writing.performance

RealTime Arts (Australian online and print magazine devoted to live performance and multi-media) has just published my review on Forced Entertainment. You can read it here.

Ken Prestininizi’s play, As American As had a reading in a fluorescent-lit room with no windows at Brown in Providence tonight. The sealed and claustrophobic environs were weirdly suited to the play. It’s a wonderful play set in the heartland (what does that mean, exactly?– always conjured images of scary interior wastes to me) in Deerborne, Michigan. Basically it’s about a US family setting up a “black site” in their basement, after heavy persuasion from agents Frank and Frank. If they want to see their son Tommy alive again, they need to agree to “extraordinary rendition”— to the domestic basement. (more…)

I saw James Scrugg’s solo show, Disposable Men, at Perishable Theatre in Providence this weekend. It was a knock-out. The performance uses video and film in combination with live performance to present an impressionistic account of the way that black men are allied in the popular imagination with monsters. It’s funny and hard hitting and occasionally frightening. (more…)