A New Performance in the 6th Borough

If you liked The Golden Horseshoe: A Lecture on Tragedy, you’ll love the followup, Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead. Join me as I try to resurrect a hidden and dangerous history. Which of you will dare to enter the terrifying Ouija tent of the damned and open a channel to the Other Side for me, live onstage?

Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead is a surreal, 60-minute, autobiographical show about the impact of ghosts — the real kind — and of dream interpretation — the inept kind — on one’s past, present and future.  It’s tragic, and it’s also hilarious.

It’s also a work-in-progress. I’ll be performing it with limited set, script partially in hand, followed by a Q&A, one night only, with support from my friends at the historic Plays & Players in Philadelphia.   The Philadelphia City Paper’s ultra-cool Critical Mass arts blog sez it’s probably going to be good, and they’re probably right, so you should probably come.

City Paper, Critical Mass Theatre Preview, by Matt Cantor
“It’s a one-man show, but award-winning playwright Jeffrey Stanley isn’t the only one in it. At least, he hopes not. Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead is a 60-minute ‘autobiographical black comedy’ whose supporting cast is made up of ghosts  — if they’re willing to make an appearance, Stanley says. An adjunct faculty member at New York University’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, Stanley is workshopping this free work-in-progress in Philadelphia — his new home — at the historic Plays & Players theater.

“Years in the making, the new play combines elements of earlier works, including another black comedy Stanley performed in New York at the Gershwin Hotel under the curation of Andy Warhol pal Neke Carson. Mix that with ‘inept dream interpretation,’ family history, and a Ouija tent, and the result is Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead. The play is ‘about communication between family members while they’re alive and maybe even after they’re dead,’ Stanley says. Expect humor, but also ‘a lot of death, a lot of suffering, a lot of human misery.’

One-man shows or otherwise, Stanley’s works focus on shared experience: in performing his CONT’D AT CITY PAPER>>

Yeah, What She Said

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="299" caption="Brooklynite Theresa Rebeck"][/caption]

Today I’ll let Theresa Rebeck do my whining for me, via her smart discussion about her new play The Understudy now in previews at the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia; a play in which she says “she has tried to strike a balance among three needs – to entertain; to tell the truth about our lives; and to

Brooklynite Theresa Rebeck

Today I’ll let Theresa Rebeck do my whining for me, via her smart discussion about her new play The Understudy now in previews at the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia; a play in which she says “she has tried to strike a balance among three needs – to entertain; to tell the truth about our lives; and to let that spiritual thing called drama happen” (Philadelphia Inquirer).

“A lot of what happens in show business is just horrible,” she says, drawing on her experiences in film, TV, and theater, “and with next to no reason for it. Your life is out of your control. Constantly, you’re wondering, ‘Why did they pull the plug on that production? Why did they do that to me? What are people behaving like this for?’

“And after a while I came to see that the capitalist cruelty growing out of the drive for profit was behind it,” she says. “It’s a kind of senseless, dehumanizing, totalitarian force. The New York theater world is very often just as weird as the world of TV and film.”

Couldn’t agree with her more. Looking forward to seeing The UnderstudyFull Inquirer story by John Timpane here.

[image via philly.com]

Medicine, Man Now on Kindle, Too

“Someday I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away.”
~Clarence Darrow

As with Tesla’s Letters, I’m happy to report that Medicine, Man is now available on Kindle and that a free excerpt is also available via the new Kindle web browser app which lets you buy and read

“Someday I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away.”
~Clarence Darrow

As with Tesla’s Letters, I’m happy to report that Medicine, Man is now available on Kindle and that a free excerpt is also available via the new Kindle web browser app which lets you buy and read Kindle books without needing to own a real Kindle.  Great idea from amazon.  An excerpt of the play was also published in the ep;phany literary journal in 2003, which you can also read for free.

A word to the wise  — do not buy a hard copy of this script on amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com from the scammers trying to resell it for tens or hundreds of dollars.  Be sure you’re buying a hard copy directly from barnesandnoble.com for $6.75, or the Kindle version for $7.13, or a hard copy directly from amazon.com for $7.50,  or the amazon.co.uk Kindle version for a similar amount in Euros.

In case you’re not familiar with the play, after the success of the Mill Mountain Theatre’s regional premiere of Tesla’s Letters in my hometown of Roanoke, Virginia in 2001 (after its world premiere Off Broadway in 1999), artistic director Jere Lee Hodgin asked me what I was working on next.  I shared with him a two- Continue readingMedicine, Man Now on Kindle, Too”