The Gokash production of Death of a Salesman is the first African-American staging of the Arthur Miller classic in Philadelphia. We talk to Kash Goins, head of Gokash, who stars as Willy Loman.

Henrik Eger: A number of African-American theater companies in the U.S., in spite of their good work, seem to attract a predominantly black audience. By contrast, your production of Death of a Salesmanbrought people of all ethnic and social backgrounds to the theater. How do you explain such success in appealing to a multiethnic audience?

Kash Goins: That is a result of a concentrated marketing effort, combined with a strategy to build brand awareness (Gokash Productions) amongst an audience that appreciates quality theater, regardless of ethnicity. 

HE: How do other African-American theaters tend to go about attracting audiences?

KG: I think many African-American theater companies pander to the low-hanging fruit, which tends to be the African-American patrons. But I don’t think that an organization should hinge long-term health on segmentation. Business is always a gamble. 

HE: How did you start building your audience base?

KG: We started this company in 2008, and our audience was 99 percent African American. The shift that you’ve witnessed is the very beginning of a long-term strategy.

We understand that initially, because of the nature of such a seismic paradigm shift, we will have to be patient with things like attendance and the financial ramifications. But, we also think that for long-term sustainability and to not fall victim to the “fad” nature of African-American based theater, this goal toward diversity will support us. 

We need to attract audiences based on an interest in quality, not race. I hope that we don’t turn off the African-American audience in the process, because the parallel goal is to expose our audience to artistic endeavors they may not normally take an interest to. It’s a robust effort.

HE: Who inspired you for this production?

KG: The idea of an African-American Death of a Salesman with me as the lead was planted in my head almost ten years ago by theater director Kirk Paul.

It simmered in the background for years, and then I found out Yale did it in 2009 with Charles S. Dutton. I seem to be drawn to roles previously played by Dutton and James Earl Jones. We began our effort to present the classics, aware of the plays in that canon.

Like a moth to light, I’m drawn to characters with extreme levels of internal conflict. This was a perfect storm.

HE: Never before have I seen a production of Death of a Salesman where an overweight Willy Loman generated such energy, sweating profusely, and working himself into a stroke and a heart attack — all at once. I was convinced that we were watching the last performance ever of this master actor. What did you and Ozzie Jones, the director, do to prepare for this role and to give it such self-destructive energy?

KG: I’m losing weight! [smile] Ozzie convinced me to resist the urge to “act” and, instead, live through Willy Loman’s experience, which gave me the energy that you saw on stage.

HE: How did you connect this play that originally took place in New England with an all-white cast with Africa and with African Americans?

KG: All that we did was become intimate with the text and honor the words that were written to inhabit the world that these people live in.

The repetitions of “Africa” in the “imagination” scene were an artistic discovery in the rehearsal process that accented what Africa represented to the character. To me, it was less of a “going home” type of a thing and more about where Ben found his opportunity. If he went into a jungle in Poland and came out with diamonds, it would have meant the same thing to me. 

In addition, Ozzie dressed Ben [Mike Way] in traditional African garb and accented his experience with the African drums.

HE: What did you want to convey to your audience?

This is a human experience: to want more for your life, for your wife, and for the lives of your children. It isn’t confined to a race or a geography. For that matter, nor does that experience apply to a specific decade.

HE: How do you feel about white actors taking on all-black plays, or companies that reverse roles, as in the recent EgoPo production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where all the slaves were white and the slave-owners were black?

KG: I think it’s fantastic!  A good story is a good story, regardless of who is telling it. The only requirement I have is that the story is told with the passion and the clarity it commands. If there is a major conflict like someone using a particular racial slur that they wouldn’t normally, as long as the art of the piece supports it, I’m on board. Women playing male roles and vice versa — I love creativity when it’s done “right.”

Originally published by the Broad Street Review, August 16, 2014.

The issue of diversity in theater (and in theater reviewing) is a ongoing subject of conversation. Kash Goins isn’t just talking about it. His GoKash Productions has produced a series of classic plays with all-black casts. This year’s offering is Arthur Miller’s DEATH OF A SALESMAN. Phindie writer Henrik Eger talked to the play’s director, Ozzie Jones, about the first African American production of this great work in Philadelphia.

Henrik Eger: A number of African-American theater companies in the U.S., in spite of their good work, seem to attract a predominantly black audience. By contrast, your production of Death of a Salesman attracted a wide range of people of all ethnic and social backgrounds. How do you explain such success in appealing to a multi-ethnic audience?

Ozzie Jones: I think the reason is largely connected to the audience that both Kash and myself have been developing for our work over the years. I have over the past 20 years worked with a wide range of differing races and classes. Thus there are a wide range of audiences that are interested in seeing the work. The issue of diversity in the arts is ultimately driven by relationships. If an artist makes segregated choices of what communities they will work with and in, then their audiences will be segregated.

HE: You presented an American classic which has been performed around the globe. Who inspired you for this production, and what did you do differently, apart from having an all-black cast?

OJ: The only things I would call “differences” would be stylistic choices. I have approaches to my work that are specific to me. I like making my plays look like films. I use music as a tool to tell the story as if it were another character in the play. And I am interested in stripped-down minimalist staging as in vaudeville. Those all add up to a different look than one would see from someone else. But other than those style choices, I did the play as written—word for word.

HE: Never before have I seen a production of Death of a Salesman where an overweight Willy Loman generated such energy, sweating profusely, and working himself into a stroke and a heart attack all at once. I was convinced that we were watching the last performance ever of this master actor. What did the two of you do to prepare for this role and to give it such self-destructive energy?

OJ: Nothing other than good old-fashioned character development and practice. Kash is an aggressive actor, so he attacks every performance as if it were his last. Frankly, he attacks rehearsals the same way, so the intensity you saw, I believe you would see in any of his performances.

HE: When casting for the many roles of this play, what were the qualities you were looking for in the actors?

OJ: I look for actors who are fun, smart, aggressive, and creative. I love actors that can improvise. I love actors that try new things. I love actors that do before they pontificate. And I like actors who are cool people that have good vibes, are not mean, and are fun to be around. I also like actors who are not up their own butts and can tell and take a joke. Those are the things I look for.

HE: What methods did you use to bring out a certain type of energy to keep up with Willy Loman?

OJ: The method I use is called the Rhythm Form. It is an acting technique I have been developing over the past 10 years. Simply put, I teach the actors to develop their performance in the same way a jazz musician explores a song: focused first and foremost on rhythm and thinking of text as melodic content.

HE: Watching your production, I thought I saw a black play written by a black writer for a black audience, and allowing everyone who cared to come to the theatre to get a slice of reality that shook me deeply. What did you do to simultaneously bring out that joy and suffering in many African-American families in a play that originally took place in New England with an all-white cast?

OJ: I just let the actors tell the truth of the words. I didn’t spend a lot of time talking about race. I think the journey of the artist is to find and tell the truth of the moment. I think the performance felt authentic because the goal of the journey of the actors was authentic. We spoke a lot in rehearsal about telling the truth of the words. I personally believe that race constructions take people further away from the truth and not closer to it.

HE: How do you feel about white actors taking on all-black plays, or companies that reverse roles as in the recent EgoPo production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where all the slaves were white and the slave-owners were black?

OJ: I love it. I am, I think, in the minority opinion about this in the black community, but I think the only way theater will bring us closer is if people explore telling the stories of people other than themselves. I further think that white artists have always told black stories in their own voice: Eric Clapton, Al Jolson, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Elvis, etc.

The only difference is now, in the theater, black artists are doing it with classical white works. Hey, it’s only fair and I love it.

HE: Is there anything else you would like to share?

OJ: Come out to see the last week. The show rocks. Peace.

Originally published by the Phindie, August 15, 2014.

They have a name for former LDS in Utah: Jack Mormons. You can leave the Mormon church, but the Mormon upbringing will never leave you. In his solo work CONFESSIONS OF A MORMON BOY, part of this year’s GayFest!, a sixth-generation Mormon Steven Fales explores his excommunication, divorce, prostitution, drug addiction, and inspiring revival. Phindie critic Henrik Eger talked with Fales about his work.

Henrik Eger: Given that you are a musician, singer, composer, writer, and an actor, where do you feel the most at home?

Steven Fales: I have always been hyper creative. I am a creative. Julia Cameron of The Artist’s Way recently featured me in her new book The Creative Life. Solo performance allows me to do it all. Everything I do helps me tell a story. It is all about storytelling: music, sound, lights, images, scripts, dance, etc. I paint, I love photography, I cook. If it’s creative, I will try it.

HE: Could you tell us more about your role as a leader in the solo performance genre and as the founder of the Solo Performance Alliance?

SF:  When you are a solo performer, the cast parties are extremely lonely. So I created a group, with over 700 members now on Facebook—a forum for sharing the ups and downs of the solo artist’s journey. Some of my best friends and colleagues are other solo performers. We need each other. And it is a genre in theater that is getting more and more popular and sophisticated.

HE: I’m impressed by your capacity to make fun of yourself, for example, when naming some of your plays When All Else Fales, or Missionary Position, or Mormon-American Princess, where you deal with the subject of narcissism. When and how did you develop that sense of humor? Is it a reaction to tough realities, a form of survival?

SF: The title Mormon American Princess was inspired by my ex-wife. I’ve been called “narcissistic” by her side of the story so many times that I decided to take the label and wear it proudly—like gays reclaiming the word “queer.” At the end of “MAP,” I find that that I’m not a princess, but a cowboy. A Mormon American Cowboy.

We are all narcissistic on a continuum. So I played with the phenomenon of narcissism and twisted it around. And there is always a religious bent to my titles. This one is also a nod to all the Jewish guys I’ve dated and all the Jewish girls who ever took me to lunch on my birthday! I say this with great affinity, “Mormons are wannabe Jews.”

HE: Hearing that a successful playwright and actor had beaten his addictions could impact many young people who may have given up hope: “When you stop sleeping around and doing crystal meth, you have a lot more capacity to attend to a bigger life. When you’re sober, you can do a lot” (qtd. in Kergan Edwards-Stout). 

SF:  I make a choice every day. Do I want to keep pursuing my creative dreams or do I want to just be creative online and in the bedroom? There is a lot of help out there, but what keeps me going in a sober direction are my dreams. Throw your dreams as far in front of you as you can and start pulling yourself toward them. Many things fall into place. I believe too many out there are in jobs and careers that they hate and that offer no creative outlet. Without our creativity we are more vulnerable to our demons. Creatives must create. And we are all creative in one way or another.

HE: Julinda Lewis describes your “life-affirming revelation, as when he dreams that his tears are needed to fill a deep gorge so he and his companions can swim to safety on the other side.” David Clark, like a number of other critics, was also moved by the climax of your play, which seems to have transported theatregoers into a different world altogether. “Without skimping on a single detail, Steven Fales bares his soul and the depths of his despair, creating a profoundly moving experience.” What gave you the courage to present these difficult, often existentially life threatening situations with brutal honesty?

SF: They say that still waters run deep. And behind this smile is a well of great sorrow and pain. It started when my parents divorced at age 16. The arts saved my emotional life. I knew at 18 that I would be a writer someday. So after all the performing, when life really crashed at age 30 with my excommunication, divorce, and loosing custody of my kids, the pen came out. I love to perform and I love comedy, but I have a lyrical side that will always shine through.

I also wrote for my kids. I was afraid if I were to die there would be no one I could trust to tell my story. And so I told it, hoping my kids would find clues that would help them. I am committed to telling the truth because I grew up in a family that chose denial over truth. When I lost everything, all I had was the truth.

HE: Have you considered writing children’s books or young adult novels?

SF:  I love kids. I have two of my own. But I do not specialize in children’s books. I have written a children’s book called The Valentine Maker, currently being illustrated. I don’t intend to write books for young people. I write solo plays, plays, and musicals. I am currently working on a memoir called Oxy Mormon Memoirs that will be a good 500 pages. It is to be released around the time Mormon Boy Trilogy opens off-Broadway in 2016.

HE: Steven, your one-liners are little masterpieces, including your entertaining alliterations. Examples: “Mitt lost, but the Mormon monolith won!” or “Brokeback Mormon.” How did your command of language develop?

SF:  Thank you. To survive the hard times I’ve had to learn to look at the humor in things. In graduate school. I read a lot of Shakespeare. Even his villains are funny and charming.

HE: One of your most moving reviews comes from music critic David Clark, describing your songs: “‘The Bishop’ is a raw, emotional, and extremely powerful track. It touches the hearts of the listeners on several different levels, as Steven Fales exposes us to his 9-year-old self, singing at his cousin Joshua’s funeral, while he recounts his disappointment with the Bishop for not knowing his name. In these heavy and pristinely moving moments, we experience Steven Fales’ search for comfort when he was reaching out to church in his times of great need.” Where are your greatest needs now? What would you need to feel deeply fulfilled as a playwright, a performer, and as a mensch?

SF:  After the Mormon Boy Trilogy opens off-Broadway in 2016 with the book Oxy-Mormon Memoirs and the documentary film Mormon Boy, I will start to let this Mormon Boy phase of my career go. There will be lots of time for more projects and to settle down with a partner. For now, I’m on a mission.

HE: Is there anything else you would like to share?

SF:  Confessions is the story of how I first learned to stop being a victim. I got from one Mormon Boy extreme to a Rent Boy extreme and found a middle ground. The show is about finding moderation. I may no longer be a Latter-day Saint, but something about me will always be Mormon.

Did you know that the Mormon Church is buying up prime downtown Philly real-estate and developing it just like they did recently with their brand new $3 billion dollar complex in downtown Salt Lake? The Mormon Moment is far from over. I’m coming to Philly to help you see through it—and how to live with it.

I can be reached at fales.steven@gmail.com or on https://www.facebook.com/Fales.Steven.

CONFESSIONS OF A MORMON BOY runs August 20-23, 2014, at the Adrienne Theatre (2030 Sansom Street), as part of GayFest! 2014; quinceproductions.com.

Originally published by the Phindie, August 12, 2014.

This poem was originally published by Phindie on August 12, 2014.

Robert Patrick was born into a poor migrant worker’s family in Texas in 1937. As a teenager, he wrote a novel about Tab Hunter and a screenplay for him and John Gielgud. In 1961, Patrick ended up in Greenwich Village's Caffe Cino, which turned out to be the first Off-Off-Broadway theater. Patrick stayed at the Cino until it closed in 1967, becoming a driving force in the OOB movement with over 300 productions of his plays in New York alone. In 1972, the Samuel French script company called Patrick New York's most-produced playwright.

Henrik Eger: Tell us about the first major gay plays in the U.S. 

Robert Patrick: My play, The Haunted Host (1964), was preceded by Lanford Wilson's The Madness of Lady Bright by seven months at the Caffe Cino, although Lanford and I, who were roommates, were writing the two plays at the same time.

We were not consciously or programmatically creating gay theater. The freedom Joe Cino gave to playwrights just happened to give us the courage to write what was on our minds.

HE: What shaped you the most as a writer during those early days?

RP: I was already writing poetry day and night. I love wordplay, euphony and discord, the revelation of character, relationships, and inner life through what is said on the surface, and that eerie intersection of comedy and tragedy. I always tell directors that all my plays are musicals, and that whether the play is serious or humorous, their watchword to the actors should be, "Louder! Faster! Funnier!"

Even so serious a scene as that in my Judas, where Pontius Pilate tries to talk Jesus out of being crucified, is peppered with moments when paradoxes break the audience's tension with laughter.

The Caffe Cino writers en masse were influential on me as they made me realize it was possible to do as they did: go home, have a fantasy, write it down, bring it in, and get it up onstage for people to enjoy. But my tastes had been formed by my reading and movie-going long before I found the Cino.

HE: Edward Albee wrote, "Years ago, there were many serious and daring individuals in Greenwich Village under 30, as well as young playwrights, myself included. It was a wild and vital time."

RP: The 1960s in New York were the greatest time and place in history to be young. Jobs were abundant, rents were cheap, we had all had our minds broadened by paperbacks, and most of us had had some time in college where, even if the curricula were narrow, the libraries offered self-education galore.

The Beats had paved the way, what I call "The Other Brick Road," and tens of thousands of us came tripping down it, determined to live freely, and express ourselves unstintingly. We were not very political by today's or the 1930s' standards. Our main crusade was emotional, intellectual, and sexual self-liberation.

HE: How did American theater critics treat you and your work after your breakthrough with Kennedy’s Children in London?

RP: The English critics twitted the New York critics for having failed to discover me. They had their revenge on Kennedy's Children. A Times interviewer confided to me that he had been ordered to make me look like an idiot. Tennessee Williams, trying to plug the play on talk shows, was told that he could not, but sneaked in a plug on one show anyway. No Broadway producer would so much as accept a script of a new play from me to read.

HE: One day in 1990, you were carrying a sofa down Second Avenue. It started to rain, the sofa became heavier and heavier, and no one came to help. At that moment, New York City, like the sofa, became too much to bear and you left for L.A. Do you regret that decision?

RP: The theater world I adored had largely vanished. My fame had dissipated, and my money had disappeared, because I foolishly divested myself of all my Samuel French plays — including Kennedy's Children — in 1980 to get out of a relationship with an agent whose mind was going. I was doing shows only so I could sleep in the lighting-booths of theaters. I was effectively a homeless beggar — though simultaneously I was getting honors for doing Blue Is for Boys, the first play about gay teenagers.

HE: You once gave this powerful overview of the Off-Off Broadway scene: “Never before in the history of the world had there been a theater with no repression. At the Caffe Cino, theater entered the modern era.” Do you see a similar spirit of renewal in the theater world in our own time?

RP: I've been lucky enough in L.A. to stumble into a wonderful world of gay performance artists whose activities are centered in Silver Lake. Their monumental productivity, creativity, audacity, and originality are very like the Cino.

Otherwise, most of what I see and hear is depressing. There are virtually no theaters which just give the kids a floor and say, "Do what you have to do" as Joe Cino and Ellen Stewart of La MaMa did. Most theaters are rentals; most shows are staged readings, instead of productions. There's virtually no theater press here, and yet there seems no end of playwrights.

People here are always announcing yet another competition for stand-up cold readings of ten-minute plays. Sometimes, I think the ten-minute festivals are popular only because they allow a theater to say to the grant people, "See, we serviced 150 playwrights last year!"

HE: Given the many remarkable things that you’ve done in your life, is there anything you have not done, but would like to experience?

RP: True love. And I would like to have the money to build or buy a theater in L.A. with enough ground space that I could call it Robert Patrick’s Free Parking Theater, because in L.A., the theater would fill up for every performance, no matter what show was on, just because of the magic words "free parking." Then I could do whatever plays I liked.

Originally published by the Broad Street Review, August 10, 2014.

Robert Patrick, born into a migrant worker’s family in 1937, wrote many plays, songs, poems and stories. According to the Samuel French script company, he was the most produced playwright in New York City in the 1970s. His two most famous plays are The Haunted Host (featured in this year’s GayFest! and opening August 8th) and Kennedy’s Children. He currently lives in L.A. and earns a living writing porn reviews. 

Henrik Eger: Your parents, migrant workers in Texas, moved around constantly. You never completed a year of school until your high school senior year.

Robert Patrick: The only constant thread in my childhood was the movies, magazines, records, and radio shows, which were the same wherever we moved. When we hit towns that had libraries, I discovered books as well. 

HE: Did any people with fundamentalist religious beliefs ever attack you for your atheism? 

RP: The only religious attack I can recall was when my stepfather, for what he called “blasphemy,” broke my nose with a cast-iron crucifix. I was in my early twenties. I fled but had nowhere to go, so I secretly sneaked back in and slept in my closet for a few days. 

HE: Eventually, you found your way to the Caffe Cino, the birthing place of Off-Off-Broadway, gay and fringe theater—a cultural community in New York’s Greenwich Village during the 1960s.  It attracted visitors from all over the world and spawned similar incarnations in other countries. How did that period impact everyone’s emerging creative life at the Cino?

RP: Joe [Cino] was as swept up in the fantastic currents of creation as we all were, as our audiences were, too. All of us, at the start even Joe, were working day jobs in offices and then coming down to Cornelia Street where we were stars, artists, bohemians, conspirators, companions, astonishing ourselves with our invention and our epic exertions. 

All of us always had a show in the works, sometimes two shows, three, five, as more and more places opened. Joe called us his “Rockettes.”

HE: At that time, did you ever think that you would become a playwright?

RP: I had no idea that I was going to write more plays, or I would have chosen a more resounding pen-name, like Dominic Tamerlane.

HE: In 1964, you wrote Haunted Host, one of America’s oldest gay plays. Is it still relevant today? 

RP: I recently saw an excellent 50th anniversary production of the play in the Desert Rose Playhouse in Palm Springs. To my delight, it works as well as ever. Many in the audience remarked on how un-dated it is.

HE: Two years after Haunted Host, you wrote the first known nude play, Camera Obscura. 

RP: I was doing a play across town and didn’t see the first nude weekend of Camera Obscura, and alas, there are no photos. A nude Canadian production was closed, inspiring a newspaper cartoon of the cast being thrown out of the theatrical Garden of Eden by a judge with a flaming sword.

HE: As a member of the Caffe Cino, what was your vision for the future of theater? 

RP: I wanted it to stay as it was then forever. I had found my heart’s home. I worked days and lived nights. Success, drugs, and money came and took it all away.

HE: A number of years after the Kennedy assassination you went to Phebe’s Bar in the Village and saw friends of yours sitting in dark booths, gloomy and morose. You saw the bartender click through the T.V. channels. That became the inspiration for your play, Kennedy’s Children, which was to become famous. How did you go about writing it? 

RP: Kennedy’s Children was the only play I ever labored over. Usually, I get an idea, write it, and look for a theater. I actually wrote the five characters’ speeches separately and then arranged them and revised them for resonance and empathy. I also wrote my best play, Judas, the same week.

HE: In spite of your success with Kennedy’s Children, produced on Broadway, you did not relate to the mainstream theater.

RP: All the successful people I met were obsessed with themselves and their careers and seemed startlingly insecure. It was not an exciting crowd, compared to the marvelous, dedicated people at the Cino.

HE: Apparently you’ve stopped writing plays since 1990. Was this a dark time in your life, or had your focus shifted? 

RP: My wells of creativity have been doing just fine all along, thank you. I did two years of ghosting for young TV writers. I have a number of unproduced plays, three screenplays, literally hundreds of pornographic poems, many, many songs, and an enormous autobiography. 

HE: Your life would make a great movie. You also are the keeper of the Caffe Cino flame and the liberation it brought to theater. 

RP: Yes, I have sparked a revival of interest and respect for the Caffe Cino’s role in world theater history with my online Caffe Cino pages. And I am occasionally allowed to give my illustrated lecture on “Caffe Cino: Birthplace of Gay Theatre.”

HE: Your plays blend the comic and satirical with the serious and tragic.  

RP: To me there is no profound distinction between comedy and tragedy.

HE: What do you think your life would have been like without Caffe Cino? 

RP: I would have returned to Santa Fe or Roswell and might have wound up a suicide, or I might have started a little theater. Either would have been equally likely

HE: What does your life actually look like these days? 

RP: I [walk] 60 blocks a day. It’s easy—I just have elaborate sexual fantasies all the way.  Aside from endless nerve-frazzling worry about the rent—every five minutes I shudder at the thought of living on the streets—I’m a happy man. 

HE: Robert Patrick, is there anything else you would like the world to know?

RP: Someday we will all be dead and these buildings dust, and in their ruins mutated omnivores will grub for sustenance among the orchids growing on our graves, so let us not make so much fuss about our petty differences. Just quit having babies and let us all enjoy the multitude of blessings this world could offer us as we slowly become extinct.

HE: Bob, you’re still alive and kicking!

RP: My motto has always been, “What doesn’t kill me makes a great story later.”

Originally published by the Phindie, August 5, 2014.

You step off the tour bus, the smell of exhaust replaced first with fresh air, then with the sugary smell of grapes. You sit around a bar with a wine glass that gets filled every minute or so. You and your fellow travelers and tasters swirl around a sip of Chardonnay or Riesling, ponder over it for a few seconds and then, guided by the sommelier behind the bar, you scribble down the rating of your first drink, 1–10, and perhaps add a comment or two on the little notepad the winery provided. Your glass gets filled with another half an inch of wine, and you’re given a piece of bread to cleanse your palate before the next liquid surprise comes up for both enjoyment and judgment.

At the end of the first round, the sommelier asks you which wines you like the most. You start round two, feeling relaxed and a little flush. In the wine cellar you are offered a wide range, from sweet to dry. You like half of them, and after another set or two of tasting and Italian bread, you make your final decision. This process continues until you are ready to buy your favorites. You and all the other happy tourists leave the winery, good and tight, wobbling back onto the bus, with a case of your favorite wines.

You are reminded of that wine tasting when you enter the standing room only InterAct Theatre for the second annual One Minute Play Festival. For the price of $20 you are provided with 90 different wines—and one big beautiful surprise at the end.

The festival, stylized as #1MPF, is hosted by InterAct’s artistic director Seth Rozin and conceptualized by Dominic D’Andrea—creator of the over 20 plus city festival series, spanning the U.S from New York to Los Angeles, and from Anchorage to Miami.  The plays are broken into ten “clumps” of nine plays each, directed by a range of Philadelphia area directors, including, Nick Anselmo, Tina Brock, John Doyle, Mike Durkin, David O’Connor, and Daniel Student. This tasting could not exist without dozens of great and enthusiastic actors of all ages, experiences, and backgrounds.

The performance includes wines fermented from the minds of P. Seth Baur, James Christy, Jacqueline Goldfinger, Michael Hollinger, Ken Kaissar, David Robson, and Walt Vail. You are also served samples from many other fine winemakers who present drinks made of, pears, peaches, and plums. The wines range from sweet and funny to dry and serious—even the occasional sparkling wine is served.

The plays pour out of the InterAct bottle faster and more relentlessly than any wine tasting you have ever experienced. Unfortunately, no announcement is given about  any of the plays you are about to see and, as a result, you squint and strain under the low lights to see which play by which playwright is listed next on your 90-title-extra-small-print-one-page handout.

In the beginning you might try to mark your favorite wines, but soon you are swept away by the flood of stimulating and at times terrifying offerings. After two hours, you may remember a handful of vignettes that manage to arrest and sober, for example: Carjacked by Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, where a would-be thief learns he cannot escape the maternal instinct of the car-owner, or Checklist by Renee Lucas Wayne where, in just 60 seconds, two mothers, one black one white, teach their sons how to drive. The juxtaposition is almost unbearable. Here the audience, used to laughter throughout the evening, almost chokes on silence.

After almost two hours the evening ends. You are drunk on excitement, face flush and hands raw from applause. Your head spins from having tasted 90 different one-minute plays. You stumble into the night, at the end of it all, not entirely sure what you have seen, not remembering everything so clearly, your mind hazy, you’re left not with a distinct appreciation for dozens of Philly playwrights, but a feeling that theatre in Philadelphia is not slapping the bag but rather popping the cork in celebration of its many vintages of diversity and creative spirits. [Adrienne Theater, 2030 Sansom Street] August 3-5, 2014, interacttheatre.org.

EXTRA: Recording of this year’s festival was just made available. More archived video recordings from previous #1MPFs across the country, as well as many other theatre-related videos, are available online here.

HENRIK EGER

Originally published by Phindie, August 4, 2014.