Who: Tẹmídayọ Amay, Keith David, Antwayn Hopper, Chiké Johnson, Patrice Johnson, Zonya Love, Anastacia McCleskey
What: Seven short vignettes focusing on the eight different types of love
Where: MCC Theater
When: Thursday, February 11, $7, 6:30 (available on demand through February 13 at midnight); open mic night February 12, free with RSVP, 5:30
Why: MCC’s LiveLabs series of one-act virtual plays has included Talene Monohan’s Monty Python-esque farce Frankie & Will, directed by Jaki Bradley and starring real-life partners Ryan Spahn and Michael Urie, the latter a playwright attempting to write his own plague version of “King Leir”; Aziza Barnes’s Pues Nada, directed by Whitney White and starring Ito Aghayere, Alfie Fuller, Karen Pittman, and Kara Young, a very funny satire dealing with some strange goings-on at a bar in East LA (complete with puking and a brutal murder), inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies; Matthew Lopez’s poignant and honest The Sentinels, directed by Rebecca Taichman and starring Jane Alexander, Denee Benton, and Katrina Lenk as three 9/11 widows whose significant others all worked in the Twin Towers and who meet in a diner on the anniversary of the tragedy every year, the action moving backward in time, with Priscilla Lopez as the waitress and reading stage directions; and C. A. Johnson’s When, directed by Taylor Reynolds and starring Antoinette Crowe-Legacy and Kecia Lewis as a daughter going through a breakup and her Downton Abbey-obsessed mother on a long Zoom call that gets pretty personal. The plays run between twenty-five and forty-five minutes each, followed by a discussion facilitated by Ianne Fields Stewart.
The series continues February 11-13 with Mfoniso Udofia’s On Love, exploring eight types of love through seven short vignettes, poems, and songs, consisting of Philautia: Self Love, Ludus: Playful Love, Storge: Family Love, Eros: Erotic Love, Agape: Love within Community, Pragma: Enduring Love, Philia: Friendship Love, and Mania: Obsessive Love. The terrific cast features Tẹmídayọ Amay, Keith David, Antwayn Hopper, Chiké Johnson, Patrice Johnson, Zonya Love, and Anastacia McCleskey; Awoye Timpo (The Homecoming Queen, The Revolving Cycles Truly and Steadily Roll’d) directs the play, Udofia’s online follow-up to such previous works as Sojourners, runboyrun, and Her Portmanteau. Tickets are only seven dollars. In addition, MCC is hosting a free On Love open mic Zoom night on February 12 at 5:30, where you can sit back and watch or share your own spoken word, poem, or song.