Tag: Carly Crawford

Categories
Theater We Recommend We Recommend

Quark Theatre Concludes Season With Constellations

Nathan McHenry and Carly Crawford (Photo: Tony Isbell)

Quark Theatre is gearing up to finish off its season in the coming weeks with the regional premiere of Constellations by Nick Payne, opening Friday, May 10th.

“I have been calling this a multiversal love story,” says director Tony Isbell. “Because it’s about two characters — Roland and Marianne — and the story is they meet, they go on a date, they hit it off, they fall in love, they break up, they get back together, and they deal with some very serious issues along the way and some very funny issues. But it’s not that straightforward: We follow their relationship through the lens of the multiverse. … It jumps to different universes and it occasionally jumps back and forwards in time as well. So there’s a lot going on.”

At just about 80 minutes, the play, Isbell says, feels like a montage sequence. “Like short scenes cut together,” he says. “But these two actors [Carly Crawford and Nathan McHenry] are phenomenal because when they switch universes there’s no technical aspect — there’s not necessarily a scene change or sound change. It’s all conveyed by the actors and just something as simple as a change of tone of voice or a change of their posture or the way they’re relating to each other. And the amazing thing is you can almost always tell when there’s a change, when they jump through the universe, not only because they end up repeating some of the same lines but just because of the nuance they bring to the characters as they move from universe to universe.

“I call it a love story because that’s really what it is. The most important thing here is the relationship between these two people and how much chemistry they have and how much the audience roots for them. Because they’re both really likable people most of the time, and in a couple of universes, they’re not so nice, but most of the time they’re really likable and the audience is really rooting for them. I think people will just really be fascinated by the show.”

Isbell hopes this production follows the success this season has offered so far with The Wasp and The Sound Inside. “In terms of audience we’ve just done really well,” he says. “This has been our most successful season, and we’d like to continue that with this show.”

Tickets for Constellations can be purchased at quarktheatre.com. Performances run Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. with a Sunday matinee at 2 p.m., May 10th through May 26th.

Constellations, Theatre South at First Congo, 1000 Cooper St., Friday, May 10-May 26, $20.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Queerly Ever After at Circuit

“I never really think of Canada as being a different country,” says Memphis actor and activist Carly Crawford. “I mean, I know it’s a different country, but we’re sort of the same, right?” The distinctions were driven home while visiting Buddies in Bad Times, the world’s oldest and largest professional company devoted exclusively to developing work that reflects the life and experiences of the LGBT community. Crawford recalls taking da walking tour of Toronto’s gay village when girls in her group asked what the gay village in Memphis was like. “We don’t have one of those,” she responded.

Crawford, who recently founded Q&A, an open and accepting queer youth theater group, says it can be lonely doing this kind of work in the South. There is a similar company in New Orleans and one in Lexington, Kentucky, but most of the theaters working with gay youth are concentrated in California and New England. “It can be pretty geographically isolating,” she says.

Crawford isn’t all alone in this endeavor, however. Q&A was created under the umbrella of Playhouse on the Square and is affiliated with the North American Pride Youth Theatre Alliance, which includes 24 theaters and Buddies in Bad Times in Canada. This week, Crawford hopes to raise her company’s profile and discover new friends and allies when Q&A opens its first play, Queerly Ever After, an all-original show that puts an LGBT spin on classic fairy tales.

“Fairy tales are great to work with,” Crawford says of the source material. “It’s so easy to turn them on their heads.” In this case, Queerly Ever After finds Cinderella trying on labels instead of shoes to see which one fits. Rapunzel is imagined as a lesbian locked away by her disapproving mother. And so it goes.

Although there’s no bad language and the situations aren’t too adult, Crawford recommends the show only to adults and children over 14. “Unless you don’t mind having conversations with your kids about what asexuality or pansexuality are,” she says.

“Queerly Ever After” at Circuit Playhouse Saturday, May 30th, at 2 p.m. and Sunday, May 31st, at 7 p.m. Pay What You Can — suggested donation $10 (937-6475)

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

4000 Miles at TheatreWorks

“Gentle” is the word I hear over and over again in reference to 4000 Miles, Amy Herzog’s funny, thorny play about geographical, emotional, temporal, and political distance across generations. Director Tony Isbell dropped the word when we chatted online. It’s popped up repeatedly in conversations with friends who’ve seen the play at TheatreWorks. Even New York Times critic Charles Isherwood called it a “gently comic drama” in his review, so there must be something to the idea that it’s a gentle play. But that isn’t how I experienced 4000 Miles. The play I saw was an uncomfortably real snapshot of a generational moment, a sound thrashing of lifestyle-lefties and a similarly-bracing critique of our elders and their astonishing ability to idealize the past. 4000 Miles is a quiet play, mostly. There’s no sustained shouting or violence to speak of, though death looks out from every corner of the room. Genuinely sweet moments are shared between a self-absorbed millennial and his grandmother, an old lefty at the tipping point of senility. But gentle isn’t the first word I’d choose to describe this subtle, one-act reminder that the reward of a long life is outliving everyone who might attend your funeral.

Did I mention that the show is also funny? It is. What it’s not is tightly plotted. Nor is it full of the archetypal characters that tend to populate the classic American family drama. To that end, 4000 Miles — a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist — is a chamber piece, more meditation than assault. But it’s an uneasy meditation, almost never serene.

The play opens with a scruffy, baggage-laden Leo waking Vera, his elderly grandmother in her Greenwich Village apartment at 3 a.m. The last thing she expected was an early-morning visit from her Left Coast grandson, and she doesn’t seem all that happy to see him. Leo has been cycling across the country with a friend, but when that friend died in a horrible accident on the road, he broke off communication with his family in Minneapolis and went off the grid.

Leo’s not intentionally malicious, but the young trustafarian is a natural manipulator: a wounded rugged outdoorsy-type quick to use his personal tragedy if it buys some sympathy or helps get the hot Chinese girl who looks like his adopted sister into bed. He takes up residence with his grandmother on a temporary basis, but makes her promise to not tell the family where he is.

Over the course of the play we watch Leo lose his girlfriend Bec, making one final douchey request to “remember how our bodies were together.” We also witness an attempted hook-up with a rich girl named Amanda who flips out when she discovers she’s in the huge, rent-controlled apartment of a card-carrying Communist. Amanda says she doesn’t think she can have sex in a Communist’s house, allowing that she’s usually kind of slutty. Her drunken anti-Communist rant is one of the show’s best set pieces. Replace the word Communist with any racial descriptor and the monologue would leave audiences slack-jawed. Then again, Amanda is Chinese, and there’s family history.

4000 Miles took its first Off-Broadway bows about three months before the Occupy Wall Street movement moved into Zuccotti Park. I mention that because somehow that real-world occurrence seems more like the ending of Herzog’s play than its actual ending. She uses the outdoorsy Leo and the urban Vera to look at how far the easily-identified tropes of the American left had evolved. Class-conscious collective action had become a lifestyle choice for people who can afford to protest GMOs and oil companies with their purchasing power. There is some suggestion that Leo is growing by the play’s end. It’s not hard to imagine him leaving for his new job out west only to get caught up in the massive street protest brewing in Manhattan. Nor is it hard to imagine him moving on following a fashionable arrest during some clash with the New York police.

Every character in 4000 Miles is a prisoner of perspective, Leo most of all. He’s loveably disheveled, despicably self-centered, and difficult to like. His grandmother, Vera, can be abrasive and muddled, but she clearly has the more sympathetic role, and Karen Mason Riss is spectacular in the part.

Christopher Joel Onken is completely believable as Leo, although his more cloying antics come across as being downright sinister. Carly Crawford is also effective, if a little stilted as Leo’s girlfriend Bec. Then again, if the show has a thankless part, that’s it.

Ron Gordon’s scenic design gives the impression that Vera’s not-so-Manhattan Manhattan residence is infinitely large on the inside. That’s a quibble, not a deal-breaker.