There’s something immediately audacious and comical about compressing a voluminous turn of the century literary oeuvre into a one hour performance piece. When said performance is delivered by just two actors, deploying only a hat and a scarf as props, the ante rises significantly. As does the challenge. Such is the project Carrie Brown and Karim Muasher, jointly the Animal Engine production company, set themselves in their show Petunia and Chicken, presently showing as part of the 2014 Frigid Festival at the Kraine Theater. Skillful performers both, trained clowns, they arrive at this year’s event with the accolade of having won last year’s Participants Pick Award for their joint authored show, The Vindlevoss Family Circus Spectacular!

Petunia and Chicken takes as inspiration Willa Cather‘s well regarded literary Prairie Trilogy – My Antonia, O Pioneers!, and Song of the Lark – wide reaching stories illuminating the experience of the agricultural peoples that settled the plain states at the latter end of the nineteenth century. The genius of Cather’s apparently simple narrative style is that it has roots in some of humanities darkest places. While ever respectful, Animal Engine address only surface Cather, mining the humor to be found in characters, tropes, and plot devices which – today – nearly all hold a whiff of nineteenth century corn about them. This is, after all, clowning, but clowning that wishes to breathe some of the finer air found in great literature. Funny, no?

Petunia and her family – father, mother, brother Ambrosz – are immigrants from Europe, looking to settle on cheap land holdings in Nebraska. Their’s is the make-it-rich dream of coming to America. “Chicken” Burden is an orphan – his parents victims perhaps of a similar dream – and grandson of the neighboring property owners. Whilst children, they meet and become fast friends and, as the years pass and parents succumb, shy lovers. Chicken wants adventure and experience, Petunia is dutiful and rooted. The familiarity of this story arc serves Brown and Muasher well, as their formal telling of it is original, imaginative, and at times startling. The writing is clever and there is evident ingenuity of editing and dramatization. We get some memorable invocations of landscape – an essential component of Cather’s world; waving fields of wheat, rhythmic sighing windmill sails, the ceaseless rise and fall of water pumps all mimed by the performers on a blank stage. Brown gives us a touching and hilarious impression of Chicken’s faithful canine companion, smushed face and hunched shoulders, as he tries to keep up with his restless young master. These moments are precious and vivid theater. But the necessary break-neck pace at which the whole thing has to unfold works sometimes to blur the sharpness of personation and gesture.

Additionally, if you overwhelm your central characters with cartoon surroundings and personalities, you shouldn’t be surprised if they partake of some of that cartoonism, and dramatic impact is depleted. So even as your story is building towards an inevitable climax, it is losing air, and the eventual pop is muffled – regardless of how heavy the inverted commas around that pop might be

in the first place. Melinda Jean Ferraraccio’s directing must take some blame here. It wants crispness. Clever and sharp is how to keep things aloft. There shouldn’t be room for the serviceable gesture or allusion, despite the speed of proceedings. First night opening issues aside, this reviewer felt the performance in need of some polish.

One feels Brown and Muasher, imaginative and energetic as they are, can find it. They are shrewd enough to turn the rudimentary lighting set-up they deploy into a moment of fun, when there’s some direct address to the lighting booth controller during the performance. Other than the lighting, they conjure everything else. And however jaded your outlook you’ll be rooting for them throughout. On evidence, Thursday night’s audience certainly were, and seemed utterly taken by them to wherever they traveled, narrative whiplash notwithstanding. Clowns, of course, can be gratuitous crowd-pleasers, but their durable notoriety resides not merely in this fun raising provocation, but ultimately in the canny ability to unsettle. This sweeping, romantic tale of settlers ultimately wants a little unsettling.

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Petunia And Chicken
Inspired by the works of Willa Cather
Created and performed by Carrie Brown and Karim Muasher
Direction from Melinda Jean Ferraraccio

Remaining Performances:
Feb 24, 8:40PM
Mar 03, 10:15PM
Mar 06, 8:40PM
Mar 08, 3:40PM

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
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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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Written in 1983, an early effort from playwright John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck; Doubt: A Parable), Danny and the Deep Blue Sea has enjoyed a healthy theatrical life to date, being something of a favorite showcase for two actors displaying their mettle in a torrid tale of attraction, repulsion, knock-down and drag-out. At once alive to the profane speech and stunted hopes of its two messed-up blue-collar, Bronx dwelling principals, it is also elaborately artificial in its romantic trajectory, positing the notion that these two social zeroes could come together in the course of one night and offer each other something like redemption – in the form of a marriage proposal. You don’t have to be hyper critical to find it psychologically unconvincing. But you might want to re-examine your own smug sense of what is and is not possible as Shanleys’ characters, Roberta and Danny, play out this tormented encounter with the demons that preside over what can and cannot happen for them in their own desperately bleak lives.

At play’s opening Roberta (Allison Plamondon), sullen yet provocative, sits alone in a dive bar, drinking. Enter Danny (Joe Perrino) holding a pitcher of beer, bloodied and still steaming from a recent violent street encounter. He takes the table alongside Roberta. The pheromonal hum he’s giving off would move most people directly toward the exit, but to Roberta it works as an enticement. She engages him. In short order Danny has convincingly asserted that he is homicidal, and Roberta that she is suicidal. A perfect match in some ways, but the verbal sparring that ensues, escalating quickly to physical assault, offers not a shred of comedy, or even tragedy, as respite. As blinded with self-loathing and rage as his characters are, Shanley finds language for them to convey the greater evils of their lives – a generational despair passed on by parents who long ago lost any self respect, along with their way. A kinship evolves and as rashly and ill-advisedly as anything else they have undertaken, these two move from bar room to bedroom. Post-coital the tension eases to a degree, but in another way the real fighting for this couple is just beginning.

Each has a sense of a better life – as clichéd and romantic as can be – and following the savagery of what went before, a certain lame tenderness is aired between them. The mythos of marriage takes hold and there’s a measure of ghastliness about the tired projections the duo concoct for themselves. Shanley puts romance on the operating table and invites the audience into the surgical theatre. Stars in a night sky induce a headache in Danny, until finally he can see some that form themselves into  - a big lump of tuna. Roberta watches the glow of a red garage light outside her window and fantasizes it’s the moon. Even these two headcases can tell themselves stories, but can they find a different ending for the one they’ve been telling themselves all their lives?

If you don’t believe Shanley’s story, it won’t be on account of director Alice Spivak. Spivak, a veteran acting teacher and coach, throws all her energy into drawing performances from her actors, both incidentally  past students of hers. She certainly appears to know how to get what she needs from them. Character comprehension and projection is deep core. Perrino’s hopped up, thin-skinned aggression relents to just as tongue-tied a vulnerability once, unwisely perhaps, it senses safety around Roberta. Wide-eyed, muscular, prone to fits of breathlessness, every tic and posture broadcasts a hair-trigger, dangerous sore-head inviting some kind of hormonal intervention. Sporting a pair of amateurishly blood-laced knuckles, Perrino easily disposes of a clumsy theatrical effect that more readily suggests a run in with a raspberry syrup dispenser than the result of a bruising street brawl. Plamondon’s Roberta is shrewder, crueler perhaps in her calculating approach. Arrogantly abandoned to her own hopelessness, Plamondon gives Roberta a brazen stare and a mouth that most naturally relaxes into a lop-sided smile of contempt. For all her armored defiance she is see-through when desperate. She knows that she needs to be forgiven, but is not clear if she wants to be punished more than she wants forgiveness. Catholicism gets a shout-out here, and we get a riff of comedy as the pair consider the possibility of a protestant wedding ceremony. There’s a definite chemistry between these two, which drags you along for the ride however much you might protest the credibility of the scenario. Their convincing embodiment of the characters actually works at throwing the artifice of Shanley’s piece into relief. Which itself is a nice conceit, one the playwright might approve.

Minor quibbles would mention the poor sighting in sections of the auditorium’s seating during some of the action. The stage at the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe is quite low and one scene has the characters prone on a bed for exchanges. There’s enough real blood in the language and the performances to overlook the aforementioned poorly applied theatrical kind. Indeed, perhaps there’s something to be said in favor of the belaboring of this gory illusion. The best theatre teases us with the knowledge of its artificiality, even while it pulls us into a state of credulous surrender. All evidence suggests this production, from OnTheRoad Repertory Company, is vividly wise to this understanding, and sharp about how to convey it.

Related Posts:

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The first thing you can’t fail to notice upon entering the performance space for Empirical Rogue‘s production of Romeo and Juliet, is the spectacular environment chashama have provided for the company. Formerly a taxi service garage on Jackson Avenue, LIC, the space retains the character of its previous functionalism, but the translation of the environment for its theatrical purpose is all but awe inspiring. This is immersive theatre space at its most captivating. Three very simple arrangements of double rowed seats place the audience right at the edge of the action. Behind them floor to ceiling drapes of canvas enclose the space and focus attention on one corner of the performance area, where a raised office hutch serves as the play’s famous balcony setting. The raw cinder block walls are spectrally painted with fading murals and decorative effects that describe location and contribute atmosphere almost slyly – “Verona” the largest declares boldly, like some pageant-styled vermouth advertisement of the Forties. A raw building scaffold sits easily in the space, spotlights glow in constellation behind canvas walls, and a wide grill metal gate recalls you to the actuality of the location. Before the drama has begun you want to take your hat off to production designer, Dante Olivia Smith, muralist, Adam Fujita, and producer/director, Tim Eliot.  This is one of the most intelligent and graceful set designs I have come across.

Susannah Hoffman and Doug Chapman.

And very happily, all of its cleverness and lightness of touch is nimbly echoed in the performance that follows of Shakespeare’s most famous story of  the tragic, young, star-crossed lovers. Eliot has honed down the play to use just four actors, each necessarily playing several roles. The choreographing of characters to scenes requires rapid-fire role changes, asking both performers and audience to stay alert and keep their wits in order to follow the action. Rudimentary costume changes are effected in seconds behind the scenes, and on this first night of performance all ran effectively as actors disappeared through narrow gaps in the scenery to emerge moments later in alternate character from another partition. Timing is precise and impressive. Having the same actors portray different genders and different generations is engrossing to watch, but also throws into relief contrasts in the story’s culturally imposed roles and restrictions. Jacob Martin takes both the role of the impassioned and reckless Romeo, as well as that of the socially constrained and conservative Lady Capulet, Juliet’s mother. All of the actors can be commended on the stamina which they bring to bear in sustaining the charged atmosphere, and it is a special note of success that I found myself, while watching the four actors in scene together, expectant of the arrival of yet another. The sense that another character was waiting in the wings was proof of the effectiveness of the illusion they were working so hard to create.

This is a physical production and swordplay (Shad Ramsey) is vigorous and convincing. Creating the sense of a factional melee can be understandably difficult with just four, sometimes three, actors at a time. Eliot’s direction is equal to the challenge and he gives us a delightful note of chaotic confrontation at one point, when a van pulls up outside the garage, headlights blazing, the gate rolls noisily upward, and sword-wielding actors rush in. The illusions of a masqued ball and of populated public space are similarly creatively suggested with a minimum of effects and participants.

If there is a villain in the production then it is undoubtedly the acoustics in this raw space. Intimate exchanges between characters can get lost and, as there is much active space in use, the same may be said when actors are turned away from the audience. As Romeo, Martin projects the most effectively, conjuring youthful vitality and a character who is touchingly over-taken by new passions and the will to be an honorable man. There were moments though when I wished he would modulate his delivery more; not everything the young lover says is an exclamation. Susannah Hoffman as Juliet gets it right, marrying the charge to the lines. This is a full throttle performance with great range, taking us from girlish excitement all the way to womanly anguish. Her Mercutio is equally impressive, startling even as she projects a complex braggart and hot head who seems to be masking a woundedness at Romeo’s attentions towards women. Sarah Baskin gets great play out of the Nurse, driven by sympathy to imprudence, she is all attentiveness and want of wisdom. To Doug Chapman fall the less meaty roles of Benvolio and Friar Laurence, well-intentioned voices of temperance, and he dithers and agonizes leanly. As an ensemble these actors come together most effectively and in moments of pitch, the language and acting engender a white hot intensity that melts your sense of time and place, all the poise and cleverness, any need of a suspension of disbelief. It’s powerful.

Fine touches abound. Live music is featured in the form of Becca Bernard, a solo cellist, sitting all-but-not-quite out of sight behind wooden pallets in one corner. The wardrobe (Summer Lee Jack) is a hybrid of contemporary wear and historical costume notes, lithely at play with a notion of dress-up and realism. In a similar vein, features of the scene-setting mural decoration archly confess to their own artificiality, their recently applied theatricality. But there is a lyricism amidst this self-consciousness. In the one instance when the space is plunged into complete darkness, a small, plastic night light that has been glowing unnoticed throughout the action, becomes the sole point of light. Keen-eyed observers might note it is a figure of the Virgin, the mother of all sorrows, herself a complex symbol of themes that underscore the drama. Utterly thoughtful, innovative, bold and tempered, Empirical Rogue and Tim Eliot have produced a memorable version of this much played Shakespearean favorite, itself the mother of all tragic romances. All one can say is Bravo! Bravo!

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• Macbeth, Aquila Theatre; Macbeth, Epic Theatre Ensemble

Best Erotic Romance (Cleis Press, 2012) offers a sampling of work from some of the best authors writing in the erotic romance genre today. Editor Kristina Wright introduces Best Erotic Romance by saying, “These are the stories that touched my heart and ignited my libido, that made me think about the nature of desire and the unpredictability of the human heart. Each of these seventeen stories weaves love and passion so tightly that one cannot be separated from the other. And isn’t that what a lasting relationship is all about?”

Well written and provocative, the stories in Best Erotic Romance touch upon many different aspects of our sexuality and our expressions of sex within the context of our most intimate relationships. This is a book that celebrates the role of sex in our lives, and the need we have for intimacy, love, and passion. As a whole, the collection supports conversation, communication, and self-reflection. In the foreword, Shayla Black encourages readers to “embrace these stories for what they are: a true mirror of our inner needs, our longing to combine souls, to discover our truest selves. Explore. Fantasize. Wonder.”

Best Erotic Romance offers a wide range of stories which explore and reveal our most intimate connections, encompassing a vast array of situations, characters, and settings. The relationships in these stories are mostly heterosexual and vary from long-term marriages to first encounters. The characters range from unattached singles to divorced parents to married couples with children. These stories take place across the world, and are rooted in our relationships with the erotic, body and mind, heart and soul.

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Best Erotic Romance

Edited by Kristina Wright. Cleis Press, 2012. Foreword by Shayla Black

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What Happened In Vegas by Sylvia Day skillfully balances the genres of romance and erotica, combining traditional romance with scorching hot sex.

First Night by Donna George Storey explores the concept of marriage and anticipates the subtle changes that such a deep commitment can bring.

Another Trick up My Sleeve by Heidi Champa finds humor and depth in a couple’s quest to bring excitement back to their sex life.

Drive Me Crazy by Delilah Devlin is a lusty story about attraction and the push and pull of two characters as they reveal themselves to each other.

Once Upon a Dinner Date by Saskia Walker is a delightfully playful story that feeds upon the sensual exploration of sex.

He Tends to Me by Justine Elyot searches the place of love in a Dominant/submissive relationship dynamic.

Guest Services by Angela Caperton explores sex as self-empowerment, as the main character learns to take what she wants.

Memories for Sale by Andrea Dale is a story about a couple in a broken relationship opening up to communication and healing.

Blame it on Facebook by Kate Dominic finds the main character reconnecting with her past, and finding a path to her future.

The Draft by Craig J. Sorenson explores the powerful need for connection between two strangers who meet by chance.

To Be in Clover by Shanna Germain is a beautifully written story encompassing the wild, boundless nature of our sexual selves.

Honey Changes Everything by Emerald explores sex as a place of empowerment, as a couple finds strength in each other during a difficult time.

Cheating Time by Kate Pearce is a hot, heady story which engages and shows the love, passion, and sheer lust between a couple who take time to rediscover and reignite the fire between them.

Our Own Private Champagne Room by Rachel Kramer Bussel explores pop-culture sexuality and self-awareness as the main character actualizes her fantasy.

Till the Storm Breaks by Erobintica is a story about sexual openness and acceptance, as a married couple finds erotic pleasure between them rekindled through a threesome.

The Curve of Her Belly by Kristina Wright explores the concept of beauty and body image, as the main character struggles to see herself as the beautiful, sexy woman her husband sees, revealing a story of love, intimacy, and desire.

Dawn Chorus by Nikki Magennis is a story about the primal, emotional, natural expression of sex, as two characters crash into each other’s dark worlds, bringing to light the deep need we all have for connection with another.

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About Cleis Press

Cleis Press publishes provocative, intelligent books in the areas of sexuality, gay and lesbian studies, erotica, fiction, gender studies, and human rights. The largest independent queer publishing company in the United States, Cleis Press was founded in 1980 by Felice Newman and Frédérique Delacoste. Brenda Knight is Associate Publisher and Kat Sanborn is Editorial Associate.

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About Kristina Wright

Kristina Wright is an award-winning author whose fiction has appeared in over seventy-five anthologies. A member of the Erotica Readers and Writers Association, Romance Writers of America, and Passionate Ink, Kristina received the Golden Heart Award for Romantic Suspense from RWA. She is the editor of Steamlust, Dream Lover, and the bestselling Fairy Tale Lust.

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