Metropolitan Playhouse
The American Legacy
The American Legacy
"Theatrical
archaeologist extraordinaire" - - Back Stage
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Metropolitan Playhouse
The American Legacy "Theatrical
archaeologist extraordinaire" - - Back Stage
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 EAST SIDE STORIES, Back Again |
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| WHERE THE HEART IS Metropolitan sits in one of the most dynamic, diverse, and storied corners of Manhattan: New York’s East Village . The whole Lower East Side of the latter 19th century saw an Irish immigrant community cede to a population of Eastern European Jews, while the neighborhood right around Metropolitan was known as Kleinedeutschland, for its concentration of Germans. Through the 20th century grew Little Italy and Chinatown, to the south of the East Village’s. The East Village itself, with lower income development projects built in the mid-20th century, absorbed a new population with growing Hispanic immigration in the 1950’s and 60’s. Relatively far from the subway lines, neglected by the commercial and official city’s interests, the area also offered a relatively isolated haven for socially active, politically resistant, and culturally rebellious Bohemians of varied backgrounds. In the 20th century were the poets and jazz musicians in the 50’s, hippies in the 60’s, punk rockers and street artists in the 70’s and 80’s. It also supported both an active drug trade and a club culture that the city’s indifference allowed if not encouraged. In the 90’s, as real estate speculators finally took measure of undervalued acres on the shrinking Manhattan island, the neighborhood’s current era of gentrification began. And yet everywhere, in the architecture, the murals, the businesses, and the residents of each block, the eclectic culture of the neighborhood wonderfully and stubbornly endures. Its historic embrace of diverse newcomers, promotion of off-beat personalities, weaving of an informal community, and relatively unhurried pace all persist. Since 2003, Metropolitan has invited playwrights to honor the life of the East Village/Lower East Side, drawing inspiration from the true history, the ephemeral ethos, even the speculative future of the neighborhood. In this, our 14th series of East Side Stories, we feature four plays that embrace and celebrate this eccentric, multifaceted urban paradise we call home. COUNTING PEDESTALS by Carlos Jerome If a neighborhood with a long history and generations of diverse families can offer one thing to its youth, it is perspective. But while the opportunity for people of different backgrounds to learn from one another is there, so is it all too easy for members of one group to turn that opportunity down, sure that more separates than unites us. Only a perseverant mentor can reach some. In Carlos Jerome’s play, a community college student, focused on survival after a bid in prison, finds an unlikely bond with his mathematics professor. IRIOMOTE by Arlene Jaffe Real estate is the coin of Manhattan’s realm, and that of the East Village stamped with its cultural heritage. But in some ways, as the neighborhood has become both safer and more expensive, it has become a simulacrum of itself. New owners and businesses adopt and promote its “character” has absent its personality. As in tourist destinations around the world, attractions invite transformation, even destruction, by the volume of travelers and businesses that seek them out. That the site of the famous punk rock club CBGB’s is now a John Varvatos designer clothing store—featuring its own line of “CBGB” merchandise, vinyl records, and fine art prints—can hardly make the point more clearly. In Iriomote, Arlene Jaffe draws an unlikely and illuminating between the East Village and a natural paradise halfway around the world, as greed and ego threaten the survival of two irreplaceable communities. THE POOR DOOR by Leonard Goodisman A hallmark of the neighborhood has been its cultural inclusion. But where immigrants and artists have long intermingled, now come wealthy arrivals in converted tenements or new “luxury” buildings. The phenomenon of the “poor door”—a special entrance for subsidized lower income residents of a high rent building—received national attention in 2016. In New York, such divisions were quickly assailed by the language of this law: “Affordable units shall share the same common entrances and common areas as market rate units.” Elsewhere in the world, the concept has not been outlawed, and even in New York, the law applies only to buildings that had received city tax breaks for including affordable housing. If the poor door has never, or yet, arrived in the Lower East Side in fact, it has in spirit, and Leonard Goodisman conjures that spirit with wit and sympathy, leading to surprising revelations. Can the neighborhood that has dealt with every impoverished newcomer the world has thrown at it handle the influx of the wealthy? RAY'S CANDY STORE by Rachael Carnes The East Village, has long been a haven for transplants, whether they are pursuing their dreams, fleeing their past, or both. It can be a brutal test to the solitary adventurer, and it can extend kindness and comfort to the lost. True Story: Asghar Ghahraman, an Iranian sailor, jumped ship in 1964 and fled to New York, where he adopted the name Ray Alvarez and a decade later purchased a candy store on Avenue A, right around the corner from Metropolitan, a place where residents, visitors, combatants and allies all come for their favorite confections. In Rachael Carnes’s play, an aspiring actress, recently arrived from Iowa and finding life in the city harder than she can bear, meets a bona fide New Yoker: proprietor of Ray’s Candy Store who offers her a new perspective, and an egg cream. For a small theater in New York, having a home is an uncommon privilege, particularly as space grows tighter and tighter throughout the city. But Metropolitan is doubly fortunate to reside in such a beguiling and embracing neighborhood as Manhattan’s East Village. Each year, it is a special pleasure to invite that neighborhood onto our stage through our East Side Stories. |
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| Rachael Carnes A nonprofit founder, Rachael Carnes develops inclusive performing arts experiences for people of all ages. She discovered playwriting in 2016 and is humbled by her many productions since, across the U.S., Canada and the U.K. Highlights include invitations to the William Inge Theatre Festival, the Midwest Dramatists Center Conference, the Mid-America Theatre Conference, the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Playwriting Intensive and the American Association for Theatre in Higher Education. She’s grateful for recognition: Her play Partner Of— was published by the Coachella Review, won Best Play in the 2019 Between Us Productions’ Take Ten Festival, received an Initiative Award at the Ivoryton Playhouse and will be featured at the 2019 Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival in New York City. Her plays Ice Front and Curbed will be published in the Silk Road Review in 2020. Rachael’s full-length play Canopy received staged readings at the Parsons Nose Theatre in Pasadena, the first play in their inaugural Women’s Playwright Series, and was featured in the WriteON Festival, in Cambridge, U.K. Her play Practice House is a Normal Ave., Theatre 33 and Seven Devils Semi-Finalist, and is a finalist in the 2019 Sewanee Writer's Conference. Rachael founded #CodeRedPlaywrightsENOUGH, a national playwrights' collective dedicated to producing plays in response to gun violence, and she thanks her playwriting mentors, and her family, for their continuing support. Leonard Goodisman was Development Director at Eclectic Theater until it closed; he produced play festivals, arranged acting classes, attended dramatist groups, acted, directed, did tech, etc. His theater entertains but also stimulates and inspires sociologically, psychologically, politically, and spiritually. He’s had full lengths and one acts produced and loves the audience reaction. Arlene Jaffe Arlene Jaffe’s play, Emigrant, was part of a previous East Side Stories festival. Her other works include Anonymous: Mary Shelley’s #MeToo moment. Search And Rescue: Three FEMA dogs at the World Trade Center. Surrounded: One of many projects developed in BMI’s Musical Theater Workshop. The Rock Eater: Demystification of Howard Hughes over a fifty-year time span. North Bend: What may have led to the killings in Newtown. 83: Two strangers on a bus; one from far, far away. Rita Shalimar: An actress with big talent has body issues. ElliEli: White hot pain, deep black comedy. Wine and Cookies: The prophet Elijah and Santa in rehab. The River Sambre: René Magritte sees his mother drown. Anything You Want: A student’s pivotal meeting with Norman Rockwell. The Keys: Reverse cyborgs learn the real consequences of being human. Arlene is writing as you read this, and is a member of The Dramatists Guild. Carlos Jerome Carlos Jerome‘s plays have been produced by various theaters and have won a number of awards around the country. A Lower East Side boy, Carlos studied acting with Anne Allen, playwriting with Mark O'Donnell, Stewart Spencer and Allen Davis III. He was on the editorial team for the Simon & Schuster International English-Spanish Spanish-English Dictionary. A member of the Dramatists Guild, Actors Studio Playwrights/Directors Unit, Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre Playwrights, Harlem Playwrights 21, Times Square Playwrights, American Mathematical Society. He has taught playwriting for Around The Block, Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre and for Latin American Theatre Ensemble at the Museo del Barrio. His The Pain Inside was published in Lawrence Harbison's The Best Ten-Minute Plays of 2017 (Smith & Kraus). |
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