Neil LaBute has teamed up with Marco Calvani and Marta Buchaca to present three plays that are “surprising takes on the idea of ‘power dynamics.’” He believes the plays “make for a fun and thought-provoking evening of theater.” Certainly power – its use and misuse – is a relevant topic for this third installment of Author Directing Author given the…
The Archives of La MaMa is pleased to announce the launch of La MaMa’s Digital Collections Website (http://catalog.lamama.org.) Its development was made possible by a generous “hidden archival collections” grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources. The site, which premieres on June 27, 2016 as part of La MaMa’s 55th anniversary season, is freely available for use by…
Everything seems to be in place in Winsome Brown’s one woman tribute to her late mother Mary. Ms. Brown has gathered stories from her mother’s life, written a script which tells those stories from the points of view of a cast of fifteen characters (in addition to several Irish cousins), used more than the requisite number of rich tropes, and…
Based on the experience of child textile workers in industrial-era United States, Pioneers Go East Collective’s American Mill #2 is about as by-the-book as a postmodern theatre piece can be. Multimedia, song and movement, found text, and an ephemeral premise touch on all the conventions to which we’ve grown accustomed. PGEC shows their youth in American Mill #2 ; some…
Exiles from Europe’s last true dictatorship, the Belarus Free Theatre delivers a knockout punch with its monumental “Trash Cuisine”, now onstage at La MaMa. An amorphous dedication to capital punishment under the guise of an international cooking program, the show gruesomely highlights socially sanctioned killing from around the globe. Leather straps, machetes, and bulk food items are brought ominously to…
In his new two-part lecture “On the Conditions and Possibilities of Hillary Clinton Taking Me as Her Young Lover,” Arthur Meek presents the indisputable and indefatigable premise that probable 2016 Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton requires a virile unsullied young lover and that the only candidate for that role is the lecturer himself. This imaginative and well-constructed riff just completed its…
A naked man, a disco ball, and a discourse on drunk moose sets the events of ‘Loveplay’ and it’s companion piece ‘Playmoney’ into motion. Written and performed (emceed, really) with loveable braggadocio by Sam Alper, the plays are a sequence of riffings on romance (Loveplay) and success. (Playmoney) With funky poetics, awkward vignettes, occasional improv and no fourth wall to…
Bum Phillips (Gary Ramsey) is more anti-hero than hero in the opera being his name currently playing at the Ellen Stewart Theatre (La MaMa). The apparently iconic Houston Oilers football coach has to endure the same struggles heroes have always experienced (Ulysses, Antigone, and that lot) but the stakes in the strife seem lower and the return home less glorious….
Something is cooking at the ever so edgy and inventive La Mama Ellen Stewart Theatre – Irina Brooks’ adaptation of “Shakespeare’s Sister” – and it is absolutely delicious. Bloomsbury Group writer Virginia Woolf imagined the existence of Shakespeare’s sister while she was preparing a lecture on women and fiction, a somewhat ambiguous subject. Woolf wrote, “The title women and fiction…
Oscar Wilde’s belief that “Life imitates art, more than art imitates life” was confirmed during the performance of Jill Campbell’s “Chemistry of Love” currently playing at the La MaMa First Floor Theatre. As the cast struggled on stage to make sense of Ms. Campbell’s script about the meaning of making art and how the making of art counterpoints with the…