This entry into my Seclusion Smörgåsbord series features streaming artists considering the themes of home and isolation. Some employ comedy. Others are dramatic. The best pieces brilliantly illuminate the present or slyly get under your skin. There is a commissioned collection from 22 southern U.S. playwrights. Another features an international take on our times. And the third is a homemade sketch show. All in all, these 29 works grapple with the world in which we now live. These artists share their thoughts in very different ways with very different perspectives. A true smörgåsbord of ideas.
Help! I’m Stuck! With Cole Escola
Mr. Escola has been touring a show with this title since 2017. This quarantine edition finds him at home alone with an assortment of characters, wigs and costumes. This is a self-created special “as no one asked me to do it.” The most humiliating part is the reason he wanted to do it. “I really, really, really want to.” This hour long video contains mini-films, character studies, blue humor, laugh and tears. Certain sections of Help! I’m Stuck! With Cole Escola are great.
After some potty mouth talk (literally) and personal revelations, the fun begins. He opens with a film noir from 1943 about Jennifer Convertibles. Naturally he plays all of the characters. Shade is thrown everywhere and the payoff is big. My other favorite skit was the porch scene between Sam and Laura Jean. He is bringing her home after a date. Her father is not a big fan of Sam. The storytelling and the two performances are so good in setting mood and heartache.
There are other fine parts in this mixed bag of oddities, including a mom commercial like no other. Be warned. There is a character called Poopy Sue and moments which might offend delicate sensibilities. For everyone else, this collection is outrageous, often idiotic and memorably offbeat.
Cole Escola has recently been a recurring character on At Home With Amy Sedaris. This video remains available on You Tube.
22 Homes (Alabama Shakespeare Festival)
ASF commissioned southern playwrights to create original pieces on the theme of home. 22 Homes is a collaboration between those playwrights and the actors which bring the works to life. The artists had about a week to work and film their segments. The pieces are roughly between three and ten minutes long. The variety is remarkable and worth a visit.
I decided to sample all of them in two sittings. Gloria Bond Clunie’s The Porch is performed by Jen Harper. This is both a memory play and a word of warning to her daughter. Would you rather sit inside with a big screen and watch people live or go outside on the front porch and interact with the world? In Pearl Cleage’s Coming Home, Darlene Hope is preparing to welcome her sister back home. This thoughtful piece nicely framed the role of mom, memories of family and what a home actually means.
Martin K. Lewis is a young man newly in love in Donnetta Lavinia Grays Sweet. His father owes him something. The dialogue here entrances: “I look into her eyes and see memories we ain’t even made yet.” Alan Knoll is sitting in a monastery kitchen in Will Arbery’s Frances and Anthony. A memory is shared which provides insight into how this man came to be in this particular home. Both of these playwrights had works performed in New York this season.
The Way He Should Go (by Quinton Cockrell) imagines life long after a funeral has passed. Christopher Gerson, a religious man, is having a conversation with his priest. “If you have a problem you wrap it up in prayer and send it to God.” This emotional play was the longest at 10:40 and is filled with sadness and regret. Shannon Eubanks was memorable in Topher Payne’s surprising and touching eulogy to the AIDS epidemic in What You Can Fix.
Joy Vandervort-Cobb burned the biscuits for the funeral party of her 103 year old mother in Rum and Biscuits written by David Lee Nelson. She’s enjoying a Piña Colada. She doesn’t drink scotch because it “tastes like white people.” She’s day drinking when her daughter arrives. “Nobody happy drinks during the day.” Ms. Vandervort-Cobb’s character is complexly drawn and filled with the fortifications of self-protection, for better or worse.
If you view the entire collection of 22 Homes, you’ll also see life today from a cat’s point of view, a surgeon learning to shoot a gun to find a connection with her husband and a panicking wife whose spouse has a fever which is being ignored. And finally, there is a richly seasoned cast iron skillet containing the histories, secrets and memories of multiple generations of families.
Each short play is viewable individually on the Alabama Shakespeare Festival website.
theaterreviewsfrommyseat/WhereWeStand/DonnettaLaviniaGrays
theaterreviewsfrommyseat/HeroesOfTheFourthTurning/WillArbery
Felt Sad, posted a frog (and other streams of global quarantine)
The Cherry Artspace is a non-profit arts facilitator and presenting organization from Ithaca, New York. In these times of non-theater, they brought together an international array of six authors to write specific material for live streaming. All of the characters and situations created reflect the boredom of being trapped at home.
The title piece, Felt Sad, posted a frog was from Berlin and written by Rebekka Kricheldorf. Snippets of thoughts performed by Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr. are scattered seemingly randomly. He is funny, annoyed, obsessed with the return of dolphins to Venice and listening to the advice of Mom, aka Angela Merkel. His Facebook friends are berating him for excessively sharing pictures of frogs.
My favorite segment was from Belgrade and was written by Iva Brdar. Erica Steinhagen portrays a woman looking to the internet for connection and self-improvement. Dean Robinson plays Wikihow in brightness of the screen warming our skin. The silliness and broad comedy is captioned in parts including “How to prevent loneliness?” and “How to answer the question – what do you like about me?” Before this pandemic, we never thought we needed to ask “How to take a walk?” Just go “past the gas station with bad coffee and inedible sandwiches.” Then the kicker which hits hard. “What are we going to do now? I don’t know how to walk on water.”
A couple has recently broken up and they are quarantined separately in Buenos Aires by Argentina’s Santiago Loza. A lesbian couple from Brooklyn and their son are isolating and home schooling in Upstate New York. From San Salvador, Jorgelina Cerritos considers life and emotions before, during and After these days of isolation, but not in chronogical order. She worries about being hired when this is all done. “That’s how capitalism works now.”
The final work is New York/ Oesti / Milan. Saviana Stanescu imagines a Zoom birthday party between three family members scattered around the world during this crisis. Some of these works are spliced and spread throughout the presentation which I found enjoyable, especially when a favorite story line reappeared. Iconic trending videos such as the penguins in the aquarium and the Venetian dolphins show up in multiple pieces. This coincidental global imprint lends an online sense of worldwide community and a welcome absurdist flair to our situation.
The Cherry Artspace presentation of Felt Sad, posted a frog (and other streams of global quarantine) completed its five show run this weekend. For information about future events, you can visit their website.
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