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

CLENCHED

Struck by a mystery illness, David receives doctor’s orders to relax: something he’s incapable of doing. Desperate to conquer his debilitating tension, David dives into a spiraling monologue, a farce that audiences will find familiar, funny, and delightfully weird.

Show  Info:

• Fri Feb 19, 2016 | 8:50PM
• Sat Feb 20, 2016 | 12:30PM
• Thu Feb 25, 2016 | 8:50PM
• Fri Feb 26, 2016 | 5:30PM
• Sun Feb 28, 2016 | 5:10PM
• Fri Mar 04, 2016 | 7:10PM

UNDER St. Marks New York, NY $12/$15

Answers by David Mogolov
(writer/performer)

1. Forget the PR version. When you’re talking to your friends, how do you explain this show to them?
David: CLENCHED is a goofy, spiraling monologue that developed as I was thinking a lot about big data, and then coincidentally got really sick with a bacterial infection last summer. The script was underway when I got sick, but a weird experience I had while at the doctor’s office became a perfect frame for re-imagining the show. It’s much, much funnier than it would have been if I’d stayed healthy. Now it’s an hour-long comedy about illness, fonts, big data, and my complete inability to relax. They come together in a way that I think will be really fun and surprising.

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?
David: Oh, I hope they’ll be discussing the scene that inspired the promo photos for the show, but they could just as easily be talking about the NFL, Comic Sans, or meditation.

3. What drives your show – character, theme or plot?
David: Theme. Definitely theme. As I start to write, I have a whole mess of things I think might fit, and ultimately the only way they stay is if they tie into a couple key themes of the show. If they don’t fit, the only way I’ll keep them is if they’re very funny.

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?
David: “Oh, I got so tense just then.” – this comment by someone at a reading of an early draft, at a specific moment, provided such a clear opportunity for a great revision.

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?
David: This isn’t exactly big-budget (and it risks sounding a little Corky St. Clair), but if I wanted to do something totally pointless, I’d periodically vent the smell of toast into the theater, like an olfactory soundtrack to the show.

6. What’s the one thing you’re looking forward to regarding the FRIGID Festival itself?
David: This is my third FRIGID: I love this festival. The FRIGID team are unambiguously “the good guys.” Somehow they create a culture where everybody is really kind and helpful and open and fun. It’s big enough to see a ton of great, diverse shows, and small enough to meet everybody and have great conversations. I hope everybody comes to a bunch of shows and then donates some money to Horse Trade Theater Group, who put this whole thing on and treat everybody like human beings while taking none of the box office. It really does wonders for my faith in people.

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?
David: Yeah, I imagine the show will be received quite differently depending on the professional composition of the room. I’m both delighted and terrified of what would happen if I had a large number of designers. I’d be equally curious about football players, but I don’t expect the NFL to send a contingent.

8. What’s your favorite line from the show?
David: So few of them make sense out of context! I like this one a lot: “Maybe I’m not so precious and different! Maybe I just need a candle and a crystal and a blanket with sleeves!”

9. What’s the last thing you usually do before the beginning of a show?
David: Check my zipper. I wish I hadn’t learned that habit the hard way.

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?
David: NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. Well, I expect he’s elsewhere, eating an endangered animal.

Well, David — okay. I’m not much of a sports person so I just googled Roger Goodell. There are a lot of memes  … enough for me to agree that yes, it’s not beyond the scope to expect he’d be eating something endangered**.  Possibly.

Hey, Mr. Goodell – all in good fun, right?

Ahem.  Anyway … the rest of you – don’t forget to check out CLENCHED.   

**No animals were harmed in the writing of this post.

 -*-*-

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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Mental disorder is a prickly theme for a comedian, at once courting a humane sympathetic response all but extinguishing of levity, while summoning a degraded, inhumane call for ridicule – an entirely viler form of laughter. As a chosen topic it is demanding, requiring skillful handling, but there are some who seem qualified to do so, much the way there are some who can juggle chainsaws. Maria Wojciechowski is one of those artful jugglers. In her self authored comedic monologue, Almost A Genius, playing at this year’s Frigid Festival, she offers an account of her fairly recent diagnosis as a bi-polar personality. A devastating label to be handed at any stage of one’s life, with presently no known “cure”, the knowledge carries a heavy burden of responsibility. It provides, however, a framework with which to look back on past experiences and reappraise them. It seems Wojciechowski is presently at this point in her young life, but it doesn’t stop her from finding comedy in reflection. And perhaps it opens up understanding in larger, freer ways.

Witness, for instance, her opening act here as slowly, painfully almost, she inches from behind a curtain wearing a head-to-toe banana suit, her face a riven mask of angst. She closes on the microphone and haltingly commences in a cringing voice a sequence of bad to very bad banana puns and humorisms. It’s agonizing. And darkly, deeply funny. Everything is up for the cut: the performer, the audience, humor itself, and the banana – most maligned of fruits. This is clever stuff. Mercifully the lights go down, the banana suit comes off, and she stands before us as herself, launching into the story of her recent real life diagnosis. She has a soft, gentle voice and a slight and graceful physical presence. There is something mild and vulnerable about her, altogether at odds with the evident sharpness of her intelligence and the gritty humor she conjures in this clear-eyed, slightly self-mocking account of her harsh situation.

Punctuating her affecting confessional monologue are a series of sketches and performances that crank up the laugh factor and deepen the investigation. Away from herself, in character, she is a bold and brassy performer, committed to her creations with a vitality that is almost scary – that banana is really quite alarming. We get some singing, some dancing, and a bunch of impersonations shedding various degrees of light on her personal story – some hilariously on point (an earnest nun singing How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?) – and some more vaguely so (a chatty Whitechapel prostitute who quips her way through a near fatal encounter with Jack the Ripper). Breezily she moves from act to act, effortlessly shifting gears, but the break in continuity and character sometimes damages the rhythm of the whole, and the proximity between scathing take-downs and heartfelt confession is an awkward one. What are we to make, for example, of her plaintive pronouncement concerning a cherished family pet -”sometimes I wonder if I loved that dog more than some of my family”? Does she mean it, or is she being funny again, sending up the trite sadness of the situation? Both, most likely. And really that’s the fine steel hook she can catch you with in this piece. She can use the comforting language familiar to support groups in a way that plays at once as sincere and as ridiculous. Many will be lulled by her soft ingenuous-seeming voice, the tender reality of her plight, but this is only half the story. Even though there are some broadly comical moments few could resist, by and large she’s a sly one.

With direction by Natalie Sullivan Shipman, as a piece it could use a little tightening up to improve pace, a little polish, perhaps even a little squaring up as to where the humor is contained and the real self prevails. But that might be tampering with a rare and delicate concoction from a distinctive performer. In its current form Wojciechowski has given us something already suffused with a vivid comedic sensibility and a brave creative reach. It’s almost a work of genius.

~~~
Almost A Genius
Directed by: Natalie Sullivan

Remaining Performance:
Mar 07, 5:30PM

Click HERE for tickets

Running time: 0 h 45 min
Price: $10.00 – $15.00
Seating: General Admission

UNDER St Marks
94 St Marks Place
New York , New York 10009
1st Ave and Ave A

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. 

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Would anyone today contest the notion that growing up gay, as the youngest only son in a traditional white Catholic family in Queens during the seventies, would not be easy?  Such is Vincent James Arcuri’s story, and in his one man, self-authored show, Becoming Butch, he delivers himself of it in an engaging comedic monologue. Vincent wasn’t one of those quietly gay boys (whoever they may be) but a real – shall we say? – screamer right from the checkered flag. There were three older sisters in the house and an atmosphere of femininity into which he fit right in. Until, that is – as a little boy who was supposed to do things “normal” little boys do – he didn’t. His father and uncles tried to wean him off Barbies and cheer leading and get him on to “harder” things, like baseball. At which his instinctual nature balked. At which Vincent sucked. It was the beginning of a fostered sense of inadequacy and self-rejection which many gay children experience, and prompted his prolonged stop-start campaign of becoming butch.

With so little in the way of external positive reinforcements available, is it any wonder he took an avid interest in the on-tap fantasy worlds television entertainment offered? Even here, however, perhaps something resistant and pugnacious was at work when he elected as his childhood role model Arnold Jackson, the character played by black actor Gary Coleman in Diff’rent Strokes. Arcuri dwells on the humorously inappropriate aspects of his youthful enthusiasms more than their psychological edge and import. In some measure those speak for themselves, as when he re-enacts a high school bullying scenario which abruptly shifts the tone and atmosphere of the narrative. It’s harsh and unsettling, devoid of the comic twist used to disarm the jibing critiques thrown his way by well-meaning, masculine relatives. Which speaks impressively of the degree of control Arcuri exercises over of his audience. Just how much of a “faggot” he really is occupies a huge part of his developing personality, and the trauma is suggested through recollections of incidents played more for laughs than for any claims  of sympathy. Sympathy, the broader reach of this performance, is something young Vincent rarely finds for himself; not until fears, tears, and years later.

All the TV soap bubbles propel young Vincent toward a career as an actor. But even in this would-be-make-believe realm he is told he is unacceptable, too much a type as himself, too “gay” to find favor with casting directors. He takes speech lessons and tries sports in order to butch himself up. It’s arduous and all but ineffectual. The breakthrough, believe it or not, occurs when he falls in love. A shift begins that launches him into the greater world, or at least to L.A., where dreams really can come true (for actors).

In essence it’s not a story that is unfamiliar, certainly to gay people or anyone in touch with them. There’s something generic about it, its insistence on the ordinariness of the social environment, the family dynamic of tough, straight-man dad; ever-approving, doting mother; extended family of types. Nothing in his story – from his childhood fears, to his Catholic guilt, and West Hollywood run-ins – partakes of the unusual, the strange. Can this really be the case, or are we being served an account that has been tamed, pruned of thorns; a history divested of anything that might be deemed too queer? There’s something gratingly mainstream in its address. A projected dial graphic, like something from a TV game show, regularly clocks score ratings for the butch factor in each episode.

As a performer Arcuri is captivating – sharp, funny, and convincing. He has a deft sense of comic timing and a highly expressive face that can swoop up and down the register with the flick of an eyelash. Enjoyable as this piece is, one feels that he could go much further without the weighted attachment to light entertainment. In the meantime though, perhaps he can be happy in the knowledge that he’s certainly a crowd pleaser.

~~~

BECOMING BUTCH
Writer: Vincent James Arcuri
Director: Gary Riotto (NY), Louis J. Cuck (CA)
From the streets of Queens, NY to life amongst the queens in West Hollywood, CA, Vincent’s coming-of-age tale takes audiences on a rousing journey through baseball, soap operas, speech lessons and more to redefine the true meaning of becoming butch.
1h 5m   National   Los Angeles, California
Comedy   Solo Show
Staycation: Family Vacation   Celeb-reality TV in Hollywood
www.BECOMINGBUTCH.com
VENUE #11: The Steve & Marie Sgouros Theatre
Fri 17 @ 3  Tue 21 @ 2:45  Thu 23 @ 6:30  Fri 24 @ 8  Sat 25 @ 5:45  Sun 26 @ 12

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Monologues! Comedy! Improv! Ukulele music!

Friday, Sept. 2nd, 7-9pm

–> Bowery Poetry Club <–

Hosted by award-winning playwright Monica Bauer (Outstanding New Script, MITF 2008; nominee writing for Best Solo Show, Planet Connections 2010; finalist, Heideman Award).

Performers include:

• playwright Monica Bauer performing the Breast Pride Movement from the Diet Monologues
• John Fico performing a monologue from his critically acclaimed performance in Made for Each Other
• Duncan Pflaster, master of the Broadway Ukulele
• and others!

–> Open Mic sign up at 7 pm <–

Admission $8 (includes one free raffle ticket for a $100 Amazon.com Gift Certificate that will be raffled off that evening!)

Related Posts:

• BALLS! – Come See What Goes On In The Minds Of Men
• Last Looks At The Happiest Medium In 3-D – Pull Your Glasses Out
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• Becoming Butch (Fringe Festival 2012)

Katie Northlich has that commanding sort of physical presence that can hold a room with ease. There is a boldness in her look, an assuredness in her movements that can compel you to watch, whether she’s meekly sipping a glass of tea, or absently raking a hand through her hair while at the end of her tether. But, as her self-authored, one woman show, The Panic Diaries, playing at the Studio in Cherry Lane Theatre, amply demonstrates, she is a consummate actress, and no doubt can make herself invisible in a crowd if she so desired. Some dark glasses might be useful to this end, as she is possessed of a pair of large, glancing eyes that betray the intelligence and watchfulness within. Likely she is aware of this, as she uses their impact to focus an audience, and their watchfulness in appropriating the behavioral niceties of different character types. As an actress she is altogether self-possessed. Which makes it most interesting that the several characters she brings to life in this show are very much the opposite; people who have somehow lost themselves in the act of becoming what they believe is expected of them. On a psychological level, this particular malaise must be the classic actor’s dilemma. Adept at becoming someone else, they experience difficulty merely being themselves. So, for all her poise here, we can believe that she knows something of what she speaks.

We are presented with an unnamed woman, alone in her apartment, beset by the troubling sense that she has somehow, somewhere, lost the plot of her life. To her diary she pours out fears and frustrations, lamenting a feeling that things have lost their meaning, their value, their taste. Nothing survives as a refuge – her identity, her aspirations, her relationships. It is a dark and lonely place. Panic ensues. Each imploding diary encounter moves us along to a sketch featuring a new character Northlich gamely embodies in situations both banal – at a department store exploring bridal registry gift options – and pathological – a well-heeled southern woman comes apart in the course of a coffee date with friends. All of her women are, in some sense, heart-breakingly pathetic, even as Northlich, a natural comedian with a fluid expressivity, raises the comical pitch to hilarious levels. An explosive young chatterbox, visiting a gynecologist, erupts into a non-stop spiel about her profligate sex life to a hapless stranger in the waiting room, establishing new dimensions around the term inappropriate. It is both ridiculously funny and terribly sad. Which is to say it is the best sort of theatre. Before this character has even opened her mouth, with just the restless flick of her eye play, Northlich has delivered us the hopelessly narcissistic soul of the young woman.

All of her women suffer from a compulsion to say something that has unsettling consequences. A homeless woman, begging at a store entrance, is reliant on the store keeper’s daily charitable gift of a single cigarette. But she can’t stop herself sounding off at one of his customers and consequently unwittingly forfeits her smoke privileges. A nervous encounter between past college lovers prompts a young woman to carelessly divulge that she had a secret abortion following their break-up. The true self, long ignored and repressed, will eventually out. Spurned and un-nurtured, it is not surprising that rage will be leading.

There is a fine balance between the comedy of the sketches and the relentlessly self-questioning diarist’s scenes. Perhaps the solemn, unwavering tone of the diarist is overshadowed by the finer plumage worn by the sketch characters, but this tug-of-war feeds into the larger theme of imbalance, polarization, and self-alienation. There is art in it. Concentrated and, at just one hour and ten minutes, winningly brief, the whole performance is a tonic and a salutary riposte to the Sex and the City set, for whom Life seems reducible merely to the mother and father of all shopping lists (check off as you go). Director Joe Ricci uses a craftily light hand, allowing Northtlich to come through fully. Really there’s no call for panic here; everyone – characters, actor, and audience – are very nicely served.

~~~

The Panic Diaries

Katie Northlich
Writer: Katie Northlich
Director: Joe Ricci
1h 10m  
www.thepanicdiaries.com
VENUE #18: The Studio at Cherry Lane Theatre
Fri 26 @ 6 Sat 27 @ 3 Sun 28 @ 4

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• Becoming Butch (Fringe Festival 2012)
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• Pieces (Fringe Festival 2012)
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