program insert

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Pocket-­‐sized Prince ($1,500 minimum) Howard and Peggy Levinton Diminutive Duke ($1,000 minimum) Pono and Angie von Holt Mini Marquess ($500 minimum) Evelyn Bishop, Gene Bishop and Andrew Stone, Stan and Susan Joseph Compact Count ($150 minimum) Anonymous (2), Leah Bishop and Gary Yale, David Herskovits, John Issendorf, Erica Levinton, George Levinton, Robert Talesnik, Ira Tucker Bitty Baron ($75 minimum) Anonymous (5), Ann and Gil Abramson, Lorraine and Jerry Bernstein, Herbert and Michele Better, Michael and Shirley Bishop, Meridith Burkus, Lenore Doxsee, Judy and Will Hancock, Amber Hough, Adam and Andrea Joseph, Sheehan and Jon Joseph, Judith S. Lee, Dan Rothenberg, Greig Sargeant, Lisa and Ben Seigel, Merle and Steve Seigel, Joseph Statter, Andrew Szegedy-­‐Maszak, Patrick Tonks, Michael and Sara Weinberg, Eve Wolff Dwarfish Dame ($25 minimum) Anonymous (7), Lauren Amlin, Tiffany Baran, Elisabeth Bayer, Lisa Bender, Roslyn and Steve Blum, Aryne Blumklotz, Robert Brown, John DelGaudio, Cara Epstein, Elizabeth Fredette, Madeleine George, Karen Glaser, Caleb Hammons, Charlene Herbert, Roberta Herbst, Megan Hill, Meret S. Hofer, Julia Jarcho, Aram Jibilian, Wendy Joyce, Diana Konopka, Polly Lee, Tlaloc Lopez-­‐
Watermann, Lauren Mancia and Adam Gidwitz, Margaret MacCary, Aaron Mattocks, Erin McCann, Alexander Muñoz, Theresa Nilsen, Katherine Nintzel, Peter Nish, Rodney Pallanck, Mayumi Shimose Poe, Leslie and Audrey Polt, Alice Reagan, Alyse Rothman, Freddie and Vin Scelsa, Kate Scelsa and Amanda Villalobos, Renee and Mike Shilling, Suzanne Smith, Jason Steinhardt, Adrienne Stone and Richard Smith, Maria Striar, Susan Sutton, Allison Taylor, Kat Vecchio, Chris Wells, Ian Wen, Colleen Werthmann, Khaliah Williams, Sarah Wozniak Small Sir ($1 minimum) Anonymous (2), Alyssa Anderson, Sherrine Azab, Lauren Brown, Maya Cantu, Siena Chrisman, Maureen Donohue, Miriam Felton-­‐Dansky, Matthew Freeman, Katie Hartman, Julia Kelly, Meghan Keys, Brooke Kühne, Caitlin Leffel, Stacey McMath, Francine Newman, Isaac Oliver, Jared Rohrer, Julia Sirna-­‐Frest, Elisabeth Wexler, Daniel Williams
And join us for our upcoming season!
JEWQUEEN
March 2011
JEWQUEEN is a highly irreverent (musical) comedy combining the Book of Esther
with the melodrama of the American Yiddish Theater, the bawdiness of the Borscht
Belt, the exaggerated raunchiness of Ancient Greek Comedy, and the beautifully sincere
but awkward rawness of faith-based community theater.
The Life and Surprising Adventures of the Celebrated CAPTAIN JOHN
SMITH, First Settler of Virginia, interspersed with interesting anecdotes
of POCAHONTAS, an Indian Princess
May-June 2011
JOHN SMITH/POCAHONTAS emerges from the 19th century American literary
fascination with Smith’s fateful rescue by Pocahontas, and its subsequent fetishization.
This story has been retold in countless plays from the period, notably James Barker’s
“The Indian Princess” (1808) and Charlotte Conner’s “The Forest Princess” (1848).
Our work launches from these texts, exploring the development of a distinctly
American mythology, in terms that encompass race, class, ambition, hero-worship, and
American machismo.
Program from the original production of Thirst, 1916. Image from Provincetown as a Stage, by Leona Rust Egan. Orleans: Parnassus Imprints, 1994. Artistic Director - Michael Levinton
Associate Producer/Dramaturg - Sarah Bishop-Stone
Associate Artistic Director - Laura von Holt
You've just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They're all connected with the sea. Here's one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-­‐starred sky! ... And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!
—Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night, 1941 The Lads: Tonya Canada, Megan Hill, Diana Konopka, Kate Marvin,
Aaron Mattocks, Rodney Pallanck, Sadrina Renee, Amanda Villalobos &
Stephanie Weeks
MISSION & HISTORY:
Little Lord (a theater company) manipulates classic texts, pillages faulty
nostalgias, and celebrates the homemade as a means to create vibrantly
bawdy, offbeat, intelligent, queer, funny (and often musical) theater. By
embracing a low-budget reality, casting across gender and racial lines, and
both glorifying and destroying theatrical illusion, our work strives to
uproot the familiar and challenge audience assumptions. We splice
antiquated theatrical forms with pop culture detritus, rewriting and
recreating found texts in an attempt at awkward sincerity. The name
“Little Lord” is an abbreviation of the company’s original name, “The
Little Lord Fauntleroys.”
Little Lord has been loosely operational since 2007. Past works include: a
new adaptation of the musical-extravaganza-turned-recession-spectacular
Babes in Toyland (OHIO Theatre's Ice Factory Festival 2009); the NYC
premiere of Tennessee Williams’s kinky short play The Pronoun ‘I’
(Bushwick Starr 2010); (oh my god I am so) THIRST(y) - an offshoot of
Eugene O'Neill's early melodrama on race and madness (The Chocolate
Factory/Target Margin Theater 2009); BALABUSTAS(!), a queer
yiddishkeit version of Aristophanes' raucous comedies (HERE Arts
Center 2007); and The Barbie-Steia: Curse of the House of Malibu, an absurdist
take on Aeschylus' classic trilogy “The Oresteia” starring a chorus of
Barbie dolls (OHIO Theatre 2007).
Donate online at Fractured Atlas:
https://www.fracturedatlas.org/donate/3583
Eugene O’Neill, 1912 Young Eugene O’Neill fled the theater. The breaking point came in a disastrous
vaudeville version of his father’s famous melodrama The Count of Monte Cristo, in
which he and his brother, both desperate for work, played bit parts. As an ablebodied seaman on the American Line, he led a dissolute life up and down the
Eastern seaboard, spending several months homeless and drunk on a beach in
Buenos Aires. In 1912, O’Neill was living above Jimmy the Priest’s saloon in New
York City, drinking all day in what would become the setting for his sodden
tragedy The Iceman Cometh. After a suicide attempt in the flophouse above the bar,
O’Neill retreated to his childhood home, finding work as a journalist while
surrounded by his mother’s morphine addiction and his father’s drinking problems
and washed-up career. At Christmas of 1912, he entered the Gaylord Farms
Sanitarium in rural Connecticut, to be treated for tuberculosis. There he read
Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Strindberg, and decided to become a playwright.
Thirst was one of his very first attempts, drawing on his maritime experience and
his obsession with the Titanic disaster, which had happened just two years earlier.
These plays were his entrée to the Provincetown Playhouse, a group of artists with
whom he went on to forge a new kind of American drama.
—Sarah Bishop-Stone