Although Mardi Gras and New York are not synonymous that is no reason not to celebrate the joyous event. Join one of New Orleans' beloved children as Blanche DuBois offers a little taste of the New Orleans every night (Thursday – Sunday) in her show Blanche Survives Katrina in a FEMA Trailer Named Desire now playing at the SoHo Playhouse. Celebrate with beads, Mardi Gras King Cake (the cakes with the little plastic baby Jesus inside) a nice sip of the potent "Hurricane" at the SoHo Playhouse's Huron Club before and after the show. Mardis Gras is February 24 and Blanche will kick-off the festivities the weekend before (2/19-2/23)
"I remember one Mardi Gras Day...the Zulus had already run rampant in our street, smashing their coconuts in the gutter - suffusing the New Orleanian air with an even more tropical stink than usually permeated it. Then Stanley staggered home drunk - no doubt from some Bourbon Street bordello - and demanded I bare my own...'coconuts'...in exchange for brightly colored plastic beads. As if a lady's sacred womanhood could be so cheaply bought! But...in a moment of Schnapps-induced weakness I succumbed to their purple, green, and golden charms! My dignity traded on the front porch for a few strands of translucent Taiwanese plastic... But what sweet music they made jangling from the doorknob ever after!" Blanche DuBois' Mardi Gras memory
Blanche Survives Katrina in a FEMA Trailer Named Desire has been called "…a thoughtful, laugh-out-loud story based on one film icon's descent into reality: hilarious, a little bit heartbreaking and really smart. Like all great comedy, it's funny because it's true—and even better because it's so absurd." Time Out NY, "… a loving tribute to a dazzling character and an unforgiving political commentary." Backstage, "Rosenthal, with a mixture of dark humor and pathos, captures well the woman who thinks she's too good to share this fate with so many…" nytheatre.com, "Funny and poignant… Deftly directed by Todd Parmley… a humorous yet bitterly sad meditation on the desperate conditions during a national disaster where government relief was inept at best, criminal at worst." offoffoff.com, "Brilliant script, cleverly crafted and surprisingly touching. Blanche Survives Katrina in a FEMA Trailer Desire is a one-man marvel courtesy of Mark
Sam Rosenthal. " HX.
Writer/Performer and a Mardi Gras scholar, Mark
Sam Rosenthal is a 7th generation Louisianan, the son of a former king and queen of a Baton Rouge Mardi Gras krewe. He is a comedic improviser trained with New York's renowned UprightCitizens Brigade, wades into the swamp of his Louisiana roots with a politically incorrect, gender-bending new solo show, Blanche Survives Katrina in a FEMA Trailer Named Desire.
Blanche Survives Katrina, an award winning production featured at the 2008 New York Int'l Fringe Festival, imagines that
Tennessee Williams' tragic heroine, Blanche DuBois, has neither aged nor left New Orleans. She was there when Katrina hit; she was sent to the Superdome; she was evacuated to Shreveport and entangled in the heartless bureaucracy of FEMA. She gets involved with drugs, is adopted by an Arizona megachurch, and is 'job-placed' at a Popeye's cash register – having for good reason been permanently barred from teaching young schoolboys. Hers is a refugee story whose politics and pathos you have read but never experienced through the eyes of the desperately deliberately fragile, alcoholic, codependent, sex-addicted Blanche DuBois – America's most broken woman™.
Rosenthal's idea for introducing Blanche DuBois into the aftermath of Katrina sprang from the images on the news of nameless evacuees arriving bewildered at the Superdome. "No one has ever arrived more famously bewildered and homeless in New Orleans than Blanche at the start of A Streetcar Named Desire," says Rosenthal. "I wanted to see what would happen if this delicate flower's story started over in a way, in the midst of this horrible hurricane mess. Dark humor was just about the only way I could deal with what was happening at home." He concludes, "And I love that even in the midst of unprecedented catastrophe, Blanche still sees herself as the biggest drama."
Comments
To post a comment, you must
register and
login.
