by Karen Tortora-Lee on April 18, 2012
While there’s nothing to indicate that Sondheim influenced Larry Kunfosky’s Your Boyfriend May Be Imaginary in any way (in fact, extensive interviews with Larry Kunofsky beforehand never once included references to The Man or the the musical I’m about to cite) we all have our own personal archives. To me, there was an undeniable Company element (albeit an updated one) which manifested early on and lingered for most of the play. Perhaps unintentionally Kunofsky has, in Your Boyfriend, offered up the city which Another Hundred People paid (somewhat contemptuous) homage to – the “city of strangers” with the people who “meet at parties through the friends of friends who they never know”. And as main character Marci spends the night living out the line: “I looked in vain”, another hundred people just got off of the train.
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by Karen Tortora-Lee on March 26, 2012
You’ve read part one. You clamored for another round! What could be more fun that sitting in on a conversation between me and brilliant playwright Larry Kunofsky as we discuss the road that led to his upcoming production of Your Boyfriend May Be Imaginary?
Last time Larry explained how everyone has an imaginary component (in a way) … and he explained how his main character, Marci, spends a Saturday evening running from party to party in New York City looking for the man she’s dating — only to discover she possibly didn’t know him as well as she thought she did. We also got into what lies at the heart of Larry’s writing. Good stuff!
Today we’re talking about how Larry and The Management came to partner up for Your Boyfriend May Be Imaginary, Larry references Tolstoy AND Voltaire (in the same answer!) and gives us a little taste of what your dinner conversation will be like after you see his play. So, grab your drink, settle in, and enjoy … Larry Kunofsky, Part 2:
Let’s talk for a minute about finding the right company to produce your work. Your Boyfriend May Be Imaginary is being produced by The Management. What are some of the great things about having another company produce your work as opposed to doing it through your own company, Purple Rep?
Well don’t get me wrong, I am committed to Purple Rep and have grown to love producing, even though I know that I’m not anywhere near the kind of producer that I want to become just yet. But having someone else produce my play – which is something that hasn’t happened in a while on my own home turf here in NYC – that ROCKS!
I feels so decadent! I can be Just The Playwright! I feel like a Roman Emperor! Where are the slave girls to dangle grapes over my gaping mouth?!
And if you knew The Management’s budget, you’d be laughing at me here, not with me (which you might have been doing already). This is not a decadent company. They are workers, and they have a guerrilla approach to doing more with less (in terms of budget, at least), and this is inspiring to me. When Purple Rep grows up, I want it to be just like The Management. But also different.
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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
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
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 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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by Stephen Tortora-Lee on February 26, 2012
Because Frigid slots are limited to 60 minutes some shows have needed to trim their original running time. Cutting down some of the material can sometimes break a beautifully crafted piece, as you just can’t fit it all in. Not so for Emleigh Wolf who has been bringing The Terrible Manpain of Umberto MacDougal to various audiences on numerous occasions over the last few years, often in small 5-20 minutes sketches at open mics and other venues. At its current Frigid run at UNDER St. Marks, Wolf really shines as these short skits are able to be united and lengthened. While always humorous, putting Umberto in a full narrative with a beginning, a middle, and a triumphant end makes The Terrible Manpain of Umberto MacDougal something that I think we can all identify with by the conclusion of the performance.
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by Michelle Augello-Page on February 26, 2012
‘T’il Love Do Us Part is a dark play about love, life, and death, written by Andrew Hall and directed by Cameron J. Marcotte. Part absurd, part realism, and part cautionary tale, the whole of this play centers upon the relationship between John and Virginia Walker. The audience is taken on a journey through their seventy year relationship, which begins and ends with death. After a chance meeting at the same cemetery where John’s father and Virginia’s mother are being buried, the two characters find each other, each alone and lost, desperate to connect with another person. A casket holds the center of the stage as a constant reminder of death, as the two characters try to heal, to love, and to live in the fractured and flawed world between them.
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