A butt-kicking, heart-breaking, raucous Vaudevillian Cabaret!
From the Bengsons
Show Description: Abigail Nessen Bengson & Shaun McClain Bengson's Ain’t That Good News is a raucous vaudevillian cabaret, full of roaring music and impassioned characters. The Bengson duo evoke the quintessentially American stories of the immigrant and the outcast and play at the heart of the political struggles of our age through a melding of the musical forms of Tin Pan Alley, the Old South, German Weimar and rock and roll. The show is constantly evolving. As the Bengsons travel, they trade songs and drinks for new stories from the personal to the divine, and shift the work to reflect where they've been, and each new community they're in. Directed by David Eppel.
Most Fringy Thing: This funny, sexy, and moving musical adventure follows a young couple as they travel around the world, with stories of the folks they've met from the townships of South Africa to the dumps of Tijuana.
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Artist/Company Bio: The Bengsons are the best in vaudevillian indie folk and rising stars in the NYC experimental music and theater community. They have performed their original shows, performances pieces and original musicals, Ain't That Good News and The Magic Show: The Story of the Barefoot Angels, across the country and around the world. They have appeared to acclaim at such venues as Culture Project’s Women Center Stage (NYC), MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), terraNOVA Collective’s soloNOVA Arts Festival at The Daryl Roth Theater (NYC), La MaMa E.T.C. (NYC), Dixon Place (NYC), BRIClab (Brooklyn, NY), The Flynn (Burlington, VT), Town Hall Theater (Middlebury, VT), The Thacher School (Ojai, CA), the Tijuana Christian Orphanage (Tijuana, Mexico) and the Market Theater (Johannesburg, South Africa). The Bengsons are also activists and teachers, who have taught students in NYC's public schools and Cambodian immigrants in Massachusetts, as well as internationally, including at the Market Theater Lab of Johannesburg, ZA, the Tijuana Christian Orphanage of Tijuana, Mexico, and ASAPROSA, in Santa Ana, El Salvador.
Hails from: Middlebury, VT / Brooklyn, NY
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Praise for the Bengsons:
"Not only a tremendous musical talent, but also a raw honesty and sincere righteousness." THE NEW YORK TIMES "Inspired... worthy of Bob Fosse's Cabaret work, as funny as it is horrifying." EDGE Entertainment
“Friendly, fresh-faced and downright enchanting... audiences are bound to sit up and take notice.” Addison Independent
“Beautiful and artful.” NYTheater.com “A rare and compelling talent.” Rachel Chanoff, Artistic Director of Celebrate Brooklyn and MASS MoCA “Tremendous vocals and a range of stunning and diverse musical stylings... Would bring tears to even Charles Manson's eyes.” Brandon Lucy Campos, My Feet Only Walk Forward
A homeless veteran journeys back to the home he lost.
From Pipeline Productions
Show Description: A homeless veteran of the Iraq war journeys back to the home he lost, carrying sorrows and resentments - and a loaded Colt .380. The people he meets along the way stir memories and fantasies, and prepare him, unknowingly, for his climactic confrontation with the occupants of his former home.
Most Fringy Thing: See the fire sweepin’ Our very streets today. Burns like a red coal carpet Mad bull lost its way. War, children, it’s just a shot away It’s just a shot away... War, children, it’s just a kiss away, It’s just a kiss away. Gimme Shelter, by the Rolling Stones
Can a storyteller's imagination free her from a haunting nightmare?
From Driscoll Street Salon Theatre
Show Description: Dalia Rios, a successful Latina novelist, finds herself engulfed by the ghosts of an old trauma, a violent rape that she thought she had shelved years ago. The memories haunt her dreams, which are visited by two mysterious young men who know her sins. The past threatens her stability, her relationship with a much younger man and her new book, an exploration of racism in America. They also bring to the surface a volcanic anger that has been seething within her. She turns to a therapist whose unorthodox style repels her. The two clash in heated exchanges, but their confrontations lead her to face her darkest secrets. Dalia relies on her storytelling gifts to relive her past and examine her present. The Comfort of Anger moves seamlessly between reality and fantasy, delving into uncomfortable territory, from sexuality to racism, from psychotherapy to religion.
Most Fringy Thing: The play explores how a successful Latina, one foot in a traditional cultural background and the other in the 21st Century, makes peace with her violent sexual past. In her struggle, she seeks the aid of her younger lover, a bizarre psychotherapist and a memorable gay brother.
Artist/Company Bio: The Driscoll Street Salon Theatre, a creation of playwright Fernando Dovalina, began as an informal play-reading project to develop new plays written by Houston writers. Many of the plays first read at the salon have gone on to other readings, workshops and productions. Dovalina, a member of the Dramatists Guild, has studied with Edward Albee and Stuart Ostrow and has seen several of his plays produced, most notably The Man in the Trunk and American Homefront. His drama, Meskins/Cycle of Life, Love and Death, won second place in the Nuestras Voces national playwriting competition and was read at Repertorio Espanol in midtown Manhattan. He and J.T. Buck wrote the musical, The Gospel According to Tammy Faye, which has been seen in Cincinnati, Portland, Ore., Hood River, Ore., and Houston and received an industry reading over three days at the Manhattan Theatre Club creative center in New York.
Hails from: Houston, TX
Previous Fringes: 2006 Cincinnati Fringe Festival (The Gospel According to Tammy Faye)
