Ten Questions. Ten Answers. And one Big Surprise in the audience …

Emily Dickinson: Paranormal Investigator

produced by PowerOut

It’s 1849 and New York is a gritty, grimy city filled with ghosts, ghouls, and irresponsible transcendentalists. After a string of curious incidents Emily Dickinson, New England’s premiere paranormal investigator, and her estranged mentor Edgar Allan Poe are on the case! Armed with esoteric knowledge and brass knuckles—not to mention a strong grasp on both blank and metered verse—they venture to Brooklyn on the trail of a horrifying new adversary. Emily Dickinson: Paranormal Investigator is an  ahistorical romp through poetry and Americana with ghosts, ghouls, and more! Part of the 2016 FRIGID New York Festival.

Show  Info:

• Wed Feb 17, 2016 | 8:50PM
• Sat Feb 20, 2016 | 5:00PM
• Thu Feb 25, 2016 | 8:50PM
• Tue Mar 01, 2016 | 10:30PM
• Sun Mar 06, 2016 | 5:10PM

Kraine Theater New York, NY $10

Answers byTodd Brian Backus (playwright)
Ben Ferber (director)

1. Forget the PR version. When you’re talking to your friends, how do you explain this show to them?
Todd: It’s a mash up of a lot of different things I love: Buffy, Sherlock, Sailor Moon, Ghosts, and American Poetry.
Ben: I say, “I’m directing a show called Emily Dickinson: Paranormal Investigator,” and it’s exactly what it sounds like.

2. Here’s a scenario: After the show some audience members go have a drink.  What’s the part of the show you hope they’re discussing?
Todd: Probably the sword fights. I think we’ve lost a lot of the fun of fighting on stage with the living room drama, so I’m trying really hard to write the opposite kind of play.

3. What drives your show – character, theme or plot?
Todd: I think character, seeing how these characters who we kinda know from history grow and change and learn in the face of ridiculous supernatural circumstances.

4. In rehearsals, read-thrus, or prior incarnations, what’s the one thing someone said about the show so far that made you (or the team) the most proud?
Ben: One of our actors, after the first read, exclaimed, “It’s just so fun!”

5. If money and resources (and even reality) were no object what is the most lavish, luxurious, pointless prop, costume, effect – anything – that you would spend money on for this show?
Ben: I’d have characters appear and disappear in puffs of smoke and/or flashes of light.
Todd: Have you ever watched a magical girl anime? Sailor Moon, Card Captor Sakura, Magic Knights Rayearth, that sort of thing? There’s a point in the show where one of the characters reveals she’s been posing as someone else and she reveals her true form. In a lavish, luxurious production I’d want timed theme music and a costume the she could pull a ribbon out of and spin (a la Broadway’s Cinderella) and go from her disguise to her true form, samurai swords and all.

6. What’s the one thing you’re looking forward to regarding the FRIGID Festival itself?
Todd: FRIGID is always exciting because it’s all of these wild people doing crazy shows that range from the extraordinary to the truly weird. It’salways a lively mix and I’m looking forward to a season where Emily Dickinson: Paranormal Investigator is not quite the weirdest title on the list.
Ben: I feel a real sense of competition to be the weirdest show in a big batch of weird, fun shows.

7. Is there a scene, a moment, a gesture … anything at all in the show that you anticipate may get a completely different reaction depending on the audience that night?
Ben: The ending because, and this is not a spoiler, we have this incredibly sad, somber moment which explains sort of why Emily Dickinson becomes a recluse in our version of history. And then we turn on a dime and reveal that there’s going to be a fun, exciting Part II which is about Abraham Lincoln and a train heist! And one of our actors appears wearing a stovepipe and it’s awesome.

8. What’s your favorite line from the show?
Ben: So at one point in the show, Kate Fox, a real-life 12-year-old spirit medium who was super popular/controversial in the mid 1800s, pulls a wired microphone out from nowhere and raps to a sick violin beat about how ghosts told her that Henry David Thoreau is, and I quote, an “asshat.” Then at the end of the number she drops the mic and collapses.

9. What’s the last thing you usually do before the beginning of a show?
Todd: Tell the House Manager we don’t need to hold for anyone else.
Ben: Realize I super need to pee as the lights go down.

10. You scan the audience and you see a face that stops you dead in your tracks – who is it? And why are you shocked?
Todd: Neil Gaiman, we really only interacted on twitter a few times, I didn’t think you’d actually be here. I slide up next to him, slipping a ring out of my pocket, it fits alongside the wedding band he wears for Amanda, just like me. We make out, the first scene starts but we’re too busy making out to listen. The actors are a bit thrown off by this incredibly public display of affection but I can’t help myself, we snog through the rest of the 60-minute affair.
Ben: But what the cast is really looking out at in the audience, in confusion, is me and the real Emily Dickinson, who is secretly an ageless vampire and came to see our show about her, doing an impromptu synchronized dance number in the back.

Okay, Todd and Ben … I’m going to offer up that this was possibly the first time that question was answered with something which  – in and of itself — could be turned into another FRIGID show.  Maybe not a full-length, but I definitely could see it on the main stage.  But don’t take my word for it!  Write it up and see if it sticks!

The rest of you – don’t forget to check out Emily Dickinson: Paranormal Investigator.

 -*-*-

Horse Trade Theater Group will present the 10th Annual FRIGID New York Festival at The Kraine Theater (85 East 4^th Street between 2^nd Avenue and Bowery) and UNDER St. Marks (94 St. Marks Place between 1^st Avenue and Avenue A) February 16-March 6. All shows run 60 minutes, or less. Tickets are available for purchase in advance at http://www.horsetrade.info/  

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Watching the performers in Playlab‘s production, Professor Ralph’s Loss of Breath, can shortly leave you in ready sympathy with the central character’s unlikely plight. The proceedings move at such a rate, the lines flow at such a pace, you’ll be virtually breathless trying to keep up. You needn’t fret unduly, however, if you miss a detail or an allusion (and you’ll probably miss a couple). You are fairly comfortably installed in a parallel cartoon universe where nothing matters too much because, well … because now look what’s happening!  The two performers, Scott Michael Morales as Mr. Lackobreath, and Robert Berliner as Toby Dammit (and everybody else, come to that) charge through their scenes describing character, setting and action, alternately capering, prat-falling, breaking into song, dueling – verbally and physically – at a positively giddy tilt as the madcap tale unfolds. This could prove mere irksome slapstickery if it were not for the quality and commitment of the actors. Director Kevin P. Hale has struck a rich seam of gold in recruiting this duo, never mind it being some class of fool’s gold. Both project an instantaneous theatrical charisma, lavish with the vaudevillian understanding that only a high energy showmanship will do to keep this quirky puffball of a feature aloft. As a team they have a comedic aura just standing together: Berliner tall (and by more than just a head and shoulders), soignée and devious; Morales shrimpish, cocky, and gullible. Together they could almost put over anything, which is good as they’re asked to put over quite a lot. They’ll keep you watching even as your brain is wondering – how does anyone find the time to think this stuff up?

Robert Berliner as Toby Dammit. Photo by Paul Fox.

A downright silly storyline follows the frankly fatuous quest of Mr. Lackobreath to retrieve his, well, lost breath. This he has lost in the course of an argument with his new young wife. Of course. In rapid succession he becomes a fugitive from the police, the patient of a surgical quack, the quarry of a lustful virgin, the dupe of a convicted criminal, the subject of a public hanging, and the mark of Mephistopheles. And probably a few other things I forgot to mention. The rag-taggle tumult of events comes from the pen of Kevin P. Hale, who so brilliantly showed his puppet piece, Poe-Dunk: A Matchbox Entertainment, at the 2012 Frigid festival. Hale claims to have adapted it from one “Professor” Ralph Phillips, a nineteenth-century  American itinerant puppeteer, who translated it from a German language version which was itself an adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe short story, Loss of Breath, from 1832. Said Prof. Phillips allegedly, following his absinthe-soaked tour of Europe, repaired to Vermont where he established the puppetry department at one Eldritch College, in Glover, VT just before he died on Halloween night in 1911.(Searches on line for an Eldritch College in VT yield nothing, but there is in the virtual vicinity an Eldritch Institute promoting a fairly wicked tee-shirt design featuring an impression of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.) Invention, adaptation, or a combination thereof, the piece does hold much of the naive quality of story telling common to popular entertainments of the 18th and 19th centuries, being riddled with vulgar sexual innuendo while hollowly purporting to tell a tale of moral instruction (this one champions Perseverance). Poe’s original story is itself breathtakingly silly, but does bear the hallmarks of some of his distinctive phobic obsessions – guilt, suffocation, paralysis, live entombment – which are all nimbly presented here. A good smattering of olde world misogyny gets some play, coded and uncoded, and for those who would wish to delve a little deeper for subtext, themes of emasculation, loss of libido, impotence, homophilia, and auto-erotic strangulation might be induced to raise their curly heads. Then again, Punch and Judy was about a wife-beating, tyrannical felon. It’s all great fun. Inquiring minds might like to know more about Prof. Ralph, Eldritch College, and the ur-text of this creation, but it’s probably a safe bet to consider that Hale and the Playlab troupe are from that select type your grandma warned you about, carny folk. Providing you don’t believe a word of it, you’ll be fine.

Scott Michael Morales as Mr. Lackobreath photographer Paul Fox

More than fine, you’ll be highly entertained. Beneath all the tom foolery and apparent sham-ery is a cunning mind, rich in theatrical lore, and better, a beating heart of creative purpose.

~~~

Professor Ralph’s Loss Of Breath
Company:  Playlab NYC
Directed by: Kevin P. Hale

Remaining Performance:
Mar 05, 7:05PM
Mar 08, 12:30PM

Click HERE for tickets

Running time: 1 h 0 min
Price: $10.00 – $15.00
Seating: General Admission

The Kraine Theater
85 E. 4th Street
New York , New York 10003
2nd and 3rd Ave

Horse Trade Theater Group will present the 8th Annual FRIGID New York Festival at The Kraine Theater (85 East 4^th Street between 2^nd Avenue and Bowery) and UNDER St. Marks (94 St. Marks Place between 1^st Avenue and Avenue A) February 19-March 9. Tickets are available for purchase in advance at www.FRIGIDnewyork.info or by calling 212-868-4444. 
 

Related Posts:

• PROFESSOR RALPH’S LOSS OF BREATH: 10 Things To Know About The Show Before You Go (2014 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)
• Poe-Dunk: A Matchbox Entertainment – Listen To These Tales Of Poe (2012 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)
• Poe-Dunk – A Matchbox Entertainment: 5 Things To Know About The Show Before You Go (2012 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)

The characters of this show may be tiny, a little wooden, and come off as a little stiff but Poe-Dunk: A Matchbox Entertainment is anything but rigid.  In fact, this innovative, charming, engaging show by Playlab NYC directed by John Pieza is a lively piece of theatre thanks to the man behind the matches – Kevin P. Hale.

Hale conceived this show which can be though of as a trip at break-neck speed along the autobahn of Edgar Allan Poe works (in the course of an hour over 30 Poe works are mentioned, performed or touched upon). Hale is also the sole performer, voicing all the characters and maneuvering scores of itty-bitty matchstick puppets around their eensy-weensy sets.  Don’t worry, though, thanks to a projector every microscopic bit of theatre is visible to the audience and there’s not a bad seat in the house.

When  acting as narrator, and giving a bit of history Hale is much like Poe himself who (we are informed) was a great fan of puns.  Puns, of course, can be a bit of an eye-roll but the winning and likable Hale delivers them with such outright enjoyment that it’s almost impossible not to be swept up in the sense of fun that pervades this entire production.

Poe-Dunk is many things at once: play time for grown ups,  multi-media theatre, and an exquisite study in how to shave those zeros off your production budget while still delivering characters who are gorgeously costumed and have the luxury of performing in beautifully appointed sets.

Poe-Dunk, "Annabel Lee"

The set up is simple.  Hale, for the most part, sits at a table and delivers Poe’s works one after another  -some well know (The Tell-Tale Heart, The Mask of the Red Death, The Murders in the Rue Morgue) and some obscure (The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion, The Philosophy of Furniture).  Each time another small box is drawn forth there’s no telling what will come from it, and as each Matchbox Theatre piece plays out it is nothing short of delightful to watch the clever ways that the tiny sets are manipulated.  These itsy-bitsy sets are not simply static but come complete with all manner of special effect which are highly creative and in some cases utterly ingenious.  While some stories rose far above the original work in terms of playfulness (Cabs, Theatrical Rats) the presentation of  The Cask of Amontillado was as chilling, as dramatic and as memorable as any I would hope to see in a full-scale production and played in a way that would make Poe proud.

One bit of advice if you’re planning to attend  -just as when you go to Madison Square Garden for, say, a Lady Gaga concert and find yourself staring at the Jumbotron the whole time to see her better-  you may find yourself staring at the projection screen most of the time.  Don’t.  To do so would be to rob yourself of the joy of constantly being reminded exactly how small and well-rendered each of these mini-scenes are … as well as keep you from enjoying the expressions on the face of Mr. Hale as he tells these tales of Poe. This is a man who – as PlayLab’s mission statement declares – takes fun way too seriously.  So allow yourself to enter his tiny world and see how amazing it can be to play with matches.

~~~

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The 2012 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL will run February 22-March 4 at The Kraine Theater & The Red Room (85 East 4th Street between 2nd Ave and Bowery) and UNDER St. Marks (94 St. Marks Place between 1st Ave and Ave A). Tickets to all shows may be purchased online at www.FRIGIDnewyork.info or by calling Smarttix at 212-868-4444.

Related Posts:

• Poe-Dunk – A Matchbox Entertainment: 5 Things To Know About The Show Before You Go (2012 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)
• Professor Ralph’s Loss Of Breath (2014 Frigid New York Festival)
• The Rope In Your Hands: Katrina, In Their Own Words (2012 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)
• Stripper Lesbians: When Baring It All Is Academic (2012 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)
• Man Saved By Condiments: Some Time Alone To Ketchup (2012 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)

Five Questions. Five Answers. And One Big Decision: Rock, Paper, Or Scissors?

Poe-Dunk, "Annabel Lee"

Poe-Dunk – A Matchbox Entertainment

Company: Playlab NYC

Beyond the tales of terror! On a tabletop lies the quaint and curious work of Edgar Allan Poe. Newspaperman. Playwright. Critic. Humorist. An itty-bitty puppet repertoire of obscure curios, marginalia, and even a couple popular classics from America’s most versatile writer.

Show Times:

• Wed 2/22 @ 6:30 pm
• Fri 2/24 @ 9:30 pm
• Mon 2/27 @ 8:00 pm
• Wed 2/29 @ 11:00 pm
• Sat 3/3 @ 12:30 pm

Answers by Kevin P. Hale

(Creator / Performer)

Karen Tortora-Lee’s Question
That’s some title. How did you come up with it – and what does it mean?
Kevin: A podunk is a small place that is regarded as unimportant. Cast members don’t get much smaller than the pair of three-quarter inch lovers in my version of “Annabel Lee.” Additionally, it was my goal to shine a light on some of Poe’s lesser-known works, seemingly unimportant stories like “The Scythe of Time” and “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion.” And finally Edgar Allan Poe loved puns, so Poe-Dunk seemed inevitable.

Diánna Martin’s Question
If you were going to invite five people, anyone from past and present, to see your FRIGID show – who would you invite and why?

Kevin:

G. K. CHESTERTON – His essay “The Toy Theater”

MOM – When she flew out to see the last performance of Poe-Dunk – A Matchbox Entertainment at FringeNYC this summer Hurricane Irene happened, and the performance was cancelled.

“PROFESSOR” RALPH PHILLIPS – His1892 puppet adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Loss of Breath” has been a continual inspiration to our work at Playlab NYC.

LAURA HEIT – Her matchbox shows allowed me to see that my matchbox Poe models didn’t need to just sit on a bookshelf.

DAVID CRONENBERG – When I invited him to my high school graduation twenty some odd years ago he didn’t come.

Antonio Minino’s Question
What is the biggest sacrifice you’ve ever made for your Art and was it worth it?
Kevin: I once sacrificed a goat for my Art. It was totally worth it, so now I’m thinking about sacrificing a water buffalo.

Geoffrey Paddy Johnson’s Question
Was there any unexpected discovery made during the development of this production and, if so, can you share it?
Kevin: I hear that actors do this sort of thing all the time, but I was very surprised to discover that I could memorize a sixty-minute one-person show.

Michelle Augello-Page’s Question
What do you hope the audience receives from the experience of seeing this show?
Kevin: It is my hope that they leave the theater knowing that Edgar Allan Poe was a very funny guy.

Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament of DEAAAAATH

THM Bonus Question – We’re serious this year!
In the THM virtual Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament of DEAAAAATH which FRIGID Show do you take on?
Kevin: Drowning Ophelia

And what do you throw?
Kevin: Paper

Excellent choice, Poe-Dunk … fantastic!  I’m not making any predictions, but seeing as Drowning Ophelia is a ROCK opera, you may have won that one.  But we’ll have to see!

Looks like Love in the Time of Chlamydia (who challenged everyone with ROCK) has finally – yes I’ll say it – met her MATCH!  Because after either tying or vanquishing most of the opponents she’s now been smothered by PAPER.  Victory to – Poe-Dunk!  You were also challenged by I Married A Nun … who also chose PAPER.  That is a DRAW — but in this case “draw” means go out and “draw” some more of those great little Poe-Dunk characters!

Thanks Poe-Dunk: A Matchbox Entertainment for participating in The Happiest Medium’s FRIGID New York Festival 2012 Q&A. And for playing our game! You’re officially PAPER in any and all challenges. You may win again, you may not – who knows! This is how it works in the crazy world of the Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament of DEAAAAATH!

For the rest of you don’t forget to check out Poe-Dunk: A Matchbox Entertainment!

~~~

~~~

The 2012 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL will run February 22-March 4 at The Kraine Theater & The Red Room (85 East 4th Street between 2nd Ave and Bowery) and UNDER St. Marks (94 St. Marks Place between 1st Ave and Ave A). Tickets to all shows may be purchased online at www.FRIGIDnewyork.info or by calling Smarttix at 212-868-4444.

Related Posts:

• Poe-Dunk: A Matchbox Entertainment – Listen To These Tales Of Poe (2012 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)
• Professor Ralph’s Loss Of Breath (2014 Frigid New York Festival)
• LOL: The End. : 5 Things To Know About The Show Before You Go (2012 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)
• ‘Til Love Do Us Part: 5 Things To Know About The Show Before You Go (2012 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)
• Aerial Allusions: 5 Things To Know About The Show Before You Go (2012 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)