Latest news with #TheLaramieProject
San Francisco Chronicle
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
What does it take to humanize the unthinkable? This show dares to explore LGBTQ hate crime perpetrators
It's possible to love, fear and hate someone at the same time. The instinct to protect and cradle wrestles with the impulse to harm until one wins. And in 'Member,' one person can be a shifty yet resigned father and a panicked little boy losing his innocence all at once. The show, one of many projects taking over a score of Mission District venues as part of the two-week San Francisco International Arts Festival, comes from Australia's Fairly Lucid Productions and takes inspiration from a wave of gay hate crimes in Sydney in the 1980s and '90s. If the place names, accents, slang ('bikkie') and slurs ('chutney ferret') are less familiar, much else in the show, written and performed by Ben Noble, is distressingly universal. Homophobia is taught, not innate. Once it's lodged in the brain, it sticks. Othering outsiders cements in-group belonging. Police, willing themselves to blindness, tacitly condone violence. Perpetrators see an impossible choice: bully and hurt, or get bullied and hurt. None of these themes breaks new ground in a country where 'The Laramie Project' is 25 years old. Rather, what distinguishes 'Member,' which opened Thursday, May 8, for a four-day run at the Marsh, is the keenness of Noble's storytelling. Heart monitor beeps and a hospital curtain set the scene before the show starts. Then, when our narrator Corey starts compulsively chattering, about his son as a tot, about toxic break room dynamics at work, about the nice nurse whose posterior he checks out as she exits, it becomes clear why he's there. He's at the bedside of his son, Billy, who's been the victim of a hate crime, and he's talking to help wake Billy up. As the rambling swerves from one finely wrought scene to the next, another key fact emerges: Corey and Billy didn't have a good relationship, and Corey feels at least some of the homophobia of Billy's victimizers. The bedside framing works wonders for the solo show, a medium where, too often, there's no obvious driving reason why a character is soliloquizing to the audience. But 'Member' also benefits from crisp, illustrative details. Beating up a victim as part of a gang feels both 'structured and weightless.' An enemy at work has eyes 'like dirty coins.' When Corey first meets his future wife, Cheryl, she enumerates her dream man's qualities: 'A hair-covered chest in the manner of a '70s porn star but a hair-free back in the manner of a sleek eel.' And 'Member,' which is directed by David Wood, is more properly described as an almost-solo show. Onstage with Noble is Stephen Choi on a keyboard, picking out celestial, music-box melodies when Corey meets Cheryl and amplifying sound effects to a fever pitch during Corey's moments of truth. Synths pulsing as loudly as UFOs over Corey's head or wasps in his ear make the whole theater feel like the inside of Corey's mind. It's like being trapped somewhere where rational thought has been quashed and only adrenaline remains. As a performer, Noble summons the way little kids gooseneck and point, the way their gazes dart like rodents' or cling to anyone who seems to know just a little more about how the world works and doesn't shove them away. In a softening of the face, he communicates another character's mocking self-regard. When he recounts the euphoria of violence, the feeling of finally being part of something, he almost weeps in a combination of relief and rue. When Corey tells Cheryl that all he wants in a partner is to 'not be scared,' Noble utters the phrase so faintly and nakedly it's as if Corey's still a little boy in awe of the big kids. 'Member' humanizes perpetrators without excusing them. It says they're made, not born. It doesn't offer false bromides, instead tallying all we lose when we hate. It trusts you can do the math on your own.
Scoop
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
Digital Afterlives - New Verbatim Play Uses Words And Experiences Of Real People To Explore Death In A Digital Age
Carving in Ice Theatre is set to bring a unique and honest look at how we experience grief in today's increasingly online world with new verbatim play, Digital Afterlives. Constructed word-for-word from interviews with everyday New Zealanders, the play explores how we connect, remember, and honour loved ones through social media and other online platforms after they've passed. 'Every bereavement is different and everyone's journey with loss is unique. Digital Afterlives explores how digital/online spaces might shape contemporary grief practices,' says the play's constructor and co-director Dr Missy Mooney. Verbatim theatre is a form of documentary theatre in which the play's script is edited together from the exact words spoken by people interviewed about a particular event or topic. Digital Afterlives emerged as a creative research output following a larger research project about digital afterlives, memorialisation, and emergent online remembrance practices. Produced by Carving in Ice Theatre, Mooney joins forces with experienced director Gaye Poole. No stranger to verbatim theatre, Poole has been at the helm of several verbatim plays staged in Kirikiriroa including The Laramie Project (2006), Life Music (2016), and Hush: A Verbatim Play About Family Violence (2020). Teaming up as co-directors, Poole and Mooney guide 12 local actors as they prepare for the staged reading of Digital Afterlives scheduled at the Meteor in May. Carving in Ice Theatre is the gold standard when it comes to staged readings, a form in which the actors are well rehearsed and very familiar with the play's content but still have their scripts with them onstage. Poole reflects that 'a staged reading is the perfect medium for something like Digital Afterlives. The 'ums', 'you knows', repetitions and stutters that litter everyday speech can be challenging for actors to learn. The staged reading approach saves the actors a lot of memorisation and, more importantly, makes it easier for the actors to prioritise accuracy in their performance.' Mooney adds, 'This work isn't just about entertainment and 'putting on a show'. At its core, Digital Afterlives is focused on sharing real and relatable experiences of bereavement as faithfully as possible'. Local actors, K-M Adams, Antony Aiono, Julianne Boyle, Kelsie Curtis, Nick Hall, Brad Jackson, Simon McArthur, Cecilia Mooney, Hannah Mooney, Missy Mooney, Kelly Petersen and Sash Rinaldi, will be voicing the 12 interview participants in Digital Afterlives. Providing diverse perspectives and an exploration of digital practices' intersection with kaupapa Māori, tikanga, and tangihanga, Digital Afterlives holds particular relevance for audiences in Aotearoa. Staged Readings of Digital Afterlives will run at The Meteor Theatre 22 - 24 May 2025 with 7pm performances.
New York Times
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
12 Plays and Musicals to Brighten the Spring
Variety, ambition and ingenuity are on generous display at theaters throughout the United States this spring, with a healthy crop of new shows, a lauded Kinks musical making its North American debut and one friend of Paddington starring in a Chekhov play. These dozen productions are worth putting on your radar. A cache of photos of Nazis who built and ran the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II is the starting point for this historically inspired production from Tectonic Theater Project ('The Laramie Project'). A finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize, it feels like a companion piece to the film 'The Zone of Interest,' fixing its gaze on perpetrators of the Holocaust. As a museum archivist in the play says, 'Six million people didn't murder themselves.' Moisés Kaufman directs. (Through March 30, Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Beverly Hills, Calif. April 5-May 11, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Berkeley, Calif.) This savvy goofball comedy by Lauren Yee ('Cambodian Rock Band') is set in 1992 in St. Petersburg, where college friends Evgeny and Dmitri are bumblers at 25, perplexed and adrift in a new economy that their Soviet upbringing did nothing to prepare them for. So Evgeny, the son of a former high-ranking K.G.B. official, and Dmitri, who had always hoped to join the agency, mimic the old ways, spying for a client on a defector who has returned. Nicholas C. Avila directs the world premiere. (Through April 13, Seattle Rep.) Kinks fans on this side of the Atlantic at last get their chance at a jukebox musical about the band. With original story, music and lyrics by Ray Davies, and a book by Joe Penhall ('The Constituent'), this retelling of the Kinks' rise won the Olivier Award (Britain's equivalent to the Tony) for best new musical in 2015. Edward Hall, who staged that production, directs this one, too. Songs include 'You Really Got Me,' 'Lola' and more. (Through April 27, Chicago Shakespeare Theater.) The title role in Chekhov's lately omnipresent comic drama seems almost tailor-made for Hugh Bonneville ('Downton Abbey'), who has often played hapless beta men to perfection; think Mr. Brown in the 'Paddington' movies or Bernie in 'Notting Hill.' In Simon Godwin's production of Conor McPherson's adaptation, Bonneville plays a man waking up to the waste of having toiled all his life for the benefit of his celebrated brother-in-law (Tom Nelis), while building nothing for himself. With John Benjamin Hickey as Astrov, the tree-hugging doctor. (March 30-April 20, Shakespeare Theater Company, Washington, D.C.) The playwright Larissa FastHorse ('The Thanksgiving Play') turns her satirical wit to the world of nonprofits and the minefield of identity politics in this workplace farce, which pits the heads of two Native American organizations — one Native (Shyla Lefner), one white (Amy Brenneman) — against each other. Michael John Garcés directs. (April 3-May 4, Arena Stage, Washington, D.C.) The exclamation point in the title is a clue to the cheeky, heightened tone of this world-premiere comedy by Keiko Green, about a pair of extinction events: the death of the Earth and, more immediately, the death of Greg, a middle-aged guy with a protective wife, a drag-artist kid and a diagnosis of Stage 4 cancer that — for a while, anyway — sparks new life in him. Tinged with grief, touched with magic, the play was a finalist for this year's Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Zi Alikhan directs. (April 5-May 3, South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, Calif.) An infamous catalyst for World War I animates this new play by Rajiv Joseph ('Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,' 'Dakar 2000'), about three young men, living under the oppression of empire, who are tapped to assassinate the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, his wife. Blanka Zizka directs. (April 15-May 4, Wilma Theater, Philadelphia.) This poetic, tender, funny play by a.k. payne, which won this year's Blackburn Prize, is about two estranged cousins who grew up close on the same unpromising street: Mina, who left for the Ivy League, and Sade, who left for prison. Back in the neighborhood for the weekend, for the funeral of yet another relative who died too young, they eat Cookie Crisp cereal, watch cartoons on BET and make a space to be themselves as they dream of utopia. Tinashe Kajese-Bolden directs. (April 16-May 18, Geffen Playhouse, Los Angeles.) Zora Howard ('Stew') has called her new play 'a meditation on rage,' but it is a comic drama — intended as a constructive, even transcendent, response to anti-Black racism and police violence. In the play, a 2022 finalist for the Blackburn Prize, a couple (Caroline Clay and Raymond Anthony Thomas) witness their neighbor (Keith Randolph Smith) being pulled over as he gets home. Then events turn surreal. Lileana Blain-Cruz directs. (April 19-May 18, Goodman Theater, Chicago.) Knud Adams, who directed the world premieres of the last two dramas to win the Pulitzer Prize, stages this quiet new play by Jiehae Park ('Peerless'). It begins conventionally — with a park bench, occupied by a man and a woman who have spent half a century together — but becomes far more cryptic and contemplative as it unfolds over a year. (May 2-June 8, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Berkeley, Calif.) A boy with an agile imagination finds a duffel bag of cash that he thinks his dead mother might have sent from the beyond in this new family musical, adapted from Frank Cottrell Boyce's novel and his screenplay for the film of the same name. With music and lyrics by Adam Guettel ('Days of Wine and Roses') and a book by Bob Martin ('The Drowsy Chaperone'), it is directed by Bartlett Sher. (May 9-June 15, Alliance Theater, Atlanta.) Queer romance is in the air in this new play by Tarell Alvin McCraney ('Moonlight,' 'The Brother/Sister Plays'), about a couple who fell for each other when they weren't looking for love. Now complications ensue. Does it give away the ending that real-life couples may apply to get married onstage during some performances? Signs point to happily ever after. (May 16-June 15, Arena Stage, Washington, D.C.)
