Results tagged “tennesseewilliams”

THEATER: Theodora Skipitares is a Greek-American playwright, director and puppeteer who uses near life-size puppets and Greek tragedies to look at our current situation in Iraq. (Her rendition of the Iliad and the Odyssey was a sold-out hit at La MaMa last year.) Her new show, which features puppetry and video, is The Exiles, an adaptation of the Orestes/Electra myth. “In this particular story of betrayal and vengeance, these puppets are an eerie construction of facade and public display, while their operators are a shadow of primal, often raw emotions and personal desires.” (Read last month's Times profile of Skipitares here.) - John Del Signore

It seems that alcohol and theater started off hand in hand. Just picture Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors being performed in the 1500's, audience slugging down pints (and probably chewing on drumsticks and meat pies!) - seems accurate, right? Never has a want for alcohol overcome us mid-play, but it's probably not a bad idea in some cases. Apparently there are theaters in London that serve alcohol, a growing trend of mixing pub culture with playhouse art across the pond.

THEATER: Pieces of Paradise is a benefit presentation of four lost plays by Tennessee Williams which were discovered in a trunk in 2000 and never produced in New York. The proceeds will benefit a legal fund for 13th Street Repertory (founded in 1972), which is struggling for survival against - you guessed it - real estate developers. It’s fitting that these plays should be chosen for the benefit, as Tennessee himself visited the theater when his play Outcry was produced and declared “that the future of the American theater lay in the small theaters of off-off-Broadway.” Martin Denton calls the four short works a “wonderful evening of undiscovered Williams.” in his rave review. (A final performance will take place on Sunday.) - John Del Signore

READING: The reclusive "Lemony Snicket" (known to grown-ups and non-believers as Daniel Handler) will be showing up - hopefully in a cloak and mustache disguise! - at Barnes and Noble tonight to celebrate the release of The

Who knew it was illegal to have an iguana in New York? Not Gothamist. But that's what we learned while reading about a four foot iguana found stranded in Brooklyn. Animal Care & Control had to remove an iguana from a tree in Midwood - it ran up there when the police arrived (maybe it was afraid of getting a summons). The Post says the iguana was first seen on the street last week, with some residents thinking it might be an alligator. AC&C think it was someone's pet and will try to locate its owner. And, since both the Daily News and Post referenced it in their headlines, it's a good time to catch up on your Tennessee Williams and read The Night of the Iguana.

One of the pleasant surprises in the Sackett Group’s production of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer comes before you even enter the theater. The a/c in the Brooklyn Music School Playhouse is hugely noisy, so they don’t run it during the show, meaning that, well, the temperature gets ugly pretty fast. Fortunately, for the price of your seat you also get a little paper Chinese fan and a bottle of cold water. To Gothamist, this gesture summed up one difference between Broadway and off-off-Broadway pretty neatly: in the first, they charge you $4 for your water, in the second they give it to you for free, with a smile and a personal cooling system on the side to boot. Of course, in the plush, frigid Times Square theaters you wouldn’t need to cool off in the first place, but that’s besides the point.

Eliot Shepard, Slower.net