vip in the city

Napalm & Cheerios

The terraNOVA Collective is comprised of writers, actors, directors, designers, musicians, poets, dancers and visual artists, whose mission it is to support and develop original theatrical works. The collective hosts a weekly developmental lab where writers submit scripts of plays or solo shows in progress for a readthrough to solicit feedback from terraNOVA members. Scripts are chosen to advance to the next level of development: a ten day rehearsal period and public staged reading. One play from the selected readings receives a full-fledged stage production. In fact, every production terraNOVA mounts emerges from these so-titled Groundbreakers Sessions, as do many of the solo shows presented in terraNOVA’s annual Solo Arts Festival — now in its fourth year.

Tonight, the final developmental staged reading of a Napalm & Cheerios, a new work by R.A. Carlsen. Carlsen lives in New York City and works for the NYC Board of Education as an elementary school special education teacher. His first play, Patpong Street, about a father-teenage son trip to Bangkok, won the John Golden Playwriting Award from Hunter College, and as did his second, The Word of God, about a retired missionary who moves in with her brother and sister. This latest play arose from his Theater Arts master’s thesis at Hunter.

The story follows three generations of women (a hippie heroin addict, her God-fearing, suburban mother, and her love child), in two segments; the first half of the story is set a quarter-century after the second. I liked the unconventional, reversed framing of time, which offered a perspective one almost never gets in real life: What combination of decisions, large and small, brings us to where we are today? Is it impossible to escape the influence of our mothers — for better or worse?

Center Stage is located on the fourth floor of a mixed use building on West 21st Street that also houses Gotham City Improv, the school and sister company of the famed Los Angeles-based comedy improv troupe, The Groundlings. Perhaps conveniently, given the unfortunate compulsions of some comedians, the building also houses the New York offices of Cocaine Anonymous.

On the second floor, the Natural Gourmet School hosts a weekly dinner where chef instructors and students of the Chef’s Training Program prepare a prix fixe four-course vegetarian dinner on Friday nights — $34.00 per person, BYOB. (Similar, I suppose, to the set-up at The French Culinary Institute’s L’Ecole.)

There are 2 Comments ... Napalm & Cheerios

Qsoz
April 15, 2007

I think ICE also serves lunch/dinner during a break in all their cooking classes.

vipnyc
April 15, 2007

I’ve long wanted to check out the CIA in Hyde Park.

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