Archive: Arts & Entertainment

Coming next to the Kitchen Theatre Company main stage: four solo performances in three weeks! NYC actor/writer/producer Lorraine Rodriguez-Reyes kicks off the Solo Play Festival with Mami Confessions, followed by Darian Dauchan's new play Black Sheep. The final week features two pieces: Michelle Courtney Berry's Mother Land and Ryan Hope Travis's June 16. The festival runs from March 25 to April 12.

Kitchen Theatre Company has championed the work of solo writer/performers for more than a decade. These uncensored, outside-the-box performers, ranging from Tim Miller (one of the "NEA Four," famous for performing in the nude) to Haitian-American feminist poet provocateur Lenelle Moise, to the politically charged one-man-rant specialist Brian Dykstra, have brought the houses down with one-of-a-kind unforgettable evenings.

"Solo performance," says Kitchen Theatre Company Artistic Director Rachel Lampert, "is like nothing else one experiences in the theater. The immediacy of hearing a personal narrative in the intimacy of Kitchen Theatre Company's 99-seat space is stunning. These writer/performers inhabit their work with directness and honesty, stripping down the act of making theater to its bare essence. We have assembled an extraordinary group of writer/performers with stories that open hearts, stimulate minds and lift spirits. I encourage everyone to spend one a day a week at the Kitchen through the duration of the Festival and not miss seeing all three evenings, because each is a gem of storytelling by masterful performers."

The first week of the festival will feature the work of a Kitchen Theatre Company newcomer, Lorraine Rodriguez-Reyes. Her play, Mami Confessions, tells 'true stories of Mamihood, from the Dolor-itos to the Faja-bulous' collected after the birth of her first child. Rodriguez-Reyes, who received her MFA from Harvard's American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.)/Moscow Art Theatre Institute For Advanced Theatre Training, has appeared Off-Broadway and in regional theaters as well as on television (The Sopranos, What Would You Do?, Cookin' in Brooklyn and others).

Week two of the festival will feature Black Sheep by Darian Dauchan, known to Kitchen Theatre Company audiences for two solo pieces he wrote and performed on the Kitchen Counter Culture series (Entertainers Eulogy and Media Madness) as well as his acting roles in two popular Main Stage plays, The Brothers Size and The Whipping Man. Dauchan is an award winning solo performer, actor, and poet who has appeared on Broadway and Off-Broadway in addition to many television and film credits. His Death Boogie, A Hip Hop Poetry Musical, was the 2012 winner of two Edinburgh Fringe Festival Musical Theatre Matters Awards for BEST New Music and BEST Innovation of a Musical.

Week three of the festival highlights two Upstate New York performers, Michelle Courtney Berry and Ryan Hope Travis. Berry and Travis are sharing an evening. Mother Land, by Michelle Courtney Berry, is a richly-sewn quilt of stories and hilarious tales from her new memoir, Horizontal Parenting. It features such life-altering events as interracial marriage, motherhood, elder care, a recent trip to Africa, and everything else in between. Michelle Courtney Berry has performed two solo plays at the Kitchen in the past, both of which were sold out successes. Berry is in demand as a speaker and performer; other performances have included opening for talks by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Dorothy Cotton, Mos Def, Amiri Baraka, Howard Zinn, and Dr. Maya Angelou. June 16, by Ryan Hope Travis, looks at the phenomenon of single-parent formation in the African American community. Derived from interviews with nine fathers, June 16 is a journey of absence and hope. Travis played the part of Steven in Slashes of Light, the very popular closing production of Kitchen Theatre Company's 23rd season.

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