The great weather of the past few days has put us in mind of summer, so since we know it’s going to turn cold soon, we’ll highlight a few festivals that, while not exactly the Fringe, might still make us warm and fuzzy remembering July.
First off, not only can you hearken back to summer with these, you can also get a bit more out of the past weekend of Halloween revelry with the Carnival of Samhain, at HERE. Thursday through Sunday, Drama of Works presents 2 programs of “the hauntingly spectacular”: puppets, burlesque, magic, music are on the bills, and with pieces based on Poe and ones with titles like Timmy Meets the Tooth Fairy, it looks quite cool.
Another great festival starts today: Emerging Artists Theatre’s annual Eatfest which has 3 programs of 4 plays. Gothamist reviewed the company’s marathon in May and has been at prior Eatfests and seen great stuff; the plays aren’t uniformly well-conceived, but you can count on going to any of the programs and seeing something special. We especially like the looks of Series A, which includes Christopher Heath’s Wally and Jesus, in which a young man accuses Jesus of shooting his mother.
Then there’s the Sackett Group’s Women’s Work V, in which 6 female directors get a chance to showcase one-act plays. One program of 3 already started and the second opens next week; in the first, you can see Yeats’ The Land of Heart’s Desire, a lovely 19th century relic, while the second includes Joe and Stew’s Theatre of Brotherly Love and Financial Success, about two roaches who survive a nuclear holocaust and – what else? – make plans for getting their theater home up and running. That’s the kind of spirit we like.
Finally, the Act French festival has been putting some nifty shows onstage this fall. This week brings even more: …She Said opens Thursday at the Brooklyn Lyceum, for instance. Staged by Wax Factory, it’s a multimedia production inspired by Marguerite Dumas’ Destroy, She Said; electronica duo Random Logic provides the surround sound. We also are intrigued by Animated Theaterworks’ Take No Survivors, a 2-woman play by Gerard Bagardie set in the France of 2050 or so, and Olivier Cadiot’s Fairy Queen, set in the France of 1900 or so with a “21st century sprite” visiting Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’ apartment. People so often talk about France as the main exponent of tradition-bound Old Europe, but these shows seem to demonstrate that at least a portion of the country’s population is enthusiastic about imagining the future even while examining the past, which makes the festival so appropriate in our fast-paced but deeply rooted city.
Details after the jump...
