This is not your grandmother’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but one for 21st century NYC—a modern re-imagining of Shakespeare’s classic, which casts Hermia and Lysander as lesbian lovers with Demetrius and Helena as a gay couple. In the midst of the national gay marriage controversies, this production exposes contemporary America’s sexual hang-ups and resistance to gay marriage. Concepts of what constitutes gender, sexual orientation and power will be explored and exploded! A wild bacchanal of every fetish imaginable–filled with delectable and dangerous fairies straight out of everyone’s fantasies and fears.

Performances @ Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue
(Between 9th & 10th St.)

Wednesday – Sunday, 8pm 

Additional 3pm performance Saturday, May 5th and 12th

Closing Night, Saturday May 19, 2012

_____________

Tickets 

$25 General Admission

$20 Students / Seniors

click above logo to purchase tix

___________________________________________

Visit The Hive for more information

This is not your grandmother’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but one for 21st century NYC—a modern re-imagining of Shakespeare’s classic, which casts Hermia and Lysander as lesbian lovers with Demetrius and Helena as a gay couple. In the midst of the national gay marriage controversies, this production exposes contemporary America’s sexual hang-ups and resistance to gay marriage. Concepts of what constitutes gender, sexual orientation and power will be explored and exploded! A wild bacchanal of every fetish imaginable–filled with delectable and dangerous fairies straight out of everyone’s fantasies and fears.

Performances @ Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue
(Between 9th & 10th St.)

Wednesday – Sunday, 8pm 

Additional 3pm performance Saturday, May 5th and 12th

Closing Night, Saturday May 19, 2012

_____________

Tickets 

$25 General Admission

$20 Students / Seniors

click above logo to purchase tix

___________________________________________

Visit The Hive for more information

or just check out a magazine for emerging photographers

www.museemagazine.com

Artwork by Nadia Ackerman

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 26, 2012 6-9pm

a drawing event

Line is unique in that the work does not collectively articulate a single concept—the collectivity of the work is the concept. In their multitude, the drawings bring to the viewer a humanistic and intimate experience, an expression of the elusive mind hidden behind the impressive displays of dexterity and artistic skill of each selected drawing. It is our sincere hope that the viewer will leave not only aesthetically engaged, but also with a sense of connection—the solace offered only by the well-crafted thoughts of an articulate mind.

READ MORE

OPENING RECEPTION: THURSDAY, APRIL 5, 2012 6-9 pm

MORE INFO HERE

from March 6, 2012

by Robert Windeler

A little like those of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks of the Russian Revolution, the specifics of the infighting among factions of Irish Republicanism over the last 100 years may seem arcane to most of us, even as we recognize their ongoing ramifications. This twin bill doesn’t do much to illuminate the Irish nationalists’ philosophical splits, but the appropriately loud and violent production does offer a vivid look at power struggles in the movement during two of its most visible periods, 1916 and 1984.

In “Blood,” playwright Larry Kirwin re-imagines a real-life confrontation among three leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising. James Connolly (Ciaran Byrne) is a trade-union organizer, an avowed socialist with sympathy for if not actual ties to the contemporaneous Russian revolutionary movement. He founded the small Irish Citizen Army to fight the British, unaware of the larger Irish Republican Brotherhood and its plans to revolt. Two IRB leaders, Sean MacDermott (Jed Peterson) and Pádraig Pearse (Paul Nugent), capture and torture Connolly to convince him to abandon his activity and join forces with theirs. MacDermott and Pearse have their own differences in belief and approach, beautifully delineated by the two actors. Peterson, as the polio-stricken older leader on his way out, is the hard-nosed patriot of immediacy, Nugent’s Pearse, a lawyer, teacher, and poet, displays a relatively calmer, more cooperative demeanor toward both their captive and their goals. The two men’s class and educational differences (and that of Byrne’s Connolly) are nicely underlined by distinctive accents that are presumably partly the work of dialect coach Amy Jo Jackson.

Nugent shines again, with a very different but equally credible accent, as the central character in Seamus Scanlon’s “Dancing at Lunacy.” This is a completely fictional account of another kind of clandestine Irish Republican power struggle, this one set 68 years later. A complete psychopath with a penchant for punk-rock music and pogo dancing, Nugent’s character, McGowan, quickly blasts away any pretense of residual lofty national honor and comradeship that fueled the Easter Rising. Now, in 1984, it seems to be all about literally fighting for primacy in the IRA and assassinating British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, among others. To prove it, McGowan arrives in a secret IRA basement drinking club to do battle with his senior rival, Pender (Philip Callen), and a possible informer to the British, Ahern (Todd Pace). The resulting believable bloodbath would not be possible without the estimable work of fight director Tim Elliot and sound designer Stephanie Riddle.

Director Kira Simring has provided the proper pacing for both halves of the 110-minute program, but its noise and fury, while undoubtedly suited to contemporary tastes, doesn’t impart much historical heft.

Presented by and at the Cell, 338 W. 23rd St., NYC. March 3–19: Thu.–Sat., 8 p.m. (Additional performance Mon., March 19, 8 p.m.) (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com, or www.thecelltheatre.org. Casting by Jason Najjoum.

from March 16, 2012

by Deborah Greenhut

Romantic Ireland’s Dead and Gone: New Voices at the cell

The pairing of Larry Kirwan’s play, “Blood,” with Seamus Scanlon’s “Dancing at Lunacy,” muddies our understanding of the Easter 1916 violence. And that is a good thing. This production is an excellent case of the sum of the parts being greater than the whole. Either one alone makes a poignant point, but taken together, the frustrations of the spirit seem larger and louder and make a cri de coeur for Ireland’s peace that might not be as audible in one alone.

Both plays are well-written, their violence well-constructed, and the producers and director, Kira Simring, have taken great care to create a world that moves easily between scenes set nearly a century apart in the stunning white box theater, The Cell, that houses all this explosive energy.

Blood and Sarcasm

“Blood” opens with a gripping monologue that immediately signals conflict. Based on true events of 1916, Kirwan’s play concerns the disappearance of James Connolly, who was a trade union organizer as well as the leader of the Irish Citizen Army. Claran Byrne portrays Connolly with passion and pathos as a fitting adversary to his captors, Padraic Pearse (Paul Nugent) and Sean McDermott (Jeb Peterson). Not one can escape the cycle of violence and botched opportunities that plague the book of Irish history.
Read more at Suite101: Romantic Ireland’s Dead and Gone: New Voices at The Cell | Suite101.com http://deborah-greenhut.suite101.com/romantic-irelands-dead-and-gone-new-voices-at-the-cell-a404716#ixzz1pfTxvLjR

Read online

from March 16, 2012

Who Speaks for Ireland?  Rebel Voices have their say.

by John Lee

The sign at The Cell Theater entrance warns, “TONIGHT’S PERFORMANCE OF ‘BLOOD’ AND ‘DANCING AT LUNACY’ CONTAINS THE SOUNDS OF GUNFIRE.”

Take that as a sign that there’ll be none of the season’s shamrock and leprechaun sentimentality, so brace yourself for a riveting duet of dramas on rebellious Ireland, each built around a trio of all-too-human, and in one case, quite inhuman, revolutionaries. Blood by rocking Renaissance man Larry Kirwan, conjures a likely scenario for a mystery of the history in the run-up to the 1916 Easter Rising, while the aptly named Dancing at Lunacy tells of a helter-skelter clash of IRA operatives in an illegal drinking club in Belfast of 1984.

The opener, Blood, is a story of three key historical figures of the Easter Rising told in three scenes, the first brief vignette set in 1916 in Kilmainham Jail where, bound to a chair, is James Connolly (Ciaran Byrne) — common man, communist, head of the Irish Citizen Army — ruing the day he allied with his co-conspirators in the failed Easter Rising, cursing the Irish people who failed to rally to the cause: “Shower of bastards — spittin’ at us and spatterin’ us with horseshite as we were frog-marched out of the GPO and into this hellhole!”

Jed Peterson, Ciaran Byrne, and Paul Nugent in Blood. Photo by Christina Kim

Scene Two goes the heart of the drama, a flashback to 1913 when Connolly disappeared, held in secret for three days by the rival Irish Republic Brotherhood. Kirwan scripted and Kira Simring directed a scene of escalating tension played out at close quarters, a boxing match with three contestants, whose rivalries and alliances shifting round by round. There’s Connolly, the vibrant prole of the Dublin’s slums termed the worst in Europe; Sean MacDermott (Jeb Peterson), the wraithlike organizer of the IRB — pale, gaunt, stricken with polio, which at least left him with a cane to wield; and Padraig Pearse (Paul Nugent) — poet, barrister, Gaelic language proponent, who would be the president of the Irish Republic in the few days before the Rising was crushed. As they spar, a breakthrough is blundered into, a tense equilibrium achieved, a wan handshake brokered and the fates of these three and many more are sealed. Blood ends where it began, Connolly alone in Kilmainham Jail awaiting his own bitter conclusion to the Rising.

Kirwan gives his actors a great material — a compelling historical incident, tightly laced dialogue and rich dramatic possibilities — and they rise to the challenge. Ciaran Byrne’s Connolly is impassioned, physical, pugnacious, instinctive, with the down-to-earth sensibilities of a family man and an appealing northern tinged accent. Jed Peterson’s Sean McDermott is cold, austere, conniving, a fatalist and he plays the character’s stiffly challenged physical infirmities convincingly. Paul Nugent plays Pearce as a conciliator, opportunist, a bit out of his league and uncomfortable in his own skin, with a Mitt Romney-esque awkwardness when he tries for the common touch, but with steely conviction for the cause at his core.

And Nugent’s night was only half over.

He comes back with a flourish in Seamus Scanlon’s Dancing with Lunacy in an indelibly rendered character named McGowan, an offbeat wiseass, fuelled by manic energy and freshly brewed tea, a pop music-loving, gun-toting, Clockwork Orange-caliber sociopath for the Republican cause. The play’s title is an apt wordplay on Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, especially in the manic moment when McGowan pistons up and down in a punk dance called Pogo (think Irish step dancing weaponized and on crack… not craic).

Dancing at Lunacy opens in dead-end Irish Republican drinking club, a young guy (Brett Aresco) behind an old bar, and a couple of bar flies enjoying their stupor, until McGowan cajoles his way in, looking natty in a tight-fitting jacket over a Black 47 tee shirt. His banter is weird, entertaining and unsettling with an edge sharp enough to slice onions. With the arrival of an older man, the IRA hard guy Pender (Philip Lallen), things get awfully serious, awfully fast as McGowan, Pender and a bar patron named Ahern (Todd Pate), an alumnus of infamous Long Kesh prison, become a terrible triangle with a traitor at its core. The scene escalates in menace and violence as quickly as it retreats from sanity and civilization.

Scanlon has crafted a powerful piece that refuses to romanticize “The Troubles” and created in McGowan an original, chilling and bizarrely memorable character.

Both plays are staged to fine effect in The Cell’s configuration where no seat is more than four rows from the stage and all seats are on opposites side of the stage, though I recommend the seating section by the door for the best angle on Dancing’s… defining moment.

There are many St. Patrick’s Day events this week that you may have trouble remembering the next day. This is not one of them.

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The Irish Cell double bill of Blood and Dancing at Lunacy has been extended to March 29, with performances typically Thurs.-Sat. evenings with an additional show on Mon, Mar. 19. The Cell is at 338 W. 23rd St, NYC, convenient to west side subways (646-861-2253). Tickets are only $12, less than a pair of pints at the nearby pub. Order tickets online at The Cell Theatre.
New York Irish Arts is a great source of info on the New York Irish arts scene.

Check out the Irish cell review in Back Stage!

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The Cell’s One-Acts: How Noble
‘Blood’ Becomes IRA ‘Lunacy’

A Review By Megan Finnegan Bungeroth

NEW YORK – The specter of Irish men in close quarters grappling violently for freedom is a familiar one, one that The Irish Cell evokes, spins around in circles and throws at the audience’s feet, leaving them with memories of good times tinged by a slight queasiness — the appropriate response to two powerful plays that offer striking insights into the birth and bastardization of Irish republicanism.

The night of one-acts opens with Black 47 front man Larry Kirwan’s “Blood,” a play that asks and answers the real-life question of what happened to James Connolly, trade-union leader and commander of the Irish Citizen Army, when he was captured and held for four days in January 1916 by the rival Irish Republican Brotherhood. When Connolly returned, unharmed but shaken, all he would say was “I have been through hell,” a statement that would come to seem like a gross exaggeration compared to what would happen three months later in Dublin.

Ciaran Byrne, as James Connolly, in “Blood.” Photo by Christina Kim

The play opens on Connolly (Ciaran Byrne) alone, tied to a chair, shouting wildly about his predicament, asking himself how he got mixed up with “them,” and the next scene purports to show that. Connolly is brought into the room with his captors, Patrick Pearse (Paul Nugent) and Sean MacDermott (Jed Peterson).

Pearse and MacDermott were well under way plotting the Easter Rising and needed to contain Connelly’s Citizen Army until then. All three men agree that something needs to be done, but Connolly must be convinced that he should wait for the Brotherhood’s go-ahead to act to safeguard their planning.

On stage, the three dance around the motivations behind the fight. Rough-spoken Connolly, whose socialism drew inspiration from the grinding poverty made Dublin one of the world’s most unhealthy and slum-ridden cities, yearns for a bloody revolt and a socialist republic, where working men get a fair shake and children aren’t starving; Pearse and MacDermott, striving for a level of civility, are biding their time and gazing toward a future of democracy. The fact that none of the three will live long past the Easter Rising hangs over their argument, and while it does bring an ominous pallor to their, at times, clichéd calls for a free Ireland, it also drains the scene of some dramatic tension.

‘I want to live for Ireland — not die for it.

‘

Jed Peterson as Sean MacDermott, Ciaran Byrne and Paul Nugent as Patrick Pearse in “Blood.” Photo by Christina Kim

Many times MacDermott, ravaged by polio and fiercely protective of his pride, raises a pistol to Connolly and threatens him with death if he tries to leave, but we know that no harm will come to Connolly, at least not in this cell, one that morphs during the scene into an ideas salon with little menace to any of its occupants. The real threat looms large outside those walls, and as the men talk of the German army’s promised help that will never come and the uprising of the volunteers that will end with civilians shot dead in the streets, one can’t help but wonder how this encounter could measure up to “being through hell,” as Connolly later said.

Connolly and MacDermott trade insults, but ultimately their discussion, beneath the veneer of disagreement over implementation, is unabashedly hopeful. “I’ve got a wife and a family at home waitin’ for me. I want to live for Ireland — not die for it,” says Connolly. MacDermott is more skeptical, but still more willing to take a chance by collaborating with Connolly than to shoot him.

Jed Peterson and Ciaran Byrne in “Blood.” Photo by Christina Kim

In an out-of-place tableau, Pearce observes Connolly and MacDermott, stilled for the scene, and soliloquizes about his jealousy of their frank, manly talk, while vowing to “sweep them away” if they “hinder his endgame.” But moments later, Pearce says, almost cheerfully, “By the summer, we’ll have thrown [Ireland's British overseers] into the sea and God will have granted us a republic,” and we believe he believes this.

The final scene, a return to Connolly strapped down and yelling, pans to show the executions of all three men; it’s almost unnecessary, if the audience already knows their fates. It could have been placed at the beginning, to emphasize the ‘dead-men walking’ futility of their passionate debate. Of course, their individual deaths didn’t mean the end of the rebellion, so the notes of hopefulness for Ireland aren’t unfounded. Had director Kira Simring (also the artistic director of The Cell) not paired “Blood” with Seamus Scanlon’s “Dancing at Lunacy,” that hope might have seemed brighter at night’s end, but the second play of the evening casts a satisfyingly darker shadow.

‘I have no nerves, so naturally I
don’t know what you are feeling

With “Dancing,” we fast-forward 68 years, to a Provisional IRA drinking hole in Belfast, in 1984. The seeds of the modern Irish republican movement, sewn by the earnest men we watched in “Blood” and watered by the blood of many Irish for decades following, have sprouted here into twisted iterations of loyalty and patriotism.

Paul Nugent and Brett Aresco in “Dancing at Lunacy.” Photo by Christina Kim

“Dancing at Lunacy,” a smirking riff on Brian Friel’s acclaimed drama “Dancing at Lughnasa,” shares many of the bleak themes of its title inspiration — desperation, attempts to hold tight to a past that is slipping away thanks to the rude arrival of modernity.

Nugent returns to the stage, shedding his suit and slippery grasp on the Irish accent, reincarnated from the staid father of Irish freedom to a volatile young punk waving a gun around like it is a flag. From the moment he enters the scene, even seemingly casual movements are infused with a tension that the first play failed to generate. The men in this play all have guns, and it is quickly apparent they very well may use them.

The play is another extended interrogation, this time of an IRA comrade suspected of informing. Before McGowan (Nugent) enters, we can almost believe that the men tossing back whiskeys and beers might just be there for the whiskeys and beers. But Nugent’s presence immediately ramps up fear and anticipation, much more sinister than the tea he insists on as he banters mockingly with the ever-so-slightly-slow-witted Barman, played excellently by Brett Aresco.

Philip Callen, Brett Aresco and Todd Pate in “Dancing at Lunacy.” Photo by Christina Kim

As McGowan (none of the characters are giving first names) roosters around, pogo-ing to 80s tunes and driving a terrified American-born outsider (Spencer Leopold-Cohen) out of the place, fellow IRA soldier Ahern (Todd Pate) sidesteps him warily, betraying his uneasiness. We’re not sure if this is due to Ahern’s guilt or his understandable fear of what seems McGowan’s simmering insanity.

When Pender (Philip Callen) comes in, supposedly to assert some authority over the scene, it is clear that he is thrown by McGowan’s presence and McGowan’s quick-and-deadly pop culture-infused wisecracks. When Pender warns McGowan that he’s getting on his nerves, McGowan tells him that “I have no nerves, so naturally I don’t know what you are feeling right now.” It’s a chilling statement that rings completely true.

As the play continues, ever darker, Pender tries in vain to maintain a sense of order, to hold to the noble foundations of a citizen army in which he clearly has the utmost faith, while McGowan happily dances on the grave of that vision, proving by his existence that the organization has taken a severely amoral turn. Ahern ducks and begs while the Barman looks on wide-eyed, understanding only the broadest of strokes. The play’s bloody conclusion induces winces, which is completely fitting.

The play’s smart coupling with “Blood” enables the final scene of “Dancing at Lunacy” to stand in for the conclusion of a whole chapter of Irish history. It ends with Irishmen, driven to killing and being killed, clawing each other on their way out of oppression, and learning with horror just how messy and awful revolution will be. WG

“Blood” and “Dancing at Lunacy” can be seen from March 8 through March 17, Thursday through Saturday, and Monday, March 19, all at 8 p.m. The venue is The Cell Theatre, 338 W. 23rd Street (between 8th & 9th avenues). Tickets can be purchased via Brown Paper Tickets. For more information, visit The Cell’s website, atTheCellTheatre.org.