From his early teens to his death in 1972 at the age of 69, the artist stayed firmly tied to a home in Queens he shared with his mother and invalid brother.

When Cornell ventured out, it was chiefly to rummage for any number of objects that he would use back home to create the assemblages that made him famous -- each contained in a little box with a glass front.

As art critic Robert Hughes writes, "that glass, the 'fourth wall' of his miniature theater, is also the diaphragm between two contrasting worlds. Outside, chaos, accident, and libido, the stuff of unprotected life; inside, sublimation, memory, and peace."

In his 2006 play "Hotel Cassiopeia," currently onstage at Single Carrot Theatre, Charles Mee opened an imaginative window into those boxes by ...

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Categories: Drama Queens, Single Carrot Theatre
        

The latest proof: Center Stage will present free public readings of two Martin McDonagh plays featuring members of Everyman Theatre and Single Carrot Theatre and other local actors.

How's that for collaboration within the arts community? Pretty cool.

The project provides a neat way for Center Stage to promote its production of one of McDonagh's "A Skull in Connemara," which opens next week.

The readings will focus on ...

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Categories: Center Stage, Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre, Single Carrot Theatre
        

It’s not easy being a kid, especially a gay kid stuck on a chicken farm, yearning for the big shopping malls just a few miles away. It’s not easy being a chicken, either, especially when processing day is never far off.

Out of those truths comes “MilkMilkLemonade,” a dark, uneven comedy about sexual and philosophical awakening.

This recent work by Joshua Conkel is being served up in energetic, if not entirely satisfying, fashion by Single Carrot Theatre.

In a fairly compact span of 75 minutes, Conkel sprinkles all sorts of issues, along with the chicken feed, on a slender tale surrounding 11-year-old Emory.

The boy is perfectly comfortable with his doll, a budding libido, and a passion for show biz. He takes particular pleasure in his best friend, Linda, who happens to be a giant, talking chicken.

Then there’s Nana, Emory’s chicken-raising grandmother. She appears to be hanging onto life just long enough to make sure that, somehow, Emory can go sexually straight before he gets any older.

Praying away the gay isn’t going to get her far, so Nana enlists an ally in this quest, a neighborhood kid, Elliot, to bully some sense into Emory.

But Elliot slides between butch nastiness and an urge to play house with Emory — not in a naïve way. And Elliot’s got some other problems, namely an evil twin, who, parasitically, lives in the boy’s thigh.

Helping guide the audience through all of this is a narrator who also gets to portray the parasite and one big, hungry spider.

Emory is too young, too innocent (well, sort of), to fear anything about life beyond the farm. He just knows he wants to ...

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Categories: Drama Queens, Single Carrot Theatre
        

Mortality is such a downer.

No wonder many of us live in a perpetual state of denial about death, which is the approach of a young woman given nine months to live at the start of "Linus and Alora," the recent Andrew Irons play running through July 10 at Single Carrot Theatre.

Alora takes it one step farther than denial, actually, all the way into fantasy land. Not a bad way to go.

Gradually and sometimes painfully, husband Linus agrees to join her there. In the process, he doesn't just humor Alora, but also finds a way to confront his own, long-suppressed issues about death.

Irons has approached a topic all too familiar from disease-movies-of-the-week and given it enough freshness, enough surprise to create quite an absorbing experience. "Linus and Alora" -- am I the only one who thinks that's an ineffectual title? -- makes a snug fit for the avant-garde-friendly Single Carrot troupe, which brings vibrant acting and stagecraft to the material.

The production, directed by Genevieve de Mahy, has ...

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Posted by Tim Smith at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Drama Queens, Single Carrot Theatre
        

Baltimore's homicide rate may have fallen, but, as in any city, it could never be low enough.

Each year, Single Carrot Theatre offers a live reading of "Murder Ink," the weekly column by the City Paper's Anna Ditkoff. The presentation is a way of humanizing the statistics.

As the theater company's press release puts it, "There’s no pretending that reading about these desperate, often [grisly] crimes will bring back any of the victims, but it does bring a little perspective to what is clearly an epidemic."

The fourth annual "Murder Ink" reading by members of the Single Carrot ensemble and the public will be at 7 p.m. Wednesday outside in front of the theater at 120 W. North Ave. It's free, and hot beverages will be served.

PHOTO COURTESY OF SINGLE CARROT THEATRE

Posted by Tim Smith at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Drama Queens, Single Carrot Theatre