A Funeral Home in Brooklyn

"A Funeral Home in Brooklyn," published by Smith & Kraus and originally produced by Blue Coyote, is out in print. It's part of "2008: The Best Ten Minute Plays for Two Actors." You can order your copy here.

Ben Lerman at Left Out

My review of "An Evening with Ben Lerman" is up at NYTheatre.com. One more performance left of this very entertaining gay stand up/musician at the Left Out Festival.

Lynn Nottage Wins

And a well deserved win it is - "Ruined" for the Pulitzer.

"...we hold the Iowa Marriage Statute violates the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution."

Frank Rich's elegant demolition of the anti-marriage right's last pathetic gasps. I've read this many times now.

The Times article also has a link to the Iowa decision.

"...the County has been unable to identify a constitutionally adequate justification for excluding plaintiffs from the institution of civil marriage."

Thrilling words to read.

Ah Crap

I accidentally deleted by whole blogroll. OK. I'll fix this soon.

Henry VIII I Am

I'd never been to the Grolier Club before - never even heard of it - but I saw the article in the Times last week on the exhibit there, commemorating the 500th anniversary of the ascension of Henry VIII. It's a fun exhibit - bibliographic items, the Cloverdale Bible, letters written on vellum by various diplomats bitching about instransigent popes, even some cartoons and virulent attacks by Dickens. They have the Spanish Inquisition's copy of Shakespeare's works, where they've blotted out certain lines in the play, "Henry VIII" - presumably any lines referring to Protestants and 'not damned.' It's free, over on East 60th Street, through May 2.

And, Over at NYC Performing Arts Spaces...

...check out our new blog.

Cool Website of the Day

The Coney Island History Project. They're having their first event of the season this Sunday, which I'll miss. But I'm hoping to get out there to check out the booth soon. Their e-newsletter is great, too.

Tonight - Dante's Inferno with Jane. Hooray Dante!

What Child Doesn't Love Fassbinder?

Yesterday I went to an event for Martin Denton's "Plays & Playwrights 2009" at the T. Schreiber Studio. I saw some excerpts from some of the plays published this year. (If you want to buy a copy, go here.)

There was one play I saw a brief excerpt from, and this bit of dialogue made me fall out of my chair.

SCOTT: When I was a child, my father used to take me to Film Forum...All the other kids got to see Bambi and Back to the Future. I went to the Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective. That's probably why I carry around this little jar of poison. (He pops it out.)

VICTHORIA: Did you like it?

SCOTT: I dreamt up all sorts of damaging things after I saw Beware of a Holy Whore at the age of seven. It's still my favorite movie, but it fucked up Halloween in 1987, when I went as a half-empty glass of Cubra Libre being brutally smashed into the floor...

I bought my copy of the anthology, and read this play on the way downtown to Film Forum. It's called "Death at Film Forum," by Eric Bland. The above dialogue again made me guffaw embarrassingly on the train.

Dan Walker

Dan Walker passed away a few weeks ago. He was a.) the father of a good friend of mine, Sheafe Walker - b.) the husband of a woman who is in the WPA with me, Dina Harris Walker and c.) a founder and board member of Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre. I did not know Dan that well - had only met him a few times and he was in ailing health when I saw him last fall - but the stories were awesome. Sheafe passed on a lovely obit for him, that ran in Cape Cod Today.

Taught theatre at Brearley for years, great, loving family, a founder of a terrific and still ongoing theatre. As he said, "I've had a good run."