In the beginning …

We start as simple templates of mind and soul ready to begin our continuous journey to become better and better human beings.  From learning who we are to learning how to live with others either in the casually murky soup of society or the deeper, more tricky currents of love, this sojourn is what the Australian group Geppetto (composed of “pop cabaret princess, Emma Dean, and Green Room Award winner, Jake Diefenbach“) are using the fairy-tale cipher of Hansel and Gretel to explore the themes of learning how to navigate reality through a lush dreamscape in their new, provocative mini-rock opera/concert piece An End To Dreaming.

As they approach the stage in the darkness of existential doubt they move in a way that is not haphazard, but deliberate and somewhat mystical in nature.  We see a Hansel-and-Gretel-esque pair draped in capes, faces and hair a gothy white with stylized markings.  They test their paths as they go carefully forward, eventually reaching the points where they can begin to cast their spell.  They begin their ritual by gently touching the instruments of their art;  Emma Dean beginning on the synthesizer and Jake Diefenbach on the piano – telling us the story of how they began, in a darkness so complete that they forgot who they were before, and strove to find an identity as well as a path to bring them forth again into the light.

The key difference between this rendition of the Hansel and Gretel story is that this is about fighting a foe much harder to face than a witch or neglectful parents. Their chief opponent is themselves and their understanding of how they can find purpose in the world. The story of this journey is broken into different chapters with a prelude to each concept before each piece bookended by songs that show the beginning and end of their journey through each movement.  These “preludes” are beautiful spoken word pieces that really connect  you to the heart of their struggle. This is truly an existential coming of age story that goes far beyond the original text in scope.

The first movement is The Darkness (with the songs Black  and The Devil you Know ) where they explore the realization of how much they do not know in the world, and how they might begin to figure out how to escape that blindness.  The next section The Awakening (Is Anybody Out There? (see clip above) and Tomorrow) deals with the joy and fear that happen when you realize there can be different choices in life.  They learn to move beyond their inner instincts to be afraid, to want obsessively, and to dream.  The third section, The Reckoning ( This Is Where The Trouble Starts and Forged in Flames) they face who they have found themselves to be and confront that mirror vision of what they most fear as well as hope for in the future.  The fourth movement is The Healing (It’s All Fun And Games and Stuck In The Mud )  is  ”about pain..Not the blind pain of suffering, but ..one that is sexual and fragile.”  A pain that is like a new skin you are just learning to wear.  The finale of the show is The  Light  (Won This Game Before and An End To Dreaming [see below])  where they emerge into the edge of the future which is now.  They still have  new challenges to face, but they are all new journeys to reach for expectantly instead of fearfully.  The bravery of Won This Game Before and the strengthening Affirmation to go forth into the world that is  the song An End to Dreaming  are powerful transmissions to be received from these two prophets of self -rediscovery, that this alone is a reason  you make it to one of their last two performances.

Their journey is very subtle and esoteric… poignant and meaningful…helpful  as well as persuasive to take a chance.  Written directed and performed by Emma Dean and Jake Diefenbach, with brilliant lighting and sound by Ben Stuart, we see not just that these two are great musicians , but amazing at theatre as well.   Catch one of the last two shows this week if you can.  You definitely won’t regret this once in your lifetime opportunity.

Related Posts:

• Snow White Zombie: Apocalypse – The End Is Nigh In Fairy Tale Land (Fringe Festival 2012)
• Bite The Apple – To Bite Or Not To Bite? (Fringe Festival 2012)
• Christopher Marlowe’s Chloroform Dreams
• Happily Ever After (Fringe Festival 2011)
• The Halloween Plays – Three Bursts Of Fire, Fear And Fantasy

The spread of fairy tale themed and zombie-filled story lines have saturated the market over the last few years. We have The Walking Dead, Snow White and the Huntsman, Grimm, Once Upon a Time, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and now, Snow White Zombie: Apocalypse, premiering at the 2012 New York Fringe Festival.

If you haven’t seen it, go, and hurry as if the end is truly coming. Every moment of Brenton Lengel’s play proves worth it. Produced by State of Play Productions, this 90-minute show starts out with Little Red Riding Hood, who soon gets taken by the Big Bad Wolf, who turns her into a zombie. Cue Prince Charming, played by Adam La Faci, and his lady fair, Rapunzel, played by Parker Leventer. Both are there to kick some living dead ass. They do this well, though much credit goes fight choreographer Lisa Kopitsky and her assistant Adam Alexander.  Without these two the action scenes – and the characters in them – would have fallen flat.

Eventually, the team of fairy tale crusaders comes across a woman in the woods. “She’s dead, look at her skin, it’s as white as snow,” says a disgusted Rapunzel, after Charming kisses the corpse. But wait! Spoiler: it’s not a dead body; it’s Snow White, played by Lucia Brizzi, who now claims Charming as her own. The two women couldn’t be more different. Rapunzel is strong, bitter, and brave; and Snow White is weak, fluttery, and optimistic. The latter could have been annoying; instead, with great comedic timing the personalities balance perfectly.

Another plot line I enjoyed was Prince Charming; apparently, he actually is the same prince that gets all the fairy tale princesses. This isn’t his fault, he finds, when faced with Prince Dashing, played by David Marshall. Since Dashing is also a ladies’ man, Charming learns that wooing women is both their special power. Dashing uses his gift to steal Rapunzel and Snow White, Charming uses his to seduce a man-eating female bear, played by Simon Feil, who also did a stellar job as the Woodsman.

Each character touches on aspects of their actual fairy tale counterparts. Rapunzel talks about how she lost her hair and twins, Hansel and Gretel make an appearance, iron really does kill fairies, and Snow White is petrified of apples. They make references to just about every fair tale, even ones that aren’t in Grimm like The Princess Bride. No matter what their part, everyone in the cast had me completely entertained for over an hour. I also had no idea how it would end. Let’s just say it surprised me, but I won’t tell. So, go see it already, just make sure to wear your zombie-proof coat.

~~~

Snow White Zombie: Apocalypse
State of Play
Writer: Brenton Lengel
Director: Jessica Creane
Snow White awakens to true love’s kiss 28 days after the zombie apocalypse. Now she must end the plague with Prince Charming — and his axe-wielding lover Rapunzel. Blood, sex, kung fu, gender politics…fairy tales as usual.
1h 40m   Local   Manhattan, New York
Drama   Comedy
Staycation: Fantasy Island Excursion   Sci-Fi Tech SuperHero Camp
www.stateofplaytheatre.com/shows/current-show-snow-white-zombie/
VENUE #01: The Living Theatre
Sat 11 @ 10  Wed 15 @ 2  Sun 19 @ 3:45  Fri 24 @ 5:30  Sat 25 @ 9

Related Posts:

• Bite The Apple – To Bite Or Not To Bite? (Fringe Festival 2012)
• #mormoninchief’s Boring Campaign (Fringe Festival 2012)
• Final Schedule Announced for Fringe Encore Series
• Pink Milk (Fringe Festival 2012)
• Pulp Shakespeare – The Bard Would Be Proud (Fringe Festival 2012)

I am all for the fairy tale fun we have been having in the last couple of years. There has been a melody of interesting takes on Snow White, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, the Wicked Witch, and so on, both on the screen and in literature. So, why not a play about six of Grimm’s hottest heroines?

Only, in Bite The Apple by Linda Manning, the princesses and damsels are in a different type of distress—middle age. Cinderella, played by Diana Henry, has the great shoes but her Prince Charming has deserted her out of boredom. Red, played by Amy Young, is a gutter punk no longer getting pursued by the wolf, but chasing him instead. Snow White, played by Annette Arnold, remains a child trapped in a 40-year-old body, so afraid of everything, that she abandons her kids. Manning’s own character Rapunzel, has gone completely crazy without her prince or her twins, and has locked herself in a tower of her own making. Finally, Gretel, played by Diana Zambrotta, is still sweet, but now alone since Hansel died. While all these ideas sound like a story, the actual production left me feeling, well, nothing.

At first, it had mystery as Red and Cinderella seemed like older versions of their younger counterparts. They weren’t happy, but neither had they digressed beyond the basic character. Things had fallen apart and their happy ending wasn’t working out the way they had hoped. Once we moved on to Briar Rose, commonly referred to as Sleeping Beauty, things got a little off. Why was she so unhappy in the castle? How did she fall asleep under the tree? We never find out. As for Rapunzel, I had to look back into the program to figure out who she was. The only sign given was the desert setting, but even that fell flat. The circumstances that made her go off her rocker were never made clear, but we do know she managed to pull out of the sandy spot in her head long enough to talk to Gretel.  As for that character, I didn’t see the growth or story, save for her rescuing her brother.

For the amount of time the play had, there was a lot that could have been done. Instead, I often felt uncomfortable in my seat watching these women deteriorate, which, could be what Manning had in mind. Still, what I experienced was more out of restlessness than emotion. It’s not that I seek the happily ever after, more, I didn’t buy the stories strewed before me. Save for Cinderella and Red, the rest of the play went nowhere.

~~~
Bite the Apple
The Other Mirror
Writer: Linda Manning
Director: Katherine M. Carter
Cinderella is a past-her-prime trophy wife, Red Ridinghood lurks outside bars waiting for the wolf, and Snow White wants to kill her kids. Your favorite fairytale princesses are clearly beyond their “happily ever after,” which path do they take from here?
1h 30m   Local   Manhattan, New York
Drama   Comedy
Staycation: Literary Lane   In Someone Else’s Shoes
www.theothermirrortheatre.com
VENUE #14: New Ohio Theatre
Sat 11 @ 9  Sun 12 @ 12  Tue 14 @ 3  Thu 16 @ 4:15  Sat 18 @ 8

Related Posts:

• Snow White Zombie: Apocalypse – The End Is Nigh In Fairy Tale Land (Fringe Festival 2012)
• Final Schedule Announced for Fringe Encore Series
• #mormoninchief’s Boring Campaign (Fringe Festival 2012)
• Songs Of Love: A Theatrical Mixtape (Fringe Festival 2012)
• Contrasts (Fringe Festival 2012)

There’s much more than a touch of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in the character of Katharine Sherman‘s Christopher Marlowe in her new play, Christopher Marlowe’s Chloroform Dreams, running at the lower east side’s The Red Room. The time-and-smoke shrouded legend of the Elizabethan playwright hangs over the proceedings and propels the story all the way, and then nearly, to its end. Familiar tropes from classical mythology and fairy tale erupt everywhere in a noiresque style tale of a femme who is at once fatale and in flight. Mix in more than a strain of poetic patter and the result might be ponderous, over rich and over-reaching if it weren’t from the pen of a careful, gifted playwright who has a sharpened sense of when to call off the big thunderous themes to allow the smaller human story to breathe. Sherman is excellently served in this production by director Philip Gates who has done a great deal to let this highly theatrical, complexly structured drama flow. And flow it does, like silk, like smoke.

Gumshoe Marlowe (the playwright, not the fictional detective) is on the case and it’s a case of love’s labor’s lost as the gal he pines for, Daphne Fairchild, has a problem with the needle. It’s somewhere, sometime in the eternal noir of Hollywood’s 1940s and the environment is murky with urban underbelly, its sinners, and its saints. Daphne has taken up with contraband king Ingram Frizer, who keeps her in morphine embrace. Marlowe tries to cut a deal with Frizer to release Daphne, and Frizer, like the southern drawling megalomaniac he is, perversely agrees. Confident of the weakness of the human spirit Frizer is sure of Daphne’s faithlessness, or rather as he would have it, faithfulness to the true church of humanity – what he has to offer. The narrative evolves in non-linear fashion, jumping between episodes of elation and degradation, hopefulness and despair. We pretty much all know in what direction the story is heading and this disrupted sequencing brings a freshness to the unfolding, allowing us to see the tale as if shot from diverse angles. Clever staging and ingenious scenic design (Joshua David Bishop) work to brilliant effect in keeping the tempo up while contributing to a sense of layered story and hidden motives.

A polymorphous narrative builds in a polygeneric world. Marlowe, playwright/detective, is in search of his muse/dame, herself enthrall to intoxicating sensual abandon, emotional numbness. She is at once the mythical Daphne, in flight from the god of poetry and his promise of ennoblement, and the Sleeping Beauty, in love with a solitary dreamworld. The excellent Sheila Joon, as a supporting actress, plays three roles that give a sense of the multi-dimensionality of the story. She is Eleanor del Toro, a hardened habitue of Frizer’s drug world, with yet a pulse of sympathy for its entrapped denizens; Nicholas Skeres, one of Frizer’s goons, and the name of one of actual playwright Marlowe’s dodgy comrades; and The Ferryman, a sleazy guide in the city sewers, who takes payment in coin and conducts Marlowe to the underworld drug den where Frizer holds Daphne captivated.

In synch with this variegated narrative, and part of the torrent that carries you headlong through the performance, Sherman’s vibrant language shifts and morphs from hard-boiled, snappy Bogart/Bacall banter, through rhythmic Beat poetics, pulpit fire and brimstone, to gin-soaked Tom Waites-ian monologues, complete with the whine of a bruised melody off in the distance (wonderful sly sonics by Will Fulton). Opening lines intoned by Marlowe, characteristically slouched against a wall, collar up, hat brim down, run:  Once upon a time there was a habit. A habit’a mine. For a time. A time. And once upon a time she hadda have it – the girl she had a habit she was mine. This sort of linguistic bravado might be annoying if it didn’t intimately serve the themes in the piece, echoing the broken time line the play deploys. Harmonious with the whole production, it’s vividly alive to its own artificiality, risking boldly, yet never quite overplaying itself, anchoring in small moments of naturalism that draw you back in. In the play’s intriguing, only pastoral moment (Chris Marlowe did after all bequeath us the lyric poem, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love), Marlowe, Daphne, and side-kick Tommy the Kid (Thomas Kyd? wink, wink, nudge, nudge!) share a star lit night by a campfire. Relaxed for once, Daphne observes – there’s a beam of light coursing through the trees. You can only see it if you blow smoke on it. I wanna live here forever. This eloquent line speaks volumes about Daphne’s character, as well as the play’s central themes.

But wait. Lunar Energy Productions (both Sherman and Gates are founding members) have to mix it up that one notch further. If you think you know everything that can happen in a noiresque rendering of a tale of dark addiction dovetailed with classical allusions and historical references, you might yet be surprised by a sudden eruption of ensemble dancing. Honest to god in-synch dance movements that might happen at a Madonna Super Bowl performance break out, complete with the skeevy, strung out, I-got-the-needful-jones jitters.

The laurels should be lavished, and shared here by all involved in this courageous production. Detailed attention has been paid in every department: scenic (Bishop), sound (Fulton), costume (Kalere Payton), and lighting (Alana Jacoby). The hard working actors deliver handsomely. Compelling leads, Christopher Fahmie and Valerie Redd, are squarely matched with supports Sheila Joon, Michael Markham, and Curry Whitmire. In her conflation of characters Christopher and Philip Marlowe, Sherman is really on to something. This is a hero that could go almost anywhere, uncovering nasty secrets; theatrical gold dust. We would all be lucky to have another installment. Meantime, Chloroform Dreams is knockout.

~~~

Related Posts:

• The Flower Thief – A Bittersweet Bloom
• Before Placing Me On Your Shelf (Fringe Festival 2011)
• Women’s History Month: Celebrating Women In The Arts – Spotlight On Heidi Grumelot
• There is No Good News – Laughing Until Your Sides Hurt (FRIGID New York 2011)
• FRIGID Hangovers – I’ll Have Another Round! (FRIGID New York 2011)

Imagine what it would be like if you had always dozed off to sleep during your childhood bedtime stories, and you never got to hear the words -”and they lived happily ever after”? You were awake for the introduction of the main story characters – a fair maiden, a prince, a beast, a witch – and your head was nodding as the tale was reaching a crescendo of anxiety and crisis, but you were out for the count by the occasion when all was safely resolved and truth and goodness triumphed over evil adversity. Well, all your stories would be unresolved, forever arrested at a pitch of extreme desperation. You yourself might be inexplicably fearful, characteristically tense and anxious, and your slumbering dreams could well be nightmares. Such is the imaginative, if unlikely premise of Cody Lucas‘s Happily Ever After, produced by the Denton, Texas based outfit, Sundown Collaborative Theatre. The main character, Jack, was such a highly sensitive child, drowsy enough to experience this unfortunate set of circumstances. Now, a young man, he is a nervous pill-addicted wreck, afflicted and exhausted by his fear of sleep, a state that delivers him relentlessly to a nightmare realm of terror.

Beginning on a bare stage, with just a spotlight to dress the scene, we are presented with Jack, curled in the fetal position, but adamantly resisting sleep. Cody Lucas, as Jack, is extremely effective at pulling you into Jack’s tormented psyche, his anguished fretfulness never surrendering an instant in which your attention might wander, the tension slacken. Despite his best efforts, sleep overtakes Jack, surrendering him to the frightening world of his dreams. This realm is overseen and controlled by a couple of turn-of-the-century style carnival barkers, Jacob and Wilhelm, the Brothers Grimm. That their tastes and inclinations run toward the perverse is made swiftly clear as they indulge in a groaning session of incestuous mutual masturbation. When their attentions turn toward Jack things can only get uglier. He is summarily educated as to the level of his subjugation to their will and his complete powerlessness. Having dished out a little physical punishment, they decide to proceed on a more psychological level, summoning a cast of hapless story tale characters to re-enact depraved scenes of humiliation and despair. These characters are all as resentful and helpless as Jack, but their rebellious efforts to preserve their dignity are over-rode by the brothers, and each is mocked in a savagely cruel manner. In sequence the brothers call forth the characters – Rumpelstiltskin, Rapunzel, Beauty, Hansel, a Prince – as helplessly Jack is made to watch each tableaux of defilement and suffering. It’s a compelling and dark spectacle, punctuated with music, dance, and acrobatics; a delicately visualized carnival of horrors.

All of the performers are to be commended here. There is a conviction on display that defies you to relax your credibility in such a fantastical abstraction. Each scenario pushes at the limits of digestible mortification. The effect is genuinely unsettling. The Grimm brothers (Travis Steubing and Zane Harris) have some nice sneering comical passes, leeringly foul throughout, but never teeter over into recognizable contrivance. Robert Linder (Rumpel) and Nick Ross (the Prince) are especially strong in their scenes. The music (Patrick Emile) and choreography (George Ferrie) are effective at stimulating an atmosphere of drilled corruption. The direction, by Lucas, is taut and detailed. As the offenses mount up, and tension builds, I had utterly surrendered to the story’s gravitational pull, which made the conclusion, when it is suddenly sprung, all the more disappointing for being so pat. The skeleton in Jack’s closet, the bugaboo under his childhood bed, just did not do it for me. For all its ghastliness, the themes invoked in the various scenarios reached quite a bit deeper than the Tales from the Crypt-style denouement we’re served here. If these explanations must be maintained, perhaps the language they are divulged with might be adjusted. As a conclusion it goes some distance to undermining what came before, leaving it ultimately less than the sum of its parts. Horror buffs might disagree with me, but they will surely be delighted by this otherwise admirably wicked tale.

Happily Ever After ran until August 26, 2011 as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.
~~~

Related Posts:

• Snow White Zombie: Apocalypse – The End Is Nigh In Fairy Tale Land (Fringe Festival 2012)
• Bite The Apple – To Bite Or Not To Bite? (Fringe Festival 2012)
• Stinky Flowers, Sweet Thoughts

There’s something truly wonderful about smartly written children’s stories.  When you look at the enduring ones they’re not still around because they’re cute or funny or have clever titles . . . they’re still around because they teach an amazing lesson in a subtle and gentle way.  So, while Stinky Flowers and the Bad Banana has a title I could say over and over again and still laugh – I don’t think it’s gotten as far as it has on funny alone.  In fact, after hearing what creator Croft Vaugh had to say about his play, I think the reason this show has come this far is because its creator is as extraordinary as its topic.

Beginning as solo play performed by Croft Vaughn himself, Stinky Flowers and the Bad Banana was first presented as part of Six Figures Theatre Company’s Artists of Tomorrow Festival at the Westside Theatre in December 2006. From there it went to both the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (2007) and the Indianapolis Fringe Festival (2008). The new 5-person version of the play was presented in 2008 as part of The Management’s Salon Reading Series.  Now, audiences will be able to see the first fully staged production of the ensemble version of Stinky Flowers and the Bad Banana at UNDER St. Marks.

Today Croft Vaugh tells me about the challenges of turning a solo-show into an ensemble piece, he explains how Fairy Tales are filled with parental imagery, and he gives some advice on how to transform yourself into a monkey . . .

Stinky Flowers and the Bad Banana has got to be the cutest title I’ve ever run across. Tell me about what it means.

Playwright Croft Vaughn

CV: Well thank you for the compliment! The show is a fairytale frame play, and the title references two of the tales. I was visiting the Brooklyn Botanical Garden with a friend, and I had some bad news for him. I was trying to think of a way to bring up the subject without saying, “Listen, I’ve got bad news”, so I told him that I had a stinky flower for him. I liked the oddness of the metaphor, so I turned it into a fairytale about telling the truth when you have bad news. Stinky Flowers is the story that launched this show back in 2006. The Bad Banana tale is top secret, but I should warn you; the audience will be full of monkeys.

Stinky Flowers and the Bad Banana started off  as a solo show, and has now evolved into a 5 person ensemble piece. What prompted that?

My friend Kelly Miller is a literary manager and dramaturg. She saw my performance at the East to Edinburgh Festival at 59E59 Theaters. After the show, she grabbed my arm, looked me in the eye and said, “Croft, this show is beautiful. You need to write it for 5 actors for regional theaters, and for 45 actors, for high-schools.” I ran with her advice, and drummed up versions for Broadway, Cruises, and ultimately, the Pixar feature animation film, followed by a successful cartoon spin-off and tons of merchandise. If anyone knows how I can make that happen, please call me. Immediately.

What’s been the most challenging aspect of translating a solo show into an ensemble piece?

I think formatting is really hard, does that count? The play is steeped in storytelling, so, the bones of the play didn’t need to change much. It’s fun to write new characters, and discover what kind of trouble they can get into. I think the most challenging part was just allowing the play to take over with the new characters. Letting them speak, and drive the show with their fears and curiosity. Letting the new play organically develop.

Your tag-line “They . . . discover the answer to, ‘Are we still loved after the person who loves us is gone?‘” is so poignant and moving that it could almost be a line of poetry. That’s no ordinary theme. Where does it come from?

Thank you! I wish certain MFA admissions departments had your keen intuition. But I’ll fess up – I didn’t realize that’s what the play was about till about 3 years after I began working on it. I wrote a lullaby in the play that the kids discover on a cassette tape. It’s their mother singing, “Everything You Want to Know.” I was working with some musicians, trying to express to them what I needed from the song, and I had a moment of sublime clarity. That’s the question these kids face in the show. It’s something you can’t answer, so you have to take it on faith. For me, it touches a very deep and personal fear; one that I take on faith is universal. While that may be the heart of the show, the meat of the play is smart and entertaining tales told by 3 military brats who are convinced the audience is going to eat them. I’m going to be in the audience every night, so that could very well happen.

What’s your favorite moment in the play?

This is where my brilliant (to the nth degree) director comes in. It’s a good thing David A. Miller is such a great person, because with smarts like his in the wrong hands, you’d have a Robert Moses of Theatre. He’s the rare breed of artist who knows how to foster an environment where magic can happen. I just sat in on a run-through of the play, and the amount of creativity on display speaks to the freedom these actors have. Dorothy Abrahams only had a scarf with which to turn herself into a monkey, so she ties it around her head like Axel Rose. Welcome to the jungle, indeed! There was also an inspired moment with an earmuff by Lauren Sowa. Robert James Grimm’s Evil King puts my Evil King to shame, and that’s no small feat.

What part of the show have you found resonates most with the audience?

Monkeys. I think everyone resonates really well with monkeys. The finale is quite marvelous too. Maybe it’s the story about the 2 birds told in silence because it activates the sniffles pretty quickly… There’s something special in the relationship Sinclair has with his Grandfather. Fairytales are flush with characters who are not your parents, and at the same time, are your parents. For me, that’s like a grandparent. Sinclair develops an imaginary friend who takes on the role of his Grandpa to help tell the stories. Eventually he drops the charade and faces the truth. Fairytales carry the courage of their convictions. This is how the kids find the courage to create their own story, the ending of which weaves a fantastic finale for all the other tales. I’d say the audience relates to the journey of the show more than any single part.

And finally – what’s your favorite Stinky Flower?

Stinky Flowers!

Playing favorites with flora will only get you into trouble. On that note!  There are 2 genuinely stinky flowers, and I prefer Rafflesia Arnoldii. Take that Amorphophalis Titanum! Don’t worry – A.T. won’t flower again for like, 70 years. Rafflesia has no stem, no roots, no leaves. It’s just a fat, ugly flower, with a big hollow head. It sits parasitically on a vine, looks like something from The Dark Crystal, and smells like rotting meat. It is the king of stinky flowers in my opinion. Although, there are some members of Congress that give Rafflesia a run for it’s money…

___________

Be sure to catch Stinky Flowers and the Bad Banana – and check back here to read my review of the show.  I can’t wait to see what Croft Vaughn and his talent ensemble has in store.

~~~

Related Posts:

• Stinky Flowers And The Bad Banana Has Heart . . . And Cookies!
• “Bigger Than I” is Bigger Than All Of Us
• LIARS – Don’t Believe A Word Of It
• A Play Takes Flight – The Making Of “Caitlin And The Swan”
• Feeling the Chill? It’s FRIGID!