by Stephen Tortora-Lee on February 25, 2012
A pear is always more than just a pear and a man is more than the sum of his collaborations.
Coosje the story of Claes Oldenburg (played by Steven Conroy) and his long-time collaborator and wife Coosje van Bruggen (played by Julie Congress). It is also the story of a Pear who is “self-aware” (played by Haley Greenstein).
Like Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, Coosje is a story about how an artist’s process of creating helps them develop a new reality for themselves as well as for the people seeing it. Coosje allows for intimate interaction with the elements of the creative process. This play highlights the notion that every piece of art is the completion of a journey for an object (real or imagined, sentient or inanimate) to get to the place where its inclusion in the art creates the context and meaning of the art itself.
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by Stephen Tortora-Lee on March 1, 2011
Way, way back before the dawn of the internet, in the days when Microsoft was DOS (not Windows) and PCs were called by their full name (Personal Computers) and learning institutions were oufitted with Apple IIe’s, there was a game that infiltrated homes and schools across America. A game that put you in the role of the leader of a group of interpid pioneers trudging across more than 2,000 miles from Independence, Missouri to the fabled land of Oregon in the year 1848 along the Oregon Trail. The game of Oregon Trail was one of the few educational games true to the claim of being “fun as well as educational” (at least in my school in the 1980′s), and has become extremely popular over the years. So popular that it has insprired a a great new musical by No.11 Productions for the Frigid Festival called Oregon Trail: The Quest For the West!
Personally, I really enjoyed playing the game as well as seeing the musical, but a question I was asked, adds an interesting texture to this discussion, “Do you have to have played the game before in order to enjoy the play?” It definitely helped that by being in the audience I got to relive the joy of playing Oregon Trail in more ways than one, but the play is entertaining and even moving at times in ways that take this now age-old story to whole new heights. Besides, if you wanted to try your hand at the original game it is available to play just like it was back in 1985 … Continue Reading…
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