this week in theater

SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK: THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

The dancing starts early and keeps on coming in playful Central Park production of THE COMEDY OF ERRORS (photo by Joan Marcus)

Central Park
Delacorte Theater
Through June 30, free, 8:30
shakespeareinthepark.org

Shakespeare in the Park kicks off its 2013 season — and second half century — with a delightfully fresh and funny production of William Shakespeare’s early play, The Comedy of Errors. Inspired by the ancient Roman comedies of Plautus such as The Menaechmi and Amphitruo, the Bard created a farce built around two pairs of identical twins who are separated shortly after birth during a shipwreck. Egeon (Jonathan Hadary) brings Antipholus (Hamish Linklater) and the servant child Dromio (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) back home to Syracuse, wondering what has become of his wife and the other two boys. Many years later, his search for his family leads him to Ephesus, run by the gangster Duke (Skipp Sudduth), who has a thick Brooklyn accent, and his gun-wielding henchmen. Unbeknownst to Egeon, both sets of twins are soon also in Ephesus, getting mixed up in different pairings, with Antipholus of Ephesus confused by Dromio of Syracuse, thinking it is his Dromio, and vice versa. Meanwhile, Antipholus of Syracuse has the hots for Luciana (Heidi Schreck), the sister of Adriana (Emily Bergl), who is married to Antipholus of Ephesus. The mayhem mounts as Angelo the goldsmith (Robert Creighton) makes a necklace for Antipholus of Ephesus, who decides to give it to a local courtesan (De’Adre Aziza) when he thinks his wife is cheating on him.

Antipholus (Hamish Linklater) and Dromio (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) get all mixed up in Shakespeare in the Park production of THE COMEDY OF ERRORS (photo by Joan Marcus)

Antipholus (Hamish Linklater) and Dromio (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) get all mixed up in the Bard’s comedy of mistaken identity (photo by Joan Marcus)

It’s all great fun, set in a 1940s atmosphere with nightclubs, couples swing dancing between scenes, a movie theater (named the Lyceum) that is showing the 1933 Eddie Cantor musical Roman Scandals, and a train station that takes passengers to Ithaca, Utica, Troy, and Schenectady. Shakespeare in the Park veteran Sullivan (Orphans, Glengarry Glen Ross) turns up the slapstick as the gang makes its merry way to an immensely satisfying conclusion. The excellent cast is led by a standout performance from three-time Emmy nominee Ferguson (Modern Family), who has a ball running around as the two Dromios, along with Sudduth doing double duty as Dromio of Ephesus’s oversized wife, Linklater (Seminar, The School for Lies) playing two very different Antipholuses, and Harady telling the story of his search using a magical suitcase. The lighthearted romp, which continues at the Delacorte through June 30, also features original music by Greg Pliska, choreography by Mimi Lieber, and scenic design by John Lee Beatty; be sure to get there a little early, because the dancing starts well before showtime (8:30), setting the proper mood for the festivities. Don’t forget that in addition to waiting on line at the Delacorte to get free tickets, you can also enter the daily virtual ticketing lottery online here.

THE VIEW UPSTAIRS

Max Vernon’s new musical theater piece recounts story of 1973 LGBT tragedy in New Orleans

MAX VERNON: THE VIEW UPSTAIRS
The Living Room
154 Ludlow St. between Stanton & Rivington Sts.
Monday, June 24, 7:00
212-533-7237
www.livingroomny.com
www.maxvernon.com

On June 24, 1973, during Pride Weekend, popular New Orleans gay bar the UpStairs Lounge was set on fire, leaving thirty-two people dead. Although it was believed to have been arson and many claimed to know who did it, no charges were ever brought against the supposed suspect, a hustler who later killed himself. On the fortieth anniversary of the tragedy, New York-based multidisciplinary artist Max Vernon will tell the little-known story in a staged concert performance of his new musical theater piece, The View UpStairs. Taking place on June 24 at 7:00 at the Living Room, it features Tony nominee Michael McElroy, Nathan Lee Graham, Katie Thompson, Blake Daniel, Doreen Montalvo, and MJ Rodriguez, with narration by Rania Salem Manganaro; the show is directed by Eric Hoff (Hit the Wall), with musical director Rona Siddiqui on piano, Hiroyuki Matsuura on drums, and Mike Rosengarten on guitar. “Oh, ain’t it great how far we’ve come since 1973 / The future is great there you are but you own / If I could take you back with me your mind will be blown / Being fabulous all the time can get a little pricey / The future is great . . . trust me,” Vernon sings in “The Future Is Great!” The production also includes such songs as “Waltz,” “Sex on Legs,” and “When Your Body Breaks.” “It’s shocking to me that most people have never heard of the UpStairs Lounge fire, given its significance,” Vernon (Wired, State Debate) said in a statement. “Even as a queer studies major, the fire was never mentioned in any of my classes. Now, with the recent violence and hate crimes occurring around NYC, it feels more important than ever to tell this story and reclaim this event.”

TICKET GIVEAWAY: LESBIAN LOVE OCTAGON

Sue (Caitlin Lee Reid) and Jerry (Jax Jackson) search for love in LESBIAN LOVE OCTAGON (photo by KT Thomas)

Sue (Caitlin Lee Reid) and Jerry (Jax Jackson) search for love in LESBIAN LOVE OCTAGON (photo by KL Thomas)

LESBIAN LOVE OCTAGON: A MUSICAL COMEDY ABOUT DYKE DRAMA
Kraine Theater
85 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Wednesday – Saturday through June 29, $18
866-811-4111
www.lesbianthemusical.com

When Sue suddenly loses her girlfriend to her ex-girlfriend, she starts reevaluating her needs, while her friends tell her that she should jump right back in the saddle and go crazy. Relationships soon get so tangled, it all makes Alice’s famous Chart on The L Word look like amateur hour. Set in the Lower East Side in the 1990s, Lesbian Love Octagon: A Musical Comedy About Dyke Drama features such numbers as “Ordinary Day at the Wimmin’s Bookstore,” “Butch on the Inside,” “Pet Tranny,” “Clarity,” and “Vibration Salvation,” which offers a positive outlook on life: “When a girl’s in a slump / ’cause she just got dumped / nothing feels better / than a new toy, and some leather.” The two-hour show is directed by Kim Kressal, who also designed the costumes and teamed up with Felicia Blum on the choreography; music direction is by Will Larche. The cast includes Caitlin Lee Reid as Sue, Kelly Lockwood Larson as Scout, Lindsay Naas as Wendy, Kristian Espiritu as Darla, Jax Jackson as Jerry, Jenny Atwood as Anya, Taniesha Duggan as Chris, and Ti Grieco as Jess in addition to Jaimie Kelton, Lauren Sapienza, Bernadette Marsham, Tracie Franklin, Abby Chase, and Blum. Each night features a special guest as “lesbian performance artist”; among those ready to take on the role, which was recently played by award-winning Broadway star Jan Maxwell, are Maggie Keenan-Bolger, Kaki King, Ariel Scarcella, and Yetta Kurland.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: Lesbian Love Octagon continues through June 29 at the Kraine Theater on the Lower East Side, and twi-ny has three pairs of tickets to give away for free. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and all-time-favorite lesbian-related movie, TV show, or play to contest@twi-ny.com by Friday, June 21, at 12 noon to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; three winners will be selected at random. All responses will be kept confidential.

YOU ARE DEAD. YOU ARE HERE

Multimedia show examines cutting-edge techniques of treating PTSD suffered by Iraq War veterans (photo by Lana Duiverman)

Multimedia show explores cutting-edge techniques for treating PTSD suffered by Iraq War veterans (photo by Lana Duiverman)

HERE
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
Tuesday – Saturday through June 22, $10 in advance, $18 within twenty-four hours
212-647-0202
www.here.org

In Christine Evans’s You Are Dead. You Are Here., Anthony Gaskins stars as Michael, an Iraq War veteran suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. In order to stop his headaches and nightmares, he starts seeing Hannah (Kittson O’Neill), a doctor using new, innovative forms of therapy to treat soldiers with PTSD. She hooks Michael up to Virtual Iraq, a computerized simulation that takes him back to Fallujah as they try to re-create his experience so he can face it head-on and deal with it. Meanwhile, a young Iraqi woman, Zaynab (Kathreen Khavari), begins blogging about her life, the two technologies seemingly battling each other for prominence. Khavari also plays Nadia, Hannah’s assistant, who seems to have an ulterior motive to her constant interruptions of Michael’s therapy. You Are Dead. You Are Here. is a production of Transit Lounge, a collaboration between playwright Evans (Trojan Barbie, Slow Falling Bird), director Joseph Megel (The Brothers Size, The Last Seder), and media designer Jared Mezzocchi (The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, Astroboy) that uses cutting-edge means of storytelling. For You Are Dead. You Are Here. they received permission to reconfigure Virtual Iraq, which is in fact used by the government to treat PTSD. The scenes between Michael and Hannah are gripping, with Gaskins delivering a terrifically complex performance as the troubled soldier. Zaynab’s broadcasts, which are projected onto a scrim, are somewhat confusing in both their relationship to Michael’s therapy and to Nadia’s appearances; there seem to be connections, but they are too vague and, ultimately, open-ended. The seventy-five-minute multimedia show, continuing at HERE through June 22, works best when it’s just doctor and patient — and computer software — getting right to the heart of one of the tragic outcomes of the Iraq War. The June 20 performance will be followed by the discussion “Returning Home: Bridging Civilian and Military Perspectives” with Dr. Barbara Olasov Rothbaum, the director of the Trauma & Anxiety Recovery Program at the Emory University School of Medicine.

LAURIE ANDERSON: THE LANGUAGE OF THE FUTURE

Laurie Anderson is curating and participating in a special series of events for the free River to River Festival this week (photo by Tim Knox)

RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL
Note new time and place: Tuesday, June 18, Stuyvesant High School, 345 Chambers St., free, 8:00
Wednesday, June 19, Rockefeller Park, free, 7:00
Curated programming continues through June 22
www.rivertorivernyc.com
www.laurieanderson.com

Innovative experimental multimedia artist Laurie Anderson is guest-curating five days of special programming for the River to River Festival, including two nights that harken back to her seminal work United States 1-4. On June 18 and 19, Anderson will be in Rockefeller Park presenting “The Language of the Future,” with Tuesday focusing on “Stories” with the Annie Gosfield Trio (with Gosfield on sampling keyboard, Roger Kleier on guitar, and Ches Smith on drums), actor Steve Buscemi, choreographer Young Jean Lee, guitarist Gerry Leonard, horn player Doug Wieselman, and violist Eyvind Kang, while Wednesday will be all about “Songs,” with Richard Devine on electronics, Jacob Garchik on horns, and Jeffrey Zeigler on cello in addition to Wieselman, Kang, and Smith. [ed. note: Because of the weather, Tuesday’s show has been moved indoors to Stuyvesant High School and pushed back to 8:00.] “I wanted to explore how artists use time in their work,” Anderson explains in a statement about the shows. “Each guest artist in this series has a unique approach to time whether slowing it down, rolling it backwards, speeding it up, or pairing it with images in polyphonic ways. Perhaps, my real, and deeper, motive is to create a floating atmosphere that extends the summer evening and makes it all the more dream-like and timeless.” The series continues June 20 at Pier 15 on the East River Esplanade with “An Evening of Live Music and Cinema” featuring documentarian Sam Green, Brooklyn band the Quavers, and music collaborative yMUSIC. Next, Luibo Borissov and Konrad Kaczmarek team up for the interactive Peripatetic Audio Visual Ensemble beginning at River Terrace in Rockefeller Park, with an open rehearsal on June 20 followed by 2:00 and 7:00 shows on June 21-22, all of which require free advance RSVP here. Also on June 21, River to River will screen Chassol’s Indiamore, and on June 22, Andrew Schneider will perform his live multimedia Tidal, both on Pier 15. Anderson fans can also catch her inaugural New York painting and drawing exhibition, “BOAT,” along with a video installation and sculpture, at Vito Schnabel on Leroy St. through June 23.

MANNA-HATTA

Charles Pfaff (Everett Quinton, at back) serves thirsty drinkers mugs of beer at the Vault in MANNA-HATTA (photo by Dan Lane Williams)

The James A. Farley Post Office
425 Eighth Ave. at 31st St.
Thursday – Sunday through June 23, $18, 7:00
www.peculiarworks.org

Now in its twentieth year, Obie-winning theater company Peculiar Works Project has taken on quite a task for its latest immersive, site-specific show, telling the long, complex history of New York City in Manna-Hatta. Written by Barry Rowell and directed by Rowell and Kathleen Amshoff, Manna-Hatta features twenty actors playing more than one hundred roles as the production moves through a series of rooms and hallways on the third and fourth floors of the historic James A. Farley Post Office. The audience is divided into four sections, led by either presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm (Cherrye J. Davis), poet Walt Whitman (Christopher Hurt), author-activist Jane Jacobs (Catherine Porter), or Lenape chief Easanques (Tina Chilip). Examining power and corruption, immigration and corruption, city planning and corruption, business and corruption, and culture and discrimination, the show’s goal is stated at the very beginning when one of four men simultaneously playing W. Parker Chase announces, “We love New York and want everybody, everywhere, to know what a truly wonder city New York really is.” The four Parker Chases appear as a quartet throughout the show, including a terrific turn as the “Four Peters (Well, Three and a Half),” as they perform a song-and-dance number about Peter Stuyvesant, Peter Minuit, Peter Schagen, and Peter Cooper; Eric C. Bailey also plays Boss Tweed, Bradley Wells plays Robert Moses, J. Kelly Salvadore plays Jimmy Walker, and Everett Quinton plays Charles Ignatious Pfaff, among other characters. Quinton, the former artistic director of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, is particularly effective, radiating an infectious humor and energy that helps drive the show even during its slow patches, of which there are too many. Clocking in at about three hours and fifteen minutes (with a free-beer-and-pretzels intermission), Manna-Hatta is very long, especially since the audience is standing most of the time, although it’s fascinating to wander through the abandoned spaces, where plaques still identify employees and their positions, as if the workers all disappeared one night, leaving behind a kind of ghost town. Rowell and Amshoff try to squeeze in too much of New York’s history, and it gets confusing why they emphasize certain moments while giving short shrift to others, but it’s a still a rousing triumph, a lighthearted and fun if exhausting trip through Gotham, with some of the highlights being the unique way the troupe portrays the development of Manhattan’s street grid, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. Manna-Hatta continues Thursday–Sunday through June 23, with tickets only $18, but be prepared to do a lot of standing, walking, and stair climbing.

TEA FOR THREE: LADY BIRD, PAT, AND BETTY

Elaine Bromka portrays a trio of back-to-back-to-back First Ladies in one-woman show (photos by Ron Marotta)

30th Street Theatre at Urban Stages
359 West 30th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through June 29, $25-$45
212-868-4444
www.teaforthree.com

Sitting down for tea is usually a rather pleasant experience, cordial and not too stressful. Such is the case at Elaine Bromka’s one-woman show, Tea for Three: Lady Bird, Pat & Betty. Running at the small, intimate Theatre at 30th St. at Urban Stages, the show is divided into three parts, as Bromka portrays Lady Bird Johnson in 1968, Pat Nixon in 1974, and Betty Ford in 1976, as each one is getting ready to leave the White House for the next First Lady. Bromka, who previously played eight First Ladies in Rich Little’s The Presidents show, wonderfully embodies the three women, capturing their unique diction and looking the part, wearing Bunny Mateosian and Patricia Carucci’s costumes and Robert E. McLaughlin’s wigs. In each section of the eighty-minute intermissionless production (there is a short break between segments), each First Lady has a silver tray of tea, discusses life with her husband, and prepares for life outside the White House, directly addressing the audience. Although the women touch upon some of the serious aspects of their husbands’ administrations, including the Vietnam War and Watergate, the play, cowritten by Bromka with Eric H. Weinberger (Class Mothers ’68, Wanda’s World) and directed by Byam Stevens, primarily opts for lighthearted moments that are gently humorous. Bromka incorporates Pat Nixon’s claim that being First Lady is “the hardest unpaid job in the world,” but that never quite comes across in this sugary sweet look at this succession of presidential wives who wanted to be considered more than just appendages of their spouses. Thus, Tea for Three makes for a pleasant experience, served with a few too many cubes and not enough lumps.