International School of Storytelling). Michael & Caja based in The Hague make a great team telling this story.
Michael Driebeek van der Ven begins A way of Man by giving a brief introduction about the story and the nature of storytelling, including a note that – since the point of storytelling is to help us envision things in one’s mind’s eye – if the audience wants, we are welcomed to close our eyes and no judgements would be made. Van der Ven is also is responsible for the very subtle yet dramatic dimming and brightening of the lights which help us move through the transitions of seasons and scenes and senses.
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by Stephen Tortora-Lee on August 18, 2011
One thing about Fringe Festival is that it encourages experimentation among the already experimental crowd of off-off-Broadway and regional theatre troops from around the country. You can read more about their developmental process here, really quite fascinating actually. This piece is interesting in part because of the comedy interwoven into the structure (a fun mix of parody and literary criticism), but more importantly the methodologies of how the story is told (using audience participation) are worth going to the play by themselves. Mercury Rep, a Madison, Wisconsin based company, has been a past fringe favorite, and they get a chance to make their mark this year again. You’ve Ruined A Perfectly Good Mystery! is truly is a good example of the type of theatre that the New York International Fringe Festival exposes to a larger audience.
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by Stephen Tortora-Lee on August 17, 2011
What’s the difference between a janitor and a custodian? It’s all about a sense of responsibility for what you care for. The Custodian is a story about trying to find one’s way in the world, the complexities of love, and one normal man’s struggle to learn how to fight back against the messy carelessness of superheroes creating a codependent relationship with the regular citizens of New York by saying they need to save the world from disaster and then making the people trapped under the rubble of their battles beg to be rescued.
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by Stephen Tortora-Lee on August 16, 2011
Negative Space Sometimes Shows Us The Way Out
Sadness is a universal and necessary part of the human condition, whether you experience it from losing a job, a loved one or just find yourself at end of your rope. But is “unhappiness” different than “sadness”? Can lives be ruined when they are unhappy much more than when they simply have a neutral lack of happiness? Playwright Greg Kotis (who wrote the book for Urinetown as well this year’s Fringe runaway hit, the already sold-out Yeast Nation) examines these themes in 9 short dark comedies called The Unhappiness Plays.
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