![]() ![]() The magic is that the show is happening in the space, on the furniture, among us and without the proverbial net. Sit where you like, the actors will adjust or go right through you. Producers of site-specific theater visit upon themselves an extra set of challenges and obstacles. But still, a rock club is a tiny theater. Musicals have toured such rock clubs ( Hedwig and the Angry Inch) to great response, and improv groups have done residencies therein. In my many years of residence in rock clubs, I often thought, what if? What would happen if one of the slots on a three-band bill was a monologue or short one-act, wedged between Emo & the SadTones and STONESLUDGE? Would people riot, would they get it? What about a whole play? Of course, as I was having these thoughts, such things were already afoot and dong quite well. ![]() While putting on plays in non-traditional settings is nothing brand new, it's encouraging that a company in St. The script and the site are a match made in, if not heaven, then as close as one finds in the outer boroughs. Later this season, Clayton fitness center Sweat gets the treatment-should we bring our own towels? Their current offering, at the aforementioned Maplewood watering-hole, is John Patrick Shanley's existential express train Savage in Limbo, whose action plays out in a Bronx bar. OnSite Theatre Company, as their name would indicate, creates site-specific productions, and have inhabited a range of spaces over their five years, from a bowling alley to a photo studio to a youth hostel. They haven't just enjoyed an evening's performance, nor are they popping in for a pre-show belt. The bar in question is Cusumano's, and the guys and gals are theater-goers. And something a what somebody told you in a movie or in your ear is what love is.So, this guy walks into a bar. You're a little kid and you see the movies and you talk to your parents and you definitely talk to your friends and then you know, right? So you go ahead and you do love. I've been shut outta everything that mighta been good by a smartness around that won't let me think not one new thing. It's been done it's been said it's been thought so f*ck it. They know about gravity so nobody ever talks about gravity. It's like everybody knows everything and everybody argued everything and everything got hashed out and settled the day before I was born. You know what's wrong with everybody? Too smart. I wanna think out loud with other people. I go to the library and I wanna take the books down off the shelves and open all the books on the tables and argue with everybody about ideas. I go home and I see my mother in her chair and I feel like I could pick her up with one hand and chuck her out the window and roll up the rug and throw a big party. I go to work and I feel like I could take over the company, but I just type. Like I'm wearing chains and I could snap 'em any time. She delivers it after she is asked what it feels like to be a virgin. This is my favorite of Savage’s monologues. Perhaps that is because I see myself in her, but isn’t that the fun of theatre? Worth the read. The play as a whole is not incredibly memorable as I cannot remember the movement of the plot or what happens in the end, but I remember Savage like she is an actual person I used to know. She pushes boundaries and challenges your mind and how you think. One of my favorite characters in the world of theatre. This play is worth reading just for Savage’s character alone. In the end, tensions subside, Linda recaptures Tony, Murk proposes to April, and only Denise remains as she was still in the limbo of loneliness from which she so desperately wants to escape. Denise, sensing an advantage, makes a play for Tony, and the action quickens, moving swiftly from zany comedy to tense confrontation which requires the muscle and mediating skills of the taciturn bartender, Murk, who, heretofore, had been content to keep the glasses filled, including that of his mixed-up girlfriend, April, a failed nun who is also a classmate of the others. And when the macho Tony comes bursting in shortly thereafter and announces that he is leaving her to pursue "ugly girls," girls who have read books and can teach him something, Linda is desolate. ![]() She is joined by an old school friend, Linda Rotunda, whose problem has been the opposite too many lovers (and illegitimate children) but who is now fearful that her current boyfriend, Tony Aronica, is losing interest in her. The first to arrive is Denise Savage, a perennial loner who announces that she is still a virgin, but would like to remedy the situation. The setting is a slightly seedy neighborhood bar in the Bronx, where a group of regulars (who all happen to be the same age thirty-two) seek relief from the disappointments and tedium of the outside world. ![]()
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