I saw David Ives’ brilliant play based on the erotic novel, “Venus in Fur” when it played at the Classic Stage Company last year. The demand for the play was so intense, the run was extended twice. What starts out as an audition for the play about the kinky lovers, slowly and relentlessly evolves as fantasy gradually becomes reality. It also introduced us to the amazing new actor, Tony Award nominee Nina Arianda, who went on to win several awards for this role and also for her work in “Born Yesterday.”
Now it’s opening on Broadway, at the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC), and will have a limited run until December 18th. British actor Hugh Dancy will be playing the role of the director originally played by Wes Bentley. Hugh Dancy can also be seen treating women for hysteria with vibrators in Hysteria.
I’m curious to see what the chemistry between Dancy and Arianda will be like. Whether you love theater, or kink, or both, you should really try and see it. The video is from the photoshoot for the new play.
Six years before Tony Kushner grabbed the nation’s attention with his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, Larry Kramer staged The Normal Heart, about the AIDS epidemic and its devastating impact on the gay community. The Normal Heart premiered at New York City’s Public Theater, Off Broadway, in 1985, and finally received its Broadway premiere this year, winning three Tony Awards. Of the two plays, it is more immediate and raw, and maybe angrier. Kramer’s career as a playwright took a back seat to his life as an activist; he cofounded Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the more radical group ACT UP.
The action centers on the character of a newspaper writer named Ned Weeks, a stand-in for Kramer, and his struggle to respond to the nascent epidemic. But for younger audiences, the AIDS crisis is a generation past, and the disease itself feels remote. Paul VanDeCarr spoke with young people for whom The Normal Heart is not just a tragedy, but a history lesson. Joel Grey, who co-directs the show, says audiences now are shocked by the indifference toward the epidemic in the early 1980s: “The young people are flabbergasted with the information that they hear in that show. … It’s just horrendous, and true.”
Ellen Barkin, John Benjamin Hickey and director George C. Wolfe were on Charlie Rose to talk about the Broadway revival of Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” about the early days of AIDS. The play’s been nominated for 5 Tony Awards. The site doesn’t allow embedding, so click on the image to be taken to the page with the video.
Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake is a triumph … and an unforgettable erotic experience.
Matthew Bourne’s narrative can be read as a classic romance. Lovers meet, their passions intertwine, grim forces of the world tear them apart, and in the end they are united in death and redemption. On another level, though, what we have here is one big tragic queer coming-out story, complete with a rejecting parent, the obligatory girlfriend and desperate attempt to conform to social expectation … followed by depression, the first gay hookup, elation, hope, brutal bullying and finally, suicide. The attacking swan troupe, descending upon and tearing apart the lover Swan was as horrific as a lynching. I felt helpless and heart wrenched.
Far too many suffered their fate in silence and invisibility. Although debuted in 1995, this performance seems particularly timely now, given the recent media attention on homophobic bullying, youth suicides, and new efforts of outreach such the “It Gets Better” project.
Lest you think this piece is just about the boys and their swinging masculine prowess, as it can be in many homo focused works, I happily testify that the women and their roles are fiercely and unapologetically sexual as well. The Queen, richly played by Nina Goldman, is a complex mix of regal, cold, lustful, glamorous and dramatic. In one scene she chooses an evening’s lover from the ranks of military men she inspects. In another she allows the Stranger to give her pleasures, despite her son’s conflicted protestations. During the Ball, the stage is so full of mini tableaux of couples dancing entwined in lust, jealousy and struggle of wills that it’s hard to know where to focus one’s attention. I clearly recall one woman carried off stage by a group of men … possibly to be the queen bee of an orgy?
Friday I went to see the Summer of Love exhibit with Lolita, Michelle & Delano, and Ace of Hearts. Photography wasn’t allowed in the exhibit, but I snuck these shots, using available light. People had varying reactions. For some it was too much pop culture. Lolita sang and danced her way through the exhibit. For me, it was one long nostalgia trip. The show ends 9/16.
The book Kabul Beauty School has given millions of readers a window on the lives of women in Afghanistan. But it has also exposed the women to risks. And they are upset with author Deborah Rodriguez, who has since left the country.
Kabul Beauty School deals with some of the strictest taboos in Afghan society. In it, Rodriguez describes how she helped one of her students fake her virginity on her wedding night. And she writes of how some of her students were forced into loveless marriages, one of them when she was barely 14.
Although the book isn’t available in Afghanistan, word of it has leaked out there.
The book, currently No. 28 on The New York Times bestseller list, made an overnight sensation of Rodriguez, a flamboyant beautician from Michigan, when it was published by Random House in April. The book is also slated to become a movie, with Sandra Bullock playing the lead.
But back in Afghanistan, the subjects of her book say Rodriguez and her newfound fame have put their lives in danger. They say they’ve seen none of the money or help to get them out of Afghanistan that Rodriguez promised them in exchange for having their stories appear in the book. (more. . .)
“It’s not the cheating, it’s the lyingâ€â€”or so goes our national post-affair mantra. But of course, it’s the cheating. The cheating is the lying, as much as it’s the sex. (If you aren’t lying, you’re not cheating: You’re swinging.) We know the distinction between the physical act of sex and the illocutionary act of lying is false, yet this is the first line in the last act of every American domestic tragedy. It’s what betrayed spouses are supposed to say when confronted with their wayward partners, and it sets the stage for scenes filled with apology, contrition and, oddly, the detailed recitation of each liaison. It’s like this everywhere, right?
Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee, former Wall Street Journal reporter Pamela Druckerman’s witty, engaging exploration of comparative infidelity, answers this question with an emphatic No. Every country has its adulterers—some more than others—but each culture’s cuckoldry has a flair all its own.
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