Standing on Ceremony

STANDING ON CEREMONY: THE GAY MARRIAGE PLAYS (Quince), GayFest! 2014.

“What’s really interesting to me is that in just a few years since “Standing on Ceremony” came out, some of the pieces are already ‘period pieces.’ There is, for instance, one piece about two women flying from California to Iowa because marriage is legal in Iowa but not California (it was while Proposition 8 was still making its way through the courts). And the two women are saying things like, ‘Can you believe we live in California and have to fly to Iowa to get married?’ Well that, of course, is no longer the case. So in a way it’s a primer on recent history and an indication of how quickly things change!”

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Robert Patrick, image by Andrew Adam Caldwell

“What doesn’t kill me makes a great story later”: Interview with Robert Patrick on the birth of Off-Off-Broadway and 50 years of gay theater in America

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 Haunted Host and Kennedy’s Children. He currently lives in L.A. and earns a living writing porn reviews.

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Daniel Talbott

Playwright on Playwright: Two charming people interview one another

Daniel Talbott (You Know My Name: A Daniel Talbott Trio) and Kathleen Warnock (Some Are People), two of the playwrights with work in this year’s GayFest!, happen to be old friends and professional colleagues. These two unique personalities interview each other about their participation in Quince Productions’ festival, their writing habits, and a slew of other topics from desserts to dreams.

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Quince Productions’ GayFest! kicks off with HEAD OVER HEELS

Philadelphia’s first and largest LGBTQ theater festival, GayFest! by Quince Productions, returns this August 5-23 to Plays and Players Skinner Studio. Opening this year’s festival is the The Bang Group’s HEAD OVER HEELS, a high energy mix of concert dance, slapstick, and musical theater in a cabaret setting. Artistic director and choreographer David Parker took time with me to offer some insights into the dance and his New York City dance ensemble’s interests in creating the piece.

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Full House 2014 - Michael L Medvidik

Full House (Quince): You deserve a cabaret!

Downtown theater company Quince Productions – the punchy, LGBTQ-leaning bunch that puts on GayFest! every August – opens their sixth annual Full House cabaret series this Thursday in its ancestral home, the Red Room at the Society Hill Playhouse, and it’s looking as wicked, delightful and boozy as ever. (Boozy because your ticket includes the price of a drink.)

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THREE DAYS OF RAIN (Quince Productions): 60-second review

It’s 1995, siblings Walker (Mark Sherlock) and Nan (Jessica Snow) meet at a run-down Manhattan loft after the death of their star-architect father. Peripatetic Walker has just returned from his latest escapist foreign jaunt and is obsessed by a new find: the journal of his taciturn father. Maybe this will will reveal the inner soul of this silentious man?

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Photo by John Donges

John Donges Photographs THREE DAYS OF RAIN (Quince): A Double Assignment

In shooting Richard Greenberg’s THREE DAYS OF RAIN, my first photographic challenge was to capture the unique structure of the play: the first act is set in 1995 and involves a brother/sister and their old friend – the son of their father’s architecture partner and oldest friend. In Act II, the three actors play the parents of their Act I characters. So it was a dual challenge to photograph basically two casts instead of one, and to try and paint a visual portrait of what is both similar and different between each character and his/her parent, and to portray the look of two very different decades.

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