Stagenotes: June 2007

I GOOGLE MYSELF

The daring Theatre Askew (Bald Diva and I, Claudius Live) has a new show about three men with the same name. The taut script is by Jason Schafer, responsible for many episodes of Queer as Folk. Askew's co-artistic directors, Tim Cusack and Jason Jacobs, are on board as actor and director, respectively. "It's very much about same sex male sexuality, except none of the characters really ever identifies as gay," Cusack says. His recently-divorced character becomes obsessed with a gay male porn star and contacts him under the guise of doing an article about people with the same name, and that triggers a chain of events. The third character, a working class stoner mechanic with a poetry blog, is drawn into the story. "It's a series of encounters between these three men, which leads to a kind of violent confrontation. Theoretically, it deals with the connection between sexuality and violence," says director Jacobs, adding that "Tim's character initiates these encounters, which go back and forth between fantasy and reality, and as the play twists and turns, the audience never really knows who they're rooting for."

Under St. Marks, 94 St. Marks Pl., (212) 352-3101. Jun. 14-Jul. 7. Thurs. & Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 8 & 10:30 p.m. $18.

ELVIS PEOPLE

Apparently, 84 percent of Americans say their lives have been touched by Elvis Presley. Doug Grissom has written a play, directed by the capable Henry Wishcamper, that addresses this phenomenon. "It's a story about people who are obsessed with Elvis, or affected by him in some way," says Grissom, "though I'd like to make clear it's not a musical and not a bio of Elvis."

Told in a series of vignettes, we meet a variety of folks who’ve had encounters with Elvis, or whose lives were dramatically changed by his existence. Some scenes feature members of his entourage, the "Memphis Mafia"; but most are about the fans. One deals with a family who saw him on The Ed Sullivan Show and set out on a journey to meet him, and one storyline follows an Elvis look-alike as he moves from being a part-time performer to landing a career in Las Vegas. Grissom felt the show wouldn't be complete without dealing with the people who are convinced Elvis is still alive. "The Elvis sightings apparently began in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the early '80s, when a woman said she saw Elvis in a supermarket and the rumor spread like wildfire across the U.S.,” reports Grissom.

New World Stages/Stage 1, 340 W. 50th St., (212) 239-6200. Previews June 6-20, opens June 21. Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m.; mats. Wed. & Sat., 2 p.m., Sun. 3 p.m. $41, $65.

THE PRETENTIOUS FESTIVAL

You have to love The Brick Theater; they don't hold back. Their previous summer festival themes were "Hell," "Moral Values" and "$ellout." "It's a tricky concept for a theater artist to put their show in a festival called 'pretentious,’" admits Jeff Lewonczyk, associate director and co-curator of the festival, "but there is a prejudice against 'high art' in America, and that's what we're playing around with here." Allowing that there are a number of tongue-in-cheek shows in the fest, Lewoncyzk emphasizes, "There are also shows asking to be taken seriously, and legitimately running the risk of being called 'pretentious.'"

Among the 30 shows in the festival, three include Macbeth Without Words, presented by Piper McKenzie Bizarre Science Fantasy, directed by Lewonczyk, which, as the title suggests, is a version of Macbeth without any words; Every Play Ever Written, a distillation of the essence of theater, presented by Robert Honeywell and collaborators, wherein a group attempts to encapsulate everything in theater history, but soon realizes that this impossible goal will inevitably cause things to go wrong; and Ian W. Hill's Hamlet, in which Hill, downtown's Orson Welles, in his 50th production of the past decade, cuts and adapts the Shakespeare classic to his own liking in a 20th century setting.

The Brick Theater, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (212) 352-3101. Jun. 1-Jul. 1. $10.

NATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN THEATER FESTIVAL

For the first time ever, 25 Asian American performing arts companies and solo artists from around the U.S. will convene in New York City for two weeks and stage shows in all five boroughs. The groups include Mu Performing Arts from Minneapolis, the talented, hyperkinetic Vampire Cowboys Theater Company from Brooklyn and the prestigious East West Players from Los Angeles. Also from L.A. is solo performer Kristina Wong, who will perform her wacky but meaningful piece, Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Producer/actor Mia Katigback, a mainstay of the New-York-based National Asian American Theatre Company, and one of the event's organizers, says, "We wanted to say that we (Asian American theater companies) are from all over, and that we do very, very different things. People think 'Asian-American' is just one thing, but it's a lot of things; it's eleven different cultures." Katigbak's troupe will be performing Falsettoland, a breakthrough musical by William Finn (Spelling Bee), first done in the '80s, which directly took on the AIDS crisis. The play is about an extended family and is centered around a boy's bar mitzvah. "The fact that they were all Jewish and that it was to be done by a totally Asian American cast is one of the things that appealed to me," says Katigbak.

The First National Asian American Theater Festival, at various venues throughout New York City, (212) 352-3101. Jun. 11-24. $15 and up.

CLUBBED THUMB SUMMER THEATER FESTIVAL

The 12th year of this most engaging, high-quality theater company's summer festival features three plays. Greedy, by Karl Gajdusek, directed by Drew Barr, is about a mysterious e-mail that promises riches and One Thing I Like to Say Is, by Amy Fox, directed by Paul Willis, is about a woman named Lina and the stories she tells. The third, Amazons and Their Men, by Jordan Harrison, directed by the excellent Ken Rus Schmoll, is a play inspired by the life and work of Leni Riefenstahl. "When it begins, we think we're seeing a campy, classical epic movie, and it becomes increasingly apparent we are in 1939 Germany on a film sound stage and a movie is being made," says playwright Harrison.

While Harrison was researching Penthesilea, the Queen of the Amazons, who fell "murderously in love" with Achilles during the Trojan War, he discovered that Leni Riefenstahl, the German film director who made many of Hitler's propaganda films, was doing her own filmic adaptation of Penthesilea's story in 1939. Although Riefenstahl hovers over the play, she isn't the main character. "It's about a woman who discovers the artist in her is inseparable from the fascist," says Harrison. Playing Frau, the filmmaker, is the marvelous Rebecca Wisocky, who, like Riefenstahl, casts herself in the movie as the Queen of The Amazons. Playing Achilles is a man Frau recruited from the Jewish ghetto. Another female actor, the many-sided Heidi Schreck, plays The Extra, and takes on the roles of 10 different Amazons; with a fourth actor playing Patroclus, Achilles' companion.

Ohio Theater, 66 Wooster St., (212) 352-3101. Greedy: Jun. 3, 4, 5, 7, 8 & 9. Amazons: Jun. 10, 11, 12, 14, 15 & 16. One Thing: Jun. 17, 18, 19, 21, 22 & 23. $15, $18.