What I'm Watching: A Cold Night in Hell

Back by popular demand:  It seems friend Damian, the hot studly very informative bartender in Thursday's post of educational videos, is also an actor.  (Isn't everyone in LA?)  Here are three short plays he's done with a theater group out there, and apparently each one was written, produced, and performed in a single day.  The first one, especially, is sure to make you laugh out loud.  I did.  (But crank up the sound.)

The State of the South

It may come as a surprise to some folks that there's more to the South than pickup trucks, country music, and good old boys. The Alabama Shakespeare Festival, located in Montgomery, produced this thought-provoking video last fall as part of its Southern Writers Festival of New Plays.



Your Head Trucker attended some plays at the ASF when it was brand new, back in the 1980s, and can highly recommend its beautiful lakeside campus and innovative staging. I'm sorry to have to report, though, that the cheap seats were rather uncomfortable for a long-legged man: my knees were jammed against the back of the seat ahead of me all through each performance. (This seems to be a universal problem in modern theaters.)  Still, it was an enjoyable experience overall.

In case any of y'all will be touring through Alabama this year, the Festival's 47th season will include productions of Hamlet, As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, Saint Joan, Our Town, The Sound of Music, and Steel Magnolias, along with newer works by contemporary playwrights.

Corpus Christi: The Documentary

Corpus Christi is a play by Terrence McNally that reinterprets the Passion of Christ against the backdrop of McNally's own experience as a gay teen in the 1950's in deeply homophobic Corpus Christi, Texas.

The play was met with furious protests at its opening in New York in 1998, but lately a theater group called 108 Productions has been successfully touring with the play, and is making a documentary about it.

I've never seen the play, but would love to. Probably won't ever get the chance, since Texas is full of Bible-believing, gay-hating Christianists. Just last year, there was nearly a nuclear meltdown over in Stephenville when a college drama class attempted a performance in a student workshop on a Saturday morning - not even a public performance, mind you. But that was enough to create a major outbreak of full-tilt, off-the-rails, hang-em-high Pharisaism here, I tell you what.