- OTHER MEDIA
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- review in the SF Bay Guardian March 8, 2006
- by Robert Avila
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- Eastenders Repertory Company has made one-act fests their subspecialty,
presenting ambitious programs annually under specific overarching themes.
This year's topic, sex, sustains itself over three night's worth of brief
but passionate work by the likes of Albee, Caryl Churchill, Lorca, and
Strindberg. Series B offers another newly discovered Tennessee Williams
work, And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens..., first staged in
2004, about a cultured New Orleans transvestite (Craig Souza) and her attempts
to engage the affections of a threateningly gruff, taciturn, cash-strapped
sailor (Ross Pasquale), while her gay tenants upstairs (Matthew Donohue,
Gene Mocsy) look down in mock wonder and some genuine concern. The piece
feels a bit one-note, even incomplete, when all is said and done, but Jeff
Thompson's steady direction and Souza's Candy Delaney — half relentless
optimist, half dyspeptic landlady slash queen bitch — help seal our
interest in this smartly composed, uncloseted Williams number. In Charles
E. Polly's rare US staging of Italian playwright-activist Dacia Maraini's
1978 work, Dialogue Between a Prostitute and Her Client, Pasquale returns
as a mommy-obsessed john to Sandra Weingart's politically conscious prostitute.
The power play between buyer and seller strips away much of the male persona
in the bargain, as Weingart interrupts the dialogue to query the audience
(particularly its men) on its ideas of sex. A dated feeling to Maraini's
feminist theater doesn't eliminate all interest or relevance in this piece,
solidly anchored by Weingart's defiant sex worker.
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