The cast has been finalized for this month's D3C event:
Sean Meehan as Sean Ballard Matthew Ferretti as Pat Ballard Charle Everett as Bobby Shannon Jennifer Skura as Mary Conry Carol LoPorto as Kathleen Conry
With special guest musician, Ridley Parson.
Absolute Beginners is a never-before-seen play about violence as family tradition and self-destruction as cultural heritage.
It's about New York Irish Gangster in the mid-80's and siblings who take very different paths toward redemption.
Dialogue with Three Chords 8pm.
Downstairs at Mr. Dennehy's Irish Pub 63 Carmine Street, NYC
The D3C Playlist: What we're listening to this week.
I'm revisiting Avail right now, a 90's band that fit neatly into the Punk Rock/Positive Hardcore sound pioneered by bands like 7 Seconds and Gorilla Biscuits. No dogma, just honest, heartfelt lyrics for us kids who missed the first (and second wave) of Hardcore but still felt earnest, dammit.
Their first two albums, Satiate and Dixie, didn't leave my stereo for two solid years. Their songs absolutely raged and swung: aggressive post punk guitars (the bass line that begins Bob's Crew is an obvious nod to Public Image Limited) mixed with a heavy crunch, the clear but slightly hoarse vocals, and goddamn, the build-ups and breakdowns just demanded you move. Try and sit still during Connection.
I was lucky enough to see Avail tour to support Dixie, and what made it even more amazing was that they were on a bill with two of my other favorite 90's Punk Bands: Rancid and The Queers. It was during NYC's CMJ fest, so I remember standing on a ridiculously long line outside of The Wetlands (a long defunct venue) while journalists, insiders, and people way hipper than I'll ever be filed in before us. (Much to the grumbling of the skinheads and guys in Poison Idea shirts ahead of us.)
The Queers opened and were great, and, in fact, are probably one of the only bands to pull off the "we sound just like the Ramones" shtick with anything approaching style and good humor, but when Avail hit the (too damn small) stage, it was the first time I felt like I was in an audience that functioned as a unit, that sang and danced as one. A feeling that has only been replicated for me two or three times since then.
Satiate was a blast of catchy Punk Rock, but Dixie was more aggressive, musically complex, and dealt, lyrically, with issues that not many Hardcore bands touched on, notably, body image:
As an alienated Punk , already uncomfortable in his own skin, that song resonated with me, so much so, that I bought one of their t-shirts. A bold move for a fat kid, since the only shirts they had were white.
Of course, I never wore it, too damn self conscious, so instead, I cut off the front image, and pinned it onto the back of my jacket, after carefully lettering these lyrics from Model onto it:
Big is a scar; you'd better get thin; the tanner you are, the more you fit in
Bullshit! You've got a disease. You follow the trends like the rest of the sheep!
Defiant enough, I felt.
Energized by that experience, I returned to my teenage dream of fronting a band. I wrote a bunch of lyrics that, looking back, weren't completelyembarrassing, booked some studio time, and screamed my lungs out for a couple of years in the mid-90's. Nothing came of it, but it was an action at a time when every single thing in my life demanded I "sit down and shut the fuck up."
Punk and Hardcore taught me to be contrary, as Crass so brilliantly put it, "Punk was once an answer to years of crap, a way of saying 'No!', when we'd always said 'Yes.'", but it also taught me to think bigger and broader and that there was a network of kids out there feeling the same way, and at the time, they all wanted to create something too, to find direction. There were scenes, of course, and dogma crept in, but the central maxim at the root of it all was: "Yeah, you can be a part of something, but isn't it better to start something?"
Two brothers bear witness to the end of a bloody family tradition as their neighborhood slowly becomes unrecognizable.
This new play by Stephen Gracia is set in the Hell's Kitchen of 1983. The Westies are falling apart, gentrification is coming on quick, and there's a dead body in the bathtub that someone needs to atone for.
Join us on August 25th at Mr. Dennehy's Irish Pub, 63 Carmine Street for this never before seen staged reading.
The piece that opens this Thursday's D3C, "Tiny Hooks", was written to solve a problem.
The four plays that comprise the inaugural night of D3C are part of a slightly larger collection, currently titled "We Lose Our Place & Begin Again", and the first play in this collection ends with the stage covered in thick, gray dust. This, of course. makes staging these plays difficult. "Tiny Hooks" was one the first plays I've ever written with a specific goal in mind: to get the stage cleaned up. It begins:
Setting: A stage covered with dust.
Two chairs tipped over and laying on the floor.
Emily enters
She has a blue-tooth headset in.
She begins sweeping up the dust and speaking into the headset.
Simple enough, really, the actors in the previous piece leave their set behind: a table and two chairs, an ungodly amount of dust, and it's up to the next actor to set things right (or as close as possible) as she delivers a monologue on the nature and limits of mature love.
Thematically, it follows the piece before it, "We Find Our Own Level" (previously known as "Assfuck Brooklyn" for reasons of rebellious youth), in that it is tied to a very specific New York tragedy without directly addressing it. It's a part of the landscape. And in most plays, landscape and environment are characters themselves, but I like to think of them as characters the way Pinter-esque dread is its own character -- lingering just off-stage, psychologically weighing everyone down.
Now, the follow-up, the afterthought, the what-the-hell-are-we-going-to-do-about-all-that-dust fix, has become the starting point, and I get to see it stand on its own.
The first D3C will feature the acting talents of Matthew Ferretti, Dan Graff, Kendra Leigh Landon, TJ Lombardo, Sean Meehan, Ridley Parson, and Susanne Stewart.
Live music, before and after the performance will be provided by Tommy Lombardozzi.
