Tag: New Moon Theatre Company

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New Moon’s Evil Dead: The Musical

Evil Dead: The Musical (Photo: New Moon Theatre)

We may be in a national blood shortage (donate if you can!), but the folks with New Moon Theatre Company have a surplus of blood — fake blood, that is — and they’re ready to shower their audience with it.

What exactly calls for blood to run on the stage of New Moon’s latest production? Well, it’s all for Evil Dead: The Musical. Taking elements from the cult classic films Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, and Army of Darkness, the show spins the tale of five college students going to an abandoned cabin and accidentally unleashing an evil force that turns them all into demons. But, as director Ann Marie Hall says, “In this case, they’re all singing and dancing” — to songs like “All the Men in My Life Keep Getting Killed by Candarian Demons” and “What the Fuck Was That.”

“‘What the fuck was that? Your girlfriend has turned into a demon,’” chirps Hall during our phone call. “‘What the fuck was that? Your sister’s a demon, too.’ And then two of the main guys do a tango.”

Hall adds, “It’s kind of stupid and funny, just the kind of way I like my show. Stupid and funny.” Indeed, Hall has acted in and directed a number of comedic shows, most recently having directed Theatre Memphis’ You Can’t Take It With You.

“I like to laugh. I like to make people laugh. That’s my favorite thing — hearing people laugh,” she says. “I will try to find the comedy wherever it is. And sometimes it’s just in the tragedy. So when somebody gets their head lobbed off or you have to kill your girlfriend with an axe, then chop it up later with a chain saw, that’s terrible, but sometimes it’s funny.”

So when presented the opportunity to direct New Moon’s Evil Dead, Hall jumped at it immediately. She had seen the show years ago in Charleston and loved it — especially the Rocky Horror-like moments where the cast splatters the audience with blood in the midst of their violent throes. “I’d been trying to get somebody in town to produce the show for ages,” she says. “I’m so excited for the blood part.”

For those who are also excited for the blood part, the theater will have a special section reserved: the Splash Zone. These seats will quite literally be in the middle of the action, practically on the stage. “Your chairs are on the floor with the cast,” Hall explains. “They are dancing right up to your face.”

Tickets for the Splash Zone cost $35 and include a commemorative T-shirt. For those not wanting any blood on them (couldn’t imagine why), non-Splash Zone tickets are available for $30. Performances run Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2 p.m. through November 13th. Evil Dead is not recommended for those under 17. For more information or to buy tickets, call 901-484-3467 or visit newmoontheatre.org.

Evil Dead: The Musical, Theatre works, Friday, October 28-November 13, $25-$35.

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Theater Theater Feature

Killer Joe’s a dark tour of the American trailer park.

Bouncing boobs, bobbing peckers, and even the odd butthole all make featured appearances in Killer Joe. Tracy Letts’ breakthrough play is pure pulp — a Texas trailer park noir about life behind the aluminum curtain, in a land of narrowing opportunity where thrills are cheap and life is cheaper.

Chris Smith’s mom stole his coke, right? It was a lot. He was going to sell that coke, see? And, you know, responsibly get his life back in order, only for real this time, not like that time he tried to start a bunny farm but neglected the poor rabbits, and they got rabies and tore each other apart like some kind of sick drive-in monster movie come to life. Metaphor alert. Now Chris (played with impressive restraint by Luke Conner) owes 6G to some really bad dudes, and Ansel Smith, Chris’ no-account daddy (nicely rendered by Daniel Pound) — says he can’t help. It’s not like Ansel and his his sex-addicted wife (who’s not Chris’ mom) ever had more than $1,000 at any one time. So these two broke, broken, and helpless manchildren get high as hell underneath the Confederate flag in a convincingly squalid trailer, watch some shit TV, and concoct a plan to murder Chris’ mama for not very much insurance money.

Enter Killer Joe, a polite, organized, thoroughly corrupt police detective wearing a black hat. He’ll do the job for $25,000, non-negotiable.

Joe’s a classic Western trope: the bad, possibly evil SOB who becomes almost heroic now and then because he lives by a personal code that very occasionally puts him on the right side of things. He’s a direct man who means what he says and says only what needs be said. He’s also Letts’ perverse answer to Tennessee Williams’ famous Gentleman Caller, and when the Smiths can’t make the downpayment, Joe says he’ll take a retainer — Chris’ virgin sister Dottie. What follows is sick romance, rape, and horror interrupted and occasionally enhanced by buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The drama climaxes too literally with a scene of humiliation, abuse, and shaming so graphic and severe it threatens to make the play every bit as horrible as the dark world it aims to illuminate.

Killer Joe is a grotesque, trigger-laden, exploitive, and genuinely poetic fable of limited horizons playing out in the vast flatness of Texas. It’s a Libertarian paradise where radical self-interest neutralizes the blessings of liberty like chemtrails neutralize, I dunno — something or other. It’s a liminal place where characters dream small and fail epically. Speaking of epic …

Annie Freres, notable for performances in Mama Mia! and Rock of Ages at Playhouse on the Square, proves that her acting chops are just as finely developed as her “Jesus Christ” pipes. As Sharla Smith, she’s often naked and so emotionally honest in the play’s closing scenes, the most stoic observers may find themselves watching through laced fingers. Mersadies Burch is a similarly compelling Dottie, the childlike somnambulist at the heart of Letts’ nightmare.

But what about the killer?

There’s color missing from Don McCarrens’ one (admittedly perfect) note performance as Joe, but he somehow manages to get the job done just fine in black and white. Whether he’s laying out the terms of his agreement or force-feeding a villain no worse than him (save for lack of a bullshit code), McCarrens is never anything short of credible.

Adult content warnings aren’t bullshit. Dirty words and basic nudity are only the tip of an icky, disturbing, weirdly riveting iceberg.

New Moon Theatre Company presents Killer Joe at TheatreWorks through May 28th. Newmoontheatre.org

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Titus Andronicus at TheatreWorks

The faint of heart (and Shakespeare purists) should know on the front end they will witness atrocities. Characters in Titus Andronicus are gutted. Their throats are slit, and the blood is caught in buckets. Heads are severed and held up for all to see. Hands are severed from wrists, and grown men are paraded around the theater in their Skivvies. And, of course, there’s the human sacrifice, the cannibalism, and all that newly written text.

New Moon established itself as the independent theater company that loves Halloween by producing a slate of deliriously dark plays like Look Away (a Civil War zombie drama), The Woman in Black, and Tracy Letts’ deeply unsettling Bug. The ambitious players bolstered their reputation for excellence (and for going places other companies won’t) by staging infrequently produced works by William Shakespeare. Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s gore-spattered tragedy of war and revenge, is the perfect marriage of these two worlds. Some might even say that the company has upped Titus‘ gruesome levels by doing to Shakespeare’s script what Friday the 13th‘s Jason does to fornicating teenagers at Crystal Lake.

New Moon’s take on Titus is decidedly conceptual. It begins with an imagined plane crash, and the audience is welcomed to Hell with a monologue Shakespeare didn’t write. All of the players onstage are dead, we’re told, and this performance functions as a kind of “welcome to the afterlife” for sinners. For purists, the threat of never-ending torment may be actual, since new, deliberately spooky narration has been inserted between scenes, lest audiences forget the Halloween conceit or lose their way in a story full of twists and turns.

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Theater Theater Feature

Playhouse’s The Gospel at Colonus; New Moon’s The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later

CREDIT: By Chris Neely. Courtesy of Playhouse on the Square.

I remember being so intimidated by Gospel at Colonus‘ co-creator Lee Breuer. The relentlessly experimental director and playwright conducted his improv workshop like a drill sergeant, barking out the names of famous painters and sculptors from the sidelines. He’d say, “El Greco,” and we’d adjust our improvs to reflect the painter’s stylistic flourishes. Then, as the room transformed into a colorful passion play, he’d change the scene to something by Goya or Bosch or Diego Rivera. And we, his students, would all change our missions accordingly. This was never a test of our acting or improv skills, of course. It was a cultural literacy exam. And, although I didn’t fully understand it at the time, Breuer wasn’t especially interested in good acting, in the conventional sense. He was looking for translators.

Playhouse on the Square’s explosive production of The Gospel at Colonus may seem like a clever (if culturally sketchy) adaptation of the least-studied play from Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle. More accurately, it’s a translation aiming to reclaim the ecstatic nature of early theater and root out the meaning of things that are difficult to convey with words. Using a range of classic gospel styles and full-throated pulpit storytelling, The Gospel at Colonus invites audiences to participate in a blind king’s transformation from accursed sinner to acclaimed hero in his final hours. It’s easy to mistake this for a comparative exercise, mingling Greek and Christian myth. It is simpler than that. It’s the appropriation of a script we all know (church), in the service of a script we don’t know, because A) theater’s meaning has changed and B) Oedipus at Colonus is eclipsed by Oedipus Rex and Antigone. Literate congregants may also recognize allusions to Samuel Beckett’s Endgame folded into a stew that is vibrantly existential.

Playhouse director Tony Horne knows how to stage a no-holds-barred musical. To that end, The Gospel at Colonus is an exercise in both abandon and restraint. Dance is minimal but choreographer Emma Crystal uses it to generate and amplify tension in ways we don’t normally associate with Broadway. Kathy Haaga’s epically scaled set stops time, dropping the audience in the middle of a classical ruin, as ancient as it is postapocalyptic. It’s a space built for poetry and magic and with the help of music director Julian T. Jones, the cast delivers.

Curtis C. Jackson brings a James Brown-like pleading to old Oedipus. He’s answered in kind by his sister/daughters Antigone and Ismene, gorgeously sung by Claire Kolheim and Rainey Harris. The show belongs to the chorus and when it’s rocking, this chorus can absolutely take you to church.

Ten years after Matthew Shepard’s death, the Tectonic Theater Project — a New York-based theater company best known for creating a docudrama called The Laramie Project — returned to the scene of the crime to re-interview primary sources and take the town’s temperature. From those interviews they created The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. This epilogue, currently on stage at the Evergreen Theatre, explores a phenomenon we’ve come to describe as “trutherism,” and Laramie’s need, as a community, to define itself as something other than the homophobic place where Shepard was killed.

In 2004 ABC’s 20/20 revisited the slaying. The show suggested that both the media and the court had gotten Shepard’s murder all wrong. Shepard’s death was recast as a robbery and drug binge gone bad. Ten Years Later plays out as a deliberate refutation of 20/20‘s shaky revisionism. It shows that nothing changes the reasoning behind the killer’s victim choice and brutality.

There’s not one standout performance in the New Moon Theatre Company’s Ten Years Later. It’s a show about teamwork. This creative team, assembled by director Gene Elliott, works. Both The Laramie Projects are exercises in minimalism in the spirit of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. This time, the story moves beyond Shepard and his killers to explore the art of persuasion, bias confirmation, and the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about who we are. And how these stories we tell ourselves about who we are duke it out until there’s only one story left standing.

Strong stuff, beautifully acted.

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Memphis Gaydar News

Emerald Theatre Company Presents The Laramie Project

Matthew Shepard

Over the month of June, Emerald Theatre Company (Memphis’ LGBT theatre troupe) and New Moon Theatre Company will collaborate on two plays about the 1998 hate crime beating death of 21-year-old University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard. Shepard’s death brought national attention to hate crimes legislation on the state and federal level. 

From June 5th through the 14th at Theatreworks, Emerald Theatre Company will present The Laramie Project, a classic play based on interviews of Shepard’s friends and fellow Laramie, Wyoming citizens. The play was first put together by Moisés Kaufman and fellow members of the Tectonic Theater Project. They made trips to Laramie over the course of the trial of the two men accused of killing Shepard, and while there, interviewed 200 people. The Laramie Project is a collage of what they found in those interviews.

The Laramie Project will run on Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Tickets are $20 for adults and $15 for seniors and students. All tickets are sold at the door.

From June 12th through the 28th at Evergreen Theatre, New Moon presents The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. That play is set 10 years after Shepard’s death — September 12, 1998 — when five members of Tectonic returned to Laramie to analyze the murder’s long-term effects. The play looks at how the murder affected the town’s history and legacy.

The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later will run on Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Tickets are $20 for adults and $15 for seniors and students. New Moon can be reached at 901-484-3467.

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Two Theater Companies team up on Laramie Projects.

Matthew Shepard’s story is well known. In 1998, the slight, blond, 21-year-old gay man visited the Fireside Lounge near Laramie, Wyoming, where he met two other men, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. The three men eventually left the bar together. Shortly thereafter, McKinney and Henderson pistol-whipped Shepard, tied him to a fence, doused him with gasoline, set him on fire, and left him to burn in the cold. What happened in the aftermath was documented by the Tectonic Theatre Company in a living oral history called The Laramie Project. Ten years later, Tectonic returned to the scene of the crime and reinterviewed all the original subjects to create The Laramie Project 10 Years Later. This month, two of Memphis’ most enduring independent theater companies are joining forces to make both works available to Memphis audiences in the same month.

“Raw” is the word Emerald Theatre Company (ETC) director Den-Nickolas Smith uses to describe the original Laramie Project. The community was still reeling, both from the murder and the notoriety it brought. “Even though we’ve made so much progress, it’s important that we’re reminded of this story,” Smith says.

New Moon’s director Gene Elliott describes 10 Years Later as a more reflective piece showing so many of the original players wondering how they ended up where they are. “It’s interesting to see how attitudes have changed,” Elliott says.

The unusual team-up was Elliott’s idea, but the result is not at all what he originally had in mind. New Moon wanted to do The Laramie Project and thought partnering with LGBTQ-oriented ETC made good sense.

“I was excited about the partnership from the beginning,” Smith says. The possibility of staging both plays at the same time only sweetened the pot.

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Theater Theater Feature

Of Mice & Menace

Poor Kenneth Tynan. Some might say the famously acerbic theater critic never truly recognized the genius of Harold Pinter. In 1988, following a remounting of The Birthday Party, Pinter’s landmark experiment in tension, black comedy, and creeping menace, the long-dead journalist was smacked around by New York Times scribe Mel Gussow for having originally dismissed the play as “a clever fragment grown dropsical with symbolic content.” The only problem with Gussow’s fawning assessment of Pinter’s best-known work was that Tynan’s initial criticisms were entirely correct.

Like it or not, most of Pinter’s work — The Birthday Party, in particular — is laden (some might say overburdened) with dangling symbols and shot through with deliberately fragmentary passages that require audiences (willing and un-) to fill in the blanks. Like most great scripts, The Birthday Party can never be complete until actors have spoken the lines in a room full of eyewitnesses. Besides, if Gussow ever had witnessed an incarnation as imbalanced as the one currently on stage at TheatreWorks, he might have had a little more respect for Tynan’s critical point of view, because in production, Pinter’s writing, as tightly wound as it may be, is never able to stand on its own. And that, as counterintuitive as it may seem, is the playwright’s true genius.

There is much good in the New Moon Theatre Company’s take on The Birthday Party. David Newsome’s keyboard-heavy sound design is especially engaging as it swings back and forth between tense discord and whimsical vaudeville runs. The cast’s collective ability to use a foreign accent is not one of the production’s stronger points, and much of their generally good acting is subverted by bad diction. TheatreWorks veteran Mark Rutledge is appropriately mundane as Petey, a mousy presence whose boring daily rituals transform themselves into absurd comedy, but his weird pronunciations get in the way of otherwise honest work. The same might be said for Sylvia Wilson’s interpretation of Meg, Petey’s talkative, sweetly twisted wife whose utter simplicity, even during the play’s more perverse moments, is ultimately winning, even if she sounds a bit like Dick Van Dyke on a combination of helium and lithium.

Whatever good work the actors may have done on opening night was ultimately undone by the play’s three-act structure, a pair of 10-minute intermissions that made the evening feel interminable, and a rude group of wine-swilling patrons who commented inappropriately throughout the show. Act 1 survived the onslaught, and act 2 got over in spite of numerous missteps and the cast’s complete inability to physically commit to the play’s darker themes. Act 3, however, was unfocused and threatened to turn into gibberish.

The Birthday Party, which has no plot in the traditional sense, revolves around Stanley (Carl Walters), a mysterious fellow who may or may not have been a piano player before becoming the only lodger at Petey and Meg’s seedy seaside rooming house. The scruffy young man becomes tense when he hears of the imminent arrival of Goldberg (Jeff Corrigan) and McCann (Christopher Hulett), a pair of gangster-like characters who verbally deconstruct Stanley, until there’s nothing left of him but a confused muttering husk.

Hulett delivers the evening’s most satisfying performance, making McCann into a short-tempered Irish bear and a truly intimidating stage presence. He makes the ridiculous interrogation that begins The Birthday Party‘s second act as unnerving as it is hysterical. It is a perfect scene in a fragmented production that needs more time to develop.

Through August 17th at TheatreWorks