 |
|
|
Room for Cream, Episode 9 written by Jess Barbagallo Find out this and more on Saturday May 3rd... Episode 9 is Starring: Moe Angelos, Jess Barbagallo, Kate Benson, Becca Blackwell, Jibz Cameron, Nehassaiu de Gannes, Faye Driscoll, Laryssa Husiak, Cheryl Kingan, Tatiana Pavela, Brooke O'Harra, Rosemary Quinn, Marisa Rodriguez, Katy Pyle, Heidi Schreck, Igor Siddiqui and Amber Valentine Check out OffOffOnline review!! Check out OffOffOnline's interview with Brooke and Jess! Join us every other Saturday as we follow the espresso-laced exploits of dykes in distress, lesbians in love, queers in … well, you get the point. So get your ass off the couch, put down that Autobiography of Alice B. and come on over to LaMama Experimental Theatre Club. Starting January 5th. Make some room … for cream. Ever think about … getting out of the City for awhile? Just you and the girls? Uh huh. Yeah. That’s what we thought. Welcome to the wilds of western Massachusetts, home of the Bershires’ favorite Sapphic haunt - Room for Cream. Where the coffee’s hot and the drama’s even hotter. Meet Cream’s co-owners: Ellie Meeker and Roberta Charles – two ladies in it for the long haul … if temptation doesn’t get the better of them. Dire and Beatrice Owens – a handywoman with a full toolbelt, empty pockets, and a wisecracking mother she just can’t seem to shake. Lacey Chambers – toy technician at the local sex shop, Progressive Pussies. She’s smart, funny … and certainly has a knack for fitting into tight places. Doctor Jane O’Boyle – a gifted teacher in film and feminism, this professor might just need a little schooling of her own. And Bailey Donovan – a high school drop-out with a sharp tongue … who’s just learning how to use it. 1st and 3rd Saturday of the month... 1/5, 1/19, 2/2, 2/16, 3/1, 3/15, 4/5, 4/19, 5/3, 5/17, 6/7
OffOffOnline.com interview with Brooke & Jess Brooke O'Harra and Jess Barbagallo are members of the Dyke Division of Theater of a Two-Headed Calf. O'Harra is directing the division's new live lesbian soap opera, Room for Cream and Barbagallo wrote the pilot episode. O'Harra, co-founder and director of Two-Headed Calf, recently directed productions of Chikamatsu's Drum of the Waves of Horikawa and George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara. She will start teaching acting and directing at Mount Holyoke College later this year. Barbagallo graduated from NYU's Experimental Theater program and is now getting her Master's in playwrighting from Brooklyn College. She also works with another theater company, Red Terror Squad, for which she's developing a radio play. Her past projects include The Other Here with Big Dance Theater and Grey-Eyed Dogs. How would you describe the show for those who didn't see the premiere? BO: It's like self-referential queer fun. We're really embracing our community, while poking fun at ourselves. We're indulging in being out and being a lesbian, and being the goofy people we are. JB: It's like a soap set in the least soapy place you can imagine. As a premise, I think what's fun is that it's happening in Berkshires and we're trying to tap on little tiny things that happen outside of the city. Delightfully crunchy things happen there, which isn't hip in the city, but that's why this project is fun to do it lets us indulge in our cornier impulses. What would you say is an advantage to doing a live serial? JB: One thing that's really fun is the mistakes you can make and how you can feed off your audience and directly know what's working. If they like what we're saying, something vocal will happen. If a joke falls flat or if our politics are bad, we'll know that too. To be able to come back and return to characters over and over was exciting to all of us as writers, to go back to the space and build an audience. Who or what are your influences? BO: Definitely Japanese theater and a lot of contemporary artists. Lately, I've been feeling very influenced by David Lynch. He wrote these sitcoms that are amazing and very quirky. They're the way I think the soap opera should become: strange and twisted. It was too out there and strange and perverse for America â�� I was obsessed with them while living in Japan. I want Room for Cream to go there- I want stranger and stranger, more high arty. In my mind, if I would write an episode, it would be like a David Lynch sitcom. Maybe I'll write one, you never know. I'd never acted before the premiere, so maybe I'll write! JB: I feel like soap operas like this draw from pop culture, but I feel like writers have to divorce themselves from pop culture to write a different kind of play. Sam Shepard is one of my favorite playwrights since I started college. I love drama and all its clich�©s: people having arguments and pulling their hair out. I really like all the classical tenants of drama and not necessarily the use of post-modern techniques to achieve an effect. I'm old-fashioned. What about the types of theater or entertainment you seek out? JB: It's hard to balance making theater and seeing enough theater. I loved No Dice. It was a thoroughly entertaining three and a half hours. The performers were engaging and seemed really ego-less in a way that was exciting to me. The actors were being guided by the text, which is nice, and had really great onstage chemistry. They'd stop talking about something and then spend ten minutes on a topic and abruptly switch, which gave the audience a feeling of wanting more all the time. I could've heard a million of those. Could you tell me about any future projects? BO: We'll probably do a season two of Room for Cream. For Two-Headed Calf, we're working on Macbeth at Soho Rep. Jess is playing Macbeth. We're only going to do scenes of two people with intimate moments and power struggles, like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Who's more manly? Things often have to do with sex and power dynamics or attraction and disappointment. There may be this big bloodbath, but the nature of the play is how power is connected to sex. Jess just plays Macbeth as very androgynous. It's not drag, but we're just not thinking about sexes - it doesn't matter whether or not she's a man or a woman. It's about the person and the physical chemistry between two kids of people.
|
||
