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by The Happiest Medium on February 29, 2012
The Happiest Medium review by guest contributor Katelyn Manfre.
Death, It Happens (Photo by Cathryn Lynne) Pictured from left to right; Maureen Van Trease, Lori Kee, Bricken Sparacino and Rebecca Chiappone)
Down at UNDER St. Marks there are four ladies discussing it. The big, black elephant in the room. Death.
Terrifying, heartbreaking and unrelentingly emotional, losing a loved one is a different journey for us all, but it is in the commonality that we find comfort. In Death: It Happens (A Girl’s Guide to Death) (directed by Lori Kee) we meet four real-life women (Maureen Van Trease, Courtenay Harrington-Bailey, Bricken Sparacino and Rebecca Chiappone) who have lost their fathers in the not-too-distant past; all relatively suddenly, all equally as shocking. They range in age, in background, they are different, but they’re hurting just the same.
This is a brutally honest account of what it means to lose your parent; from the awkward euphemisms to the choosing of the coffin, the bills, the wills and everything in between. It’s hard stuff, but it is told with humor and perspective that keeps it from being a 60-minute sob-fest. An element for which I, personally, was all-too grateful.
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by The Happiest Medium on February 29, 2012
The Happiest Medium review by guest contributor Katelyn Manfre.
Canadian import Rachelle Elie enjoys being a woman. She especially enjoys her run-of-the-mill feminine pastimes: trying on sparkly dresses with eye makeup to match, dancing seductively to Ke$ha on a fur carpet, and hydrating with imported bottled water. She’s married to an Obstetrician/Gynecologist, has two lovely sons, and is, for all intents and purposes, living the dream.
Served with a side of audience discomfort, Elie’s solo show, Big Girls Don’t Cry (playing at The Red Room), is an insightful, if slightly off-putting insight into the psyche of the Modern Woman. Elie appears in what looks like a doll’s dress that lost a fight with a Bedazzler, knee-highs and platform slippers. She gapes and gasps her way through her basic biography, stopping every so often to sing or dance in a non-sequitur celebration of her womanhood. Questions are posed to the audience, and as she stares hard into each person’s eyes, she dares us to not be jealous of her in all her sparkle, and the beautiful life she has.
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by The Happiest Medium on February 29, 2012
The Happiest Medium review by guest contributor Katelyn Manfre
It’s tough out there for a single girl. It’s especially tough out there for a single girl with a habit of substance abuse and an absent father. But Nicole Pandolfo bravely lays it on the line for us in Love in the Time of Chlamydia running now at UNDER St. Marks.
This Jersey girl has a lot of hilarious, ridiculous and oftentimes make-your-skin-crawl war stories from her wild single days in New York. There’s a lot of bar (and bed)-hopping, recreational drug use, parties with strangers, chance encounters, unfortunate moments, and one memorable trip to Paris. Despite all of the hardships and heartbreak, Pandolfo tells her story with a smile, a smug F-you to all of the guys who hurt her and let her down, namely her distant father.
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by The Happiest Medium on February 28, 2012
The Happiest Medium Review by guest contributor Linnea Covington
Whether you’re M4W, W4M, M4M, or W4W, there is something for everyone in Missed Connections: An Exploration Into The Online Postings Of Desperate Romantics. The play consists of five actors—Jennifer Jean Anderson, Ricky Dunlop, Lauren Roth, Jake McKenna, and Julia Mattison—five Kindles, a handful of accents, and a whole lot of sass. The premise proved simple: scour Craigslist for the best and the worst missed connections postings. For those of you who don’t know what a ‘missed connection’ is, it’s an electronic posting on a website that people do when they see someone and 1) didn’t manage to talk to them, or 2) lost contact with them. It also has become the sort of place where people send long, steamy rants as a sort of digital therapy.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on February 28, 2012
More often than not, when the question of “how do you want to die” comes up the answer is often “in my sleep” or “surrounded by my friends and family”. The hope of most human beings is that, when it’s our turn to check out, we do so peacefully and with someone caring by our side. In David Stallings’ The Stranger To Kindness (directed by Heather Cohn) now playing as part of The 2012 Frigid Festival we see what happens when neither choice is available.
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by The Happiest Medium on February 28, 2012
The Happiest Medium Review by guest contributor Linnea Covington
The term “rock musical” can mean a variety of things, most of them not very good. But in Zack Powell and JD Cannady’s Drowning Ophelia, the musical aspect is all part of the story and the story rocks on its own. Cannady, who wrote the book, manages to create a convincing drama surrounding Ophelia, Shakespeare’s forlorn noblewoman who has the bad luck of loving Hamlet. She also drowns herself, which is exactly how she ended up in purgatory, singing away the time with her band the Clowns and waiting for the day Hamlet shows up.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on February 28, 2012
To say I was “pleasantly surprised” by Slash Coleman‘s solo show Big Plastic Heroes currently playing at UNDER St. Marks as part of the FRIGID Festival is an understatement. All signs pointed to this show being a raucous, self-aggrandizing narcissistic sausage-fest devoted to testosterone-ladened cultural touchstones and overblown Americana. After all, the artwork for the show features Coleman not only as Evel Knievel, but as the Bicentennial edition of Knievel, bedecked in red white and true-blue … superhero cape included. He’s even clutching a football helmet. Yes, the show I expected to see was vastly different than the one which actually unfolded before me. Within the first few minutes “pleasantly surprised” was overtaken by “completely mesmerized”. From there, it only got better.
Writer and performer Slash Coleman is a born storyteller – he has a way of not only captivating his audience but virtually hypnotizing them as his style and cadence allows his story to spring up around him as if by magic. Using no props, no sound effects, and only very subtle lighting cues Coleman seems to need nothing more than his chair and his voice to support his tale.
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by The Happiest Medium on February 27, 2012
The Happiest Medium Review by Guest Contributor Katelyn Manfre
People are always telling D’yan Forest to “act her age.” For her, that is simply unacceptable. At 77 years young, when D’yan has seen, experienced, and gone to bed with so much of the world, she simply hasn’t been able to settle into her age. In I Married a Nun!, running at UNDER St. Marks, she has set out to tell her story, to explain and illustrate just why being a senior is not where she’s at right now.
For the record, she did, in fact, marry a nun. For 25 years D’yan was unofficially wedded to Mary, an ex-lady of the cloth with whom she travelled the world and shared a rather active sex life (don’t worry–she’s got props). While her relationship with Mary is the focus of a large part of her story, D’yan also goes into great detail about her exploits, dalliances, and experiments before and after. She has, it seems, been comfortable in her skin and up for anything since she was a little girl growing up in Boston.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on February 27, 2012
Not everyone got the kind of name that looks good on a marquee or sounds good in the sentence ” … and the award for best actor goes to …”. And let’s all just admit it now: no one really knew how to pronounce “Gyllenhaal” till several movies in, and even then it took TWO siblings to get the world to say it properly. Twenty years later Demi Moore still has 50% of the population putting the accent on the wrong syllable.
So. Now imagine that you’re not that famous at all. Nowhere near. And you’re given a name that everyone mispronounces or mistakes for another name upon hearing it. Wouldn’t you change your name too? You would if you were Moe Rosen, writer and performer of I’m Only Explaining This Once, his solo-show currently playing at the Red Room.
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by The Happiest Medium on February 27, 2012
The Happiest Medium Review by Guest Contributor Katelyn Manfre
We live in a difficult world, rife with headaches and hardships. Each day new problems arise, and we are forced to self-diagnose and medicate to calm the stresses, the woes. But what if we didn’t–what if we made the very specific choice to just be happy? Is that even possible?
This is the massive philosophical question that playwright and performer Tim C. Murphy seeks to answer in Blind to Happiness, his solo show currently running at UNDER St. Marks. Using, in his words, the “quirks and quarks” of characters from his past, Murphy muses through three very different characters.
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