What makes this Oklahoma more than just smart is how it ruthlessly strips away the glaze of nostalgia that usually accompanies such restagings in order to uncover what seemingly must have always lurked there, submerged just below the musical’s glossy surface.
Payne keeps his audience from jumping ahead to any particular conclusion by deploying a second (bigger, metatheatrical) frame around Karma’s story, one in which the house lights keep coming up and we are rendered, without a choice, visible – to the actors, to the audience, and (most disturbingly) to ourselves.
Sad clowns, hobo clowns, birthday party clowns, crust-punk clowns, burning man hula hoopers dressed like clowns…juggalos! I don’t consider myself any of them.
Their movement allows them to take up all the space, filling the stage all the way to the frame.
What, for the theater, are our tablecloths, forks, spoons, plates and bowls that maybe aren’t actually serving us anymore? Is how we are making theater and performance the best way it could exist, or is there a better version?
We share our sweat, our humidity, our heat. We weather it, as Kelly does inside the box.
I grew up in a yellow house in West Seneca, NY, a suburb of Buffalo. My bedroom window was on the second floor in between the windows of my sisters, though I am the youngest, with a huge maple tree in front of it that made me feel like I lived in a treehouse.
“Feminist Perspectives on Building Intersectional Communities,” facilitated by Joy Messinger and guest speakers Hana Ii-Epstein, Jessie Fuentes, Kyra Jones, Lenox Magee, Denise Yvette Serna, and Guest Culturebot Writer Tanuja Jagernauth.” Photo Credit: Ishmael Muhammad. Written and directed by Kyoung H. Park, PILLOWTALK (which recently was
This testing, naming, retreating, reframing; lifting to the light the grays and yellows and beiges and browns of inner worlds – is often the dance of the play.
What was I doing? Why was I here? What had I hoped to achieve from this? So many people I didn’t know! Communal living having its obvious benefits, but not that easy to suddenly just find one’s self there in the thick of it.
What controversies like Robert Lepage’s “SLĀV” reveal about the shortcomings of art practices
What’s the relationship between joy and the various vibes and qualities of my identity? In my life, joy is so damn important; I’m rounding out year #2 living in NYC after moving from the Midwest and re-getting to know myself while finding and building community which couldn’t be possible without joy.
