by Stephen Tortora-Lee on June 24, 2010
Marie Antoinette is famous for the saying, “Let them eat cake!”
Whether she actually said it or not doesn’t really matter in the face of history or the minds of the people whose rumor-mill worked overtime and managed to get her head in the guillotine anyway.
Cake (written by Felipe Ossa and directed by Leah Bonvissuto) helps us to imagine what would happen approximately 200 years later if - instead of a monarch – we get someone like Dana Dunnigan (Ramona Floyd) who lives on the conservative right and has a radio talk show where her celebrity and the power of her notoriety among her detractors very well might lead to her beheading too. It’s the glorification by an adoring fan-base, determined to save her, that helps keep her around.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on November 20, 2008
My husband’s home town in Michigan is so small that, to them, the word “theatre” is 1) spelled “theater” and 2) always preceded by the word “movie”. And if you want to get to that “movie theater” you’ll need a car — because the closest one is 13 miles away in the next town over. Growing up, if he wanted a theatre experience of ANY kind he needed to head to Chicago.
Meanwhile, New York is so rife with theatre space that you can’t go to a Starbuck’s without being within a stone’s throw of one. Heck … there’s one in the building where I work. There was even a theatre connected to the restaurant I had dinner in last night. If you climb on any mailbox and squint, you can see independent theatre going on everywhere in New York.
I’m particularly fond of theatre companies who put on well crafted plays written by up and coming writers. Johnna Adam’s Angel Eater’s Trilogy is just such a work, and FLUX Theatre Ensemble is just such a company.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on November 17, 2008
You know you’re at a David Mamet play when, before the show even starts, you’re asked to turn off your fucking cell phones.
While the play was first produced in the seventies, the subject matter is hardly dated; nothing gives away the time period (except for John Leguizamo’s crazy-patterned shirt — which could easily be more of a nod toward his character’s thrift-store-shopping-habits than the decade); even in the program “The Time” is listed only as “One Friday”.
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