Thinking Theater NYC

A Small Handful Conceived and directed by Jim Petosa Presented by PTP/NYC via streaming August 13-17, 2021 Paula Langton. Courtesy DARR Publicity A Small Handful is the final of three online productions in what PTP/NYC (Potomac Theatre Project) is calling its Season 34 ½. This filmed piece presents a trio of poems by Anne Sexton, a pillar of 20th-century American poetry who struggled with her mental health and died by suicide in 1974. Each of the three poems is spoken and then sung, providing distinct but complementary experiences of Sexton's words. Running under half an hour, A Small Handful is free, but reservations are required and can be made at Home | PTP/NYC (ptpnyc.org) . Donations in support of the company are of course welcomed. The poems performed come from the earliest and latest of Sexton's published volumes, beginning with "Where It Was At Back Then," from the posthumous 45 Mercy Street (1976); then reaching back to "Music Swims Back to Me," ...

  Far Away Written by Caryl Churchill Directed by Cheryl Faraone Presented by PTP/NYC via YouTube October 15-18, 2020 Nesba Crenshaw (Harper), Ro Boddie (Todd), and Caitlin Duffy (Joan)  PTP/NYC (Potomac Theatre Project), in association with Middlebury College, has been presenting its thirty-fourth season virtually, and Caryl Churchill's 2000 play Far Away concludes this season. These performances, presented via PTP/NYC's YouTube channel , have been free, but not only are any donations welcomed by PTP/NYC but 10% of all donations benefit the National Black Theatre, the oldest continuously-operated Black theater in New York City. Assured and entertaining, PTP/NYC's production of Churchill's absurdist indictment of human violence, oppression, and tribalism feels powerfully relevant to our present moment. The play opens with a close-up of an eye, then eyes, suggesting the themes of witnessing, secrecy, and perspective to follow. Far Away , which comes in at under an hou...

Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth Written by Tom Stoppard Directed by Cheryl Faraone Presented by  PTP/NYC  at  Atlantic Stage 2 330 W. 16th St., Manhattan, NYC July 9-August 4, 2019 Matthew Ball. Photo credit: Stan Barouh. One semester, a college where one of us was working held a meeting in which a student demonstrated to the campus writing tutors how to make an origami crane. The catch was that the student spoke only in Japanese, and the intention was for the table full of people with advanced degrees in English to feel what it was like for the English Language Learners with whom they worked. A similar feeling of linguistic dislocation befalls delivery driver Easy (Matthew Ball)—along with the audience—in the first half of Tom Stoppard's two-in-one play Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth as his attempt to deliver some "blocks 'an that" is complicated by everyone else speaking only a language called "Dogg," made up of English...

Havel: The Passion of Thought Works written by Harold Pinter, Václav Havel, and Samuel Beckett Directed by Richard Romagnoli Presented by PTP/NYC at Atlantic Stage 2 330 W. 16th St., Manhattan, NYC July 9-August 4, 2019 Madeleine Ciocci, David Barlow, and Emily Ballou. Photo credit: Stan Barouh Authoritarianism is having something of a global renaissance these days. That dispiriting fact makes this a fitting time for PTP/NYC's staging of a trio of works by Václav Havel (1936-2011). Havel was a Czech dissident, writer, and repeated political prisoner during communist rule in his native country, and, after 1989's demonstration-fueled Velvet Revolution brought an end to the totalitarian government, Havel served as the final President of Czechoslovakia (1989-1992) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993-2003). With Havel: The Passion of Thought , PTP (Potomac Theatre Project, associated with Vermont's Middlebury College) fruitfully frames three of H...