Posts From Author: Theater reviews

Revolution Begins At Home

Fun Home Book and lyrics by Lisa Kron Music by Jeanine Tesori Based on Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) by Alison Bechdel Broadway’s on a roll right now, and it’s thanks in no small part to the Public Theater. If the groundbreaking Hamilton, a sell-out success at the Public in 2015, doesn’t win Best Musical at this year’s Tonys, hats will surely be eaten. And Hamilton would make it two in a row for the Public, which also championed the breakthrough hit Fun Home. As well as taking home Best Musical last year, the show picked up awards for Best Book and Best Original Score for Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori. The House of SpeakEasy is delighted to be welcoming Kron back to the Public on April 19 to talk about, among other things, her role in the creation of this extraordinary musical. The show is based on the genre-defying “family tragicomic” by Alison Bechdel, which was published in 2006 and made many of that year’s best books lists. A graphic novel, a memoir, a work of literary criticism (tackling Proust and Joyce, no less), and a landmark in LGBTQ literature, Fun Home tells the story of Bechdel’s childhood in a small Pennsylvania town and her coming out as a lesbian at […]
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Sell/Buy/Date

Sell/Buy/Date Written and performed by Sarah Jones Directed by Carolyn Cantor Playing at New York Live Arts until January 16 Note: This article concerns the workshop production of Sell/Buy/Date staged in New York in January 2016 A woman with a barcode tattooed on her ass. That was the image that stuck with me after Sarah Jones finally broke character and used her own voice to thank Friday night’s audience for attending this special workshop production of her exceptional one-woman show. Sell/Buy/Date is a humorous look at an unfunny subject — the sex industry’s capacity for exploitation — and it will be fascinating to see how the show develops during the course of its run at New York Live Arts and the months before of its world premiere later this year. Sell/Buy/Date is a work of speculative fiction. Set roughly a hundred years from now, the play explores potential developments in the relationship between sex and technology, and their effects on human interaction and psychology. Jones is a professor using “bio-empathetic resonant technology” (BERT) to teach her students about the sex industry of the past, a sort of VR that provides an alibi for Jones to adopt a series of personae who can tell us the imagined future-history of the twenty-first century. One […]
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