The Prospect @ Firehouse 13 - Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Featuring The Prospect
with
The Status, Barely Blind and June & the Ocean

7:30pm, $7
Click here for more information.

Nice One! @ Firehouse 13 - Saturday, May 9th, 2009

Hosted by MC Switch
Featuring DJs Dirty Ol' Frank, DJ Kares, Huge & Nema

9pm, $5
Click here for more information.

Cut & Dry UMASS Dartmouth Senior Photography Exhibition @ Firehouse 13- May 17th & May 30th, 2009

Exhibition on display Sunday, May 17th - Saturday, May 30th
Featuring the work of:

Hilary A. Burkitt, Stella Kapalis, Eugene LaRochelle, Vincent Martin III,
Kellie Perez, Alicia Petitti, Jenna Rodrigues, Caitlin Sherlock, Jeffrey L. Stiles,
Matthew Sullivan, Lindsey L. Taylor, Kathryn M. Thornhill and Danielle M. Verzillo

Opening Reception on Gallery Night:
Tuesday, May 21st,2009 - 6-9pm

Click here for more information.

The Storybook Art of Alison Paul: Black Birds & Burglars @ Everyman Bistro - Sunday, May 17th, 2009

Opening Reception for Black Birds & Burglars: The Storybook Art of Alison Paul........ Books, Booze, and Boogie-Woogie.

Also featuring music by SuperChief Trio.

Black, White or Red attire requested.

Click here for more information.

Off With Their Heads @ Firehouse 13 - Saturday, May 16th, 2009

Featuring Off With Their Heads

with Mustache Ride and Gunshot Wound
and special guest God Ate My Salad

9pm, $5
Click here for more information.

Hank Sinatra Jr. @ Firehouse 13 - Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

Hank Sinatra Jr.
with Spraynard and The Jesse Minute

Also featuring:
Tuesday Afternoon, a short film by Adam Theroux

8pm,$5
Click here for more information.

Loud Night #6 @ Firehouse 13 - Sunday, May 31st, 2009

Loud Night #6
Featuring:

Disappearer
Gods & Queens
Millions
Sick Electric

8pm,$7
Click here for more information.

Provy Sketchy @ Tazza - Thursday, May 21st, 2009

Dr. Sketchy’s Providence will stage a full frontal assault of dames, drinks, and drawing at the hip downtown café.

Featuring Providence burlesque queen Miss Bettysioux Tailor.

The monthly cabaret life drawing event welcomes all amateurs and will have sketch materials available for impromptu artists. Also, silly drawing contests give participating artists the chance to win fabulous sponsor prizes!

Click here for more information.

TONIGHT! IndieArts/BSR Dance Party featuring Triangle Forest @ Local 121 - Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Come down to Local 121 this coming Thursday to support IndieArts/ri and BSR by Dancing to the sounds of our DJ's:

Ted James, Tim O'Keefe, Meg Powers, & Matthew Lawrence

plus a live performance by Triangle Forest

Thursday, April 30th
Located downstairs at Local 121
10pm - 1am
$5

proceeds from this event will go to support

IndieArts/ri and BSR

Indie-Dance Party @ Local 121 - Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

Come and check out Gregor Mittersinker & Tim O'Keefe mix a variety of Indie-Dance, Blog House, and home-grown remixes at Indie-Dance Party.

Every First Saturday of the Month at Local 121.
Free

Frazier Festival 09: Call for Artists

RI2PN, RI Independent Performers Network
seeks a group of talented and inspired artists to collaborate for
Frazier Festival 2009 - Saturday, July 25, 2009. Available positions:

Curator (one)
Creative Coordinators (one Lighting and one Visual Art)
Creative Commissions (up to six)
and/or Performers (dancers, musicians, poets, others, up to 10 total

The Frazier Festival 2009: Installing Live Performance
Will engage audiences three-dimensionally with performance art and visual art crafted around and in-response to this public space, the Frazier Terrace, located on Benefit St in downtown Providence, RISD campus.

RI2PN is committed to producing multiple local concerts annually involving a myriad of art forms and provide performance opportunities to all independent artists, from the emerging to the accomplished.

Applications due Saturday, May, 30th.
Contact Producer, Nikki Carrara at rippedtix@gmail.com or (401) 996-7801
for an application, application requirements and further information.

Senior Student Exhibition

URI Senior Student Exhibition

Opening Reception: Thursday April 30 5-9PM

Gallery Z

Show Dates April 30-May 2

www.galleryzprov.com

2nite April 24: AFROSONIC JUMP with Bradford James at the Black Rep

Don't miss!

The Rhode Island Riveters vs. The Maine Port Authorities!

Riveter’s Seek Revenge on Maine Port Authorities
Providence, RI: On May 9, 2009 in the Rhode Island Convention Center, the Rhode Island Riveters will challenge the Maine Port Authorities to a re-match; this time on their home track! Last season Maine’s All-Star team, the Port Authorities insulted the Riveters defeating them 75 to 64. On May 9th the Riveters will silence the Port Authorities for good. Doors will open at 6pm and the bout will commence at 7pm. Tickets will be $10.00 in advance at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/ and $12.00 at the door; as usual kids 5-12 are half price, so bring the whole family!
After their recent victories against Philadelphia’s home team the Heavy Metal Hookers and Pennsylvania’s Harrisburg Area Roller Derby (H.A.R.D) the Riveters are ready to lay the smack-down. Come watch all of the excitement and help Providence show Portland what’s up! Don’t miss Providence’s Hysterica!, the fastest woman in New England, as she jams against Olive Spankins, Portland’s minor threat. Back for her home track debut, Lotta Pain will skate with the Riveters seeking the ultimate revenge! Come cheer on all of your favorite Riveters, Craisy Dukes, Sass E. McNasty, and HotSauce, as they lead the pack against the likes of Portland’s Mom Bomb, Punchy O’Guts and Patty O’Mean.
Providence Roller Derby will also host the Sex Slaves, who will be providing half-time entertainment. Check out our website http://www.providencerollerderby.com/ for the latest information including afterparty location, specials for special guests (Mom’s look-out!) and updates on your favorite skaters!

The 'Mericans @ Nick-A-Nees - Saturday, April 25, 2009

Check out the THE 'MERICANS

free show at Nick-A-Nees

GO-GO POWER! @ Tazza Caffe - Saturday, April 25, 2009

MOD-SOUL-FUNK-SPY-A-GO-GO DANCE PARTY! with DJ Ty Jesso & guests

10pm - 2am
Tazza Caffe

Click here for more information

Spring Awakening: Songs of Innocence

Spring Awakening (at PPAC through the 26th) wants you to be angry. Or very, very sad. Or, heck, just full of some kind of feeling. Come on! Like its main character, Melchior, whose seduction of the inexperienced and apprehensive Wendla in his parents' hay-barn is clumsy but successful, the show has little game but loads of sincerity. Think of it as a Breakfast Club musical for the pre-Weimar generation. The very catchy and sometimes haunting tunes are by Duncan Sheik, and the lyrics, which are less haunting but perfectly rhymed, are by the Word-O-Matic 3000, known to its friends as Steven Slater.

The plot, such as it is, is taken from a celebrated 1891 play by Frank Wedekind and involves the wrenching coming-of-age of a loosely affiliated group of German adolescents. The show opens with a song: Wendla, a young woman, laments that she is ill-equipped to manage the pressures and pleasures of her bubbling sexuality. At least I think this it what it's about; the song's inchoate imagery and garbled mic-ing make it difficult to be sure. Later, Melchior, handsome and cynical and almost revolutionary, defends his discombobulated friend, Moritz, from the wrath of their Latin teacher after Moritz recites his passage from Ovid incorrectly. Moritz confesses to Melchior that he misread the passage because he is so incredibly tired, having been kept up the night before by terrible dreams of a pair of stocking-clad legs advancing towards him. Demonstrating his sophisticated grasp of Freudian interpretation, Melchior promises to write a detailed illustrated essay on sexual mechanics to assuage the anxieties haunting his troubled friend. Although in 1891 there were surely more subversive tracts being written, this one seals Melchior's tragic second-act fate.

Meanwhile, the group of girls who are the counterparts to Melchior and Moritz (and the other boys, who have their own nascent sexual urges but little in the way of actual character) discover their own efflorescent sexuality, which is at once empowering and attenuating. They are thrilled by the potential strength of their infatuations, but terrified of their ability to attract--especially when one of them, Martha, reveals that she is beaten and abused by her father. Wendla, confused, perhaps, by the intensity of her affection for Melchior and by her desperate longing for deep feeling, asks Melchior to beat her--just so she can feel something, even if it is only vulnerability, impotence, and degradation. Melchior at first resists but eventually gives in; as he whips her with a reed, however, his own inarticulate impulses come out in a show of genuine, brutish violence. Spring Awakening is about simmering adolescent emotion: the smallest change of temperature can push it to a boil.

The problem is that Spring Awakening feels like a musical not only of adolescents and for adolescents but, sadly, by adolescents. Of course, the grown-ups are flattened to paper-thin stereotypes--at one point, adult language is rendered as a long string of "Blahs," like in the Peanuts cartoons--but the kids are too: when Melchior, at the close of the play, considers killing himself, Wendla, whom he seduced and impregnated, and who has died during the abortion that her mother forces her to endure, nevertheless takes the trouble to come back, as a ghost, to urge the poor lad on. This is the worst sort of sexual gratification fantasy: a young woman, practically raped, comes back from the dead to forgive, and tacitly thank, the boy who did it. His selfishness is transformed into a liberating gesture. It's obviously nonsense, but the parents who might be able to explain this are mute; or, at least, they never, ever sing. The pregnant, plangent complaint about what getting older does to people, Look what they've done to our song, goes unuttered.

Blood From a Turnip

May ‘09 Blood From a Turnip
RI’s ONLY Late Night Puppet Salon
Friday May 15, 2009, 10pm  
At Perishable Theatre
95 Empire Street, Downtown Providence 
Admission: $5
No reservations taken 
Friday May 15, 2009 at 10 p.m.  SEATS STILL $5, after all these years.
Enjoy the late night puppet salon that has lasted longer than some marriages. May 2009 features:
*STATUS: GOD IS LONELY by Katy Laguzza (Boston). An unfortunate story about Facebook.
*The Bus Stop by Jonathan Burns, performed with Chris Gugliotti (RI). A frown meets a rabbit in this sculpture/costume/performance.
* An excerpt from Excess Baggage by Carole Simms D’Agostino (New York)- from a show about hoarding.
*Babe by Nicole LeDuc (Minneapolis). A Minnesotan gets lost in New England and takes along the wrong kind of baggage.
*A stop-animation short by Emma Cunningham (Providence).
Charming and Personable Musical Interludes provided by Walter Sickert and the Army of Broken Toys w/Special Guests (Boston).
Since the day Blood from a Turnip began in February of 1997, BFaT, as the salon is affectionately called, has offered professional puppeteers and those new to the art form an opportunity to present big stories, in miniature. Co-curated by Vanessa Gilbert, David Higgins, Nicole LeDuc, and Boston-based, electronic puppeteer Evan O’Television, BFaT continues to redefine itself, but refuses to grow up.

Blood From a Turnip May 15, 2009

Perishable Theatre presents:

May ‘09 Blood From a Turnip

RI’s ONLY Late Night Puppet Salon

Friday May 15, 2009, 10pm

At Perishable Theatre

95 Empire Street, Downtown Providence

Admission: $5

No reservations taken

Friday May 15, 2009 at 10 p.m. SEATS STILL $5, after all these years.

Enjoy the late night puppet salon that has lasted longer than some marriages. May 2009 features:

*STATUS: GOD IS LONELY by Katy Laguzza (Boston). An unfortunate story about Facebook.

*The Bus Stop by Jonathan Burns, performed with Chris Gugliotti (RI). A frown meets a rabbit in this sculpture/costume/performance.

* An excerpt from Excess Baggage by Carole Simms D’Agostino (New York)- from a show about hoarding.

*Babe by Nicole LeDuc (Minneapolis). A Minnesotan gets lost in New England and takes along the wrong kind of baggage.

*A stop-animation short by Emma Cunningham (Providence).

Charming and Personable Musical Interludes provided by Walter Sickert and the Army of Broken Toys w/Special Guests (Boston).

Since the day Blood from a Turnip began in February of 1997, BFaT, as the salon is affectionately called, has offered professional puppeteers and those new to the art form an opportunity to present big stories, in miniature. Co-curated by Vanessa Gilbert, David Higgins, Nicole LeDuc, and Boston-based, electronic puppeteer Evan O’Television, BFaT continues to redefine itself, but refuses to grow up.

What- Blood from a Turnip, RI’s ONLY late night puppet salon.

When- Friday May 15, 2009 at 10pm

Where- Perishable Theatre, 95 Empire St, Downtown Providence

Cost: $5, No reservations taken, for more information go to www.perishable.org

Santa Mamba @ Firehouse 13 - Friday, May 1st, 2009

Santa Mamba
with Bangalore and Nakedkneees

Also
Flamenco & Belly Dance performances by Miss [Jamie Lee] Fury

Click here for more information.

The Cobra-Matics @ Firehouse 13 - Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

The Cobra-Maticswith
These United States,
Johnny Carlevale & Rollin' Pins
and Brown Bird Rudy Relic

Click here for more information.

New England Animators @ Boston Institute of Contemporary Arts - Sunday May 3rd & Thursday May 7th

New England Animators

A screening at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Arts

featuring Drift by RI artist Daniel Sousa

Sunday May 3 at 3pm
Thursday May 7 at 7:30pm

$10 general admission; $8 members, students, and seniors.

Click here for more information about this event.

Photo Show: Eponymous @ Firehouse 13 - Monday, May 4th, 2009

Photo Show: Eponymous
A Rhode Island College Exhibition of Student Photography
Runs through May 4th - 14th

This show will feature the work of....

Chris Carrera, Stephanie Lee Cote, Danielle Corsa, Andy Davis
Leah Edleman-Brier, Alissa Faiola, Patrick Garriepy, Amanda Grinchell
Justin Gomes, Shannon Heuklom, Kayla Hood, Angela Kaplan
Monique Langlois, AnnMarie Nethercote, Jessica Rock
Jake Smith, Darlene Williamson, Jan Schusswohl, Elena Scotti

Click here for more information.

New Spanish Dancer 7"

Not 3 months after the release of Spanish Dancer's debut long-player Burned Up, Bred High on Cozy Music comes the new Snoozer Hotel b/w Father Charisma digital 7" via Spanish's own Magistrate of Christ imprint. While Spanish's debut was sonically linked to Prince through an Evil Heat kaleidoscope, Snoozer Hotel may be Brian Wilson having a knife fight with Wolf Eyes in Twin Peaks. Spanish Dancer, now five headbangers total, are now scurrying down some covert path with a suitcase of jangly pychedelia and soul stomps with a destination anonymous.
Download Snoozer Hotel.

Spanish Dancer will be performing at Tazza Caffe on Friday, May 1st with Astronauts of Antiquity and Makeupbreakup

FirstWorks & RISD OSL present "Handmade Puppet Dreams, Vol. I" (and more...) with Heather Henson and Paul Andrejco @ RISD Museum - Monday, April 27th

FirstWorks and RISD OSL present:

"Handmade Puppet Dreams, Vol. I" (and more...)

FREE Film Screening and Presentation

with Heather Henson and special guest, Paul Andrejco

Monday, April 27, 2009, 7pm

RISD Museum / Chace Center – Michael P. Metcalf Auditorium

Daughter of the beloved puppetry pioneer Jim Henson, RISD alum Heather Henson introduces a new generation of puppeteers through her curated series of independently produced film shorts, “Handmade Puppet Dreams”.

Exploring unique approaches to animation through a spectrum of puppetry styles, this zany collection of film shorts showcases the rising stars of cutting-edge puppetry. With storylines touching such off-beat themes as: life with amnesia, life after death, music video and alien possession, these on-screen gems prove that the world of puppetry is not just for kids.

Emmy nominated puppet designer Paul Andrejco (RISD ’91) will present several of his own films in a multi-media presentation providing a sneak peek into his creative process.

Click here for more information.

The Debut of White Honey @ The Blackstone - Saturday, April 18th, 2009

Check out the debut performance of White Honey.

perfoming with:
Asteroid #4 (Philadelphia, PA)
Viva Viva (Boston, MA)
Lift of The Dial DJ's

Located at the Blackstone.

West Side Arts presents The Art of War - Drawings & Paintings of WWII

Click here for more information.

Rhode Island Idol @ Firehouse 13 - Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Stone Soup Coffeehouse Presents:
The Second Annual Rhode Island Idol Contest

Emceed by Dan White

Two contestants from each venue, a total of five different venues,
will be chosen to appear at the finals at Stone Soup. One performer will be selected with two runners-up.
Winning performer will be given an opening slot for a show at Stone Soup's 2009/2010 season.

All open mics begin at 6pm.
Final show at Stone Soup Coffeehouse, Sunday, May 3, 2009 at 4pm.

For contestant rules and information about Rhode Island Idol, click here.
Click here for more information about the Firehouse 13 event.

Perishable - Stories Late At Night

LIVE BAIT: TRUE STORIES FROM REAL PEOPLE

Friday, May 8th at 10pm. All seats $5

At Perishable Theatre, 95 Empire Street, Providence, RI 02903

Everyone has a story to tell. Come to LIVE BAIT and tell it to us or watch others tell theirs. If you have one that is in any way, shape, or form related to our May theme, “I Will Survive,” then all you have to do is sign up at the door (better come a little early, sign-up space is limited). And when it’s your time, we’ll call your name. It’s that easy. No notes, no rants, just tell your story like you’re telling your friends over a couple of drinks. There is a five-six minute time limit, please respect it (we mean it this time).

All are encouraged, performers and non-performers alike. Come play and/or watch this evening of funny, gut-wrenching, scary, enlightening, soul-baring, Real-Life Stories.

LIVE BAIT is hosted by Phil Goldman. With musical accompaniment and original “theme” song by Jerry Gregoire.

10:00pm Friday, May 8, 2009

Tickets $5.00 – no reservations taken

Perishable Theatre, 95 Empire St., Providence, RI

(401)331-2695 x101 for box office information

Check out Live Bait at www.myspace.com/livebait_latenight

AfroSonic JUMP! @ Providence Black Repertory - Friday, April 24th, 2009

Save the date for AFROSONIC JUMP! Friday APRIL 24th, starting @ 9:30pm
with special Guest BRADFORD JAMES ( Seed Recordings- Utopia ) coming from Boston to join us in our deep and soulful journey...

Djs Blackdove, Mikedelick, Dublin, Nick de Paris, Bradford James

BE THERE!!!

Click here for more information.

STATE LOUNGE @ State - Saturday, April 18th, 2009

Join Nick de Paris and Dublin for the first time at the swanky State Lounge
Saturday april 18th for a night of high energy funky french, latin and soulful house
to keep you groovin all night.

Click here for more information.

Greenzones: From the War Garden to Your Garden @ Firehouse 13 - Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

Greenzones: From the War Garden to Your Garden
Two free back-to-back events:

5:30pm: A presentation on Victory Gardens, the Women's Land of Army of America, and why/how gardeners are growing their own food today.

Featuring:
Sarah Zurier of RI Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission
Judy Barrett Litoff of Bryant University
Rich Pederson of Southside Community Land Trust

7:30: First RI Urban Ag Spring Start Party
Seed swapping, plant sharing, food potluck, drink, music, learning about local garden organizations and projects, and getting to know your fellow gardeners

Click here for more information.

Sierra Club Recruitment @ Firehouse 13 - Thursday, May 14th, 2009

Sierra Club Recruitment
Free admission with a complimentary draft beer and food

Sierra Club members are 70,000 of your friends and neighbors. Inspired by nature, they work together to protect our communities and the planet. The Sierra Club is America's oldest, largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization. The RI Chapter of the Sierra Club represents one of the 64 chapters with 2,500 members.

Click here for more information.

Derbytante Ball @ Firehouse 13 - Friday, May 15th,2009

Derbytante Ball hosted by Providence Roller Derby

Click here for more information.

Annie Lynch & the Beekeepers - Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Annie Lynch & the Beekeepers

With
Brown Bird and Peasant

Click here for more information.

4 bands/ 3 fashion designers @ Firehouse 13 - Saturday, May 23rd, 2009

The Bands:
Harbinger Project
Plan 9
Blizzard of '78
Elevator Tribe

The Designers:
BABL, presenting The Spring Fashion Collection
Joan M. Wyand, presenting Upcycled visions of Providence As Funk Fashion
My Pictures Fashun

To purchase advance tickets, click here. Tickets can be purchased at the door.
Click here for more information about the event.

Nerdsday - Thursday , April 9th, 2009.

This month's Nerdsday tweet-up and work session features Wayne Franklin of Office Lab, DJs Tim O'Keefe and Ted James. Come out and be anti social with us. Bring your 20-sided die, laptops, projects and homework. Free.

Providence Roller Derby presents The Cox Sports Xpose Documentary Series on The Providence Roller Derby @ The Cable Car - Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Check out the Providence Roller Derby Documentary produced by Cox Sports Xpose.

The Cable Car Cinema
Thursday, April 9th - 9:30 PM
$3 admission

Awesome Brothers @ Firehouse 13 - Friday, April 10th, 2009

Featuring:

Awesome Brothers
Troop of Echos
Menya
Sacred Objects
Prince of Space

Click here for more information.

Celebrating One Year of YES! @ Yes Gallery - Friday, April 10th, 2009

Friday April 10th from 7:00 - 9:00 p.m

new work by our talented YES artists and guest exhibitors. Eat some yummy nibbles, drink wine, and be soothed by the vintage Hawaiian and tropical standards played live by Ricky Russo & The Mai Tai Serenaders.

Click here for more info about the event & Yes Gallery.

DJ TY JESSO & CO present BRAVO-A-GO-GO! @ BRAVO! - Friday, April 10th, 2009

BRAVO-A-GO-GO is one of Providence's FREE underground Go-Go dance parties! They spin mostly old school club classics from Funk & Soul to Punk & Rock.

Where else can you go listen, drink, and dance amongst gorgeous go-go girls for FREE??

Second Friday Monthly!
Don't miss out! Tell your Friends!

Located at Bravo Brasserie
10pm - 2am Free

Rock & Roll Yard Sale @ AS220 - Saturday, May 9th, 2009

11am - 5pm - Located at AS220

Click here for more information about Rock & Roll Yardsale.

Providence Roller Derby - RI Riveters vs. The Nuclear Knockouts (PA) @ The Rhode Island Convention Center - Saturday, April 11th, 2009

Check out the Riveters vs. The Nuclear Knockouts at the Rhode Island Convention Center

Saturday, April 11th, 2009
Doors at 6 p.m.
Bout at 7 p.m.

Click here to learn more about the Providence Roller Derby.

Susan Clausen - None of These Things is Just like the Others @ Myopic Books - Wakefield, RI - Friday, April 17th, 2009

Susan Clausen - None of These Things is Just like the Others

Opening on Friday, April 17th 2009, 5.30 - 7.30 pm

Located at Myopic Books
343 A Main Street, Wakefield RI 02879

Exhibition dates: April 13th - May 17th
Click here to learn more about this event.

ALLIANCE OF ARTISTS COMMUNITIES & RISD Career Services present Be Our Guest : finding creative time and space @ MetCalf Refectory - Monday, April 13

ALLIANCE OF ARTISTS COMMUNITIES
and risd career services present
Be Our Guest : finding creative time and space
a public information session on artists-in-residence programs

Learn about the hundreds of artists’ residency opportunities available for artists of all kinds and every career stage, in your backyard and across the globe. Find out what distinguishes them, the best way to apply, and how to maximize your experience.

Visual artists, writers, choreographers, composers, filmmakers, architects, performance artists and more — there’s a residency for you!

Free and open to the public. No registration required.

More information at: www.artistcommunities.org

PROVIDENCE, RI
MONDAY, APRIL 13 2009
5:30 - 7:00 pm
RISD | METCALF REFECTORY, ROOM A
30 WATERMAN STREET

panelists:
NOVA BENWAY
BERWICK INSTITUTE (BOSTON)

ALIX REFSHAUGE
HUB-BUB (SPARTANBURG, SC)

MELISSA LEVIN
LOWER MANHATTAN CULTURAL COUNCIL (NEW YORK CITY)

MONICA MARTINEZ
ARTIST, FELLOW OF THE MACDOWELL COLONY (PETERBOROUGH, NH)

TYLER GULDEN
WATERSHED CENTER FOR CERAMIC ARTS (NEWCASTLE, ME)

moderator:
CAITLIN STROKOSCH
ALLIANCE OF ARTISTS COMMUNITIES (PROVIDENCE, RI)

"Grace": Last Weekend at the Gamm

Grace, now in its last weekend at Pawtucket's Gamm Theatre, is about the timeless struggle between two ways of making sense of the universe: religious inquiry and scientific investigation. Its intentions are as straightforward as its title. Grace, the eponymous main character, is a scientist and a hardened atheist—“naturalist” is her preferred sobriquet—but, to her bitter disappointment, her son, Tom, leaves his work as a defense lawyer to become a priest. His goal is to draw out what is good and ennobling in religion to create something better, an aim that Grace finds naïve and even dangerous; the only bearded sage whose word she considers worth proselytizing is Darwin. And so she does, in strident, impassioned lectures to her college classes that leave you dazed by her conviction if a little uncertain about what subject she claims to be actually teaching. In between, she and Tom fight, viciously and perhaps irrevocably; her husband, Tony, a secular Jew, does his best to understand and support them both; and Ruth, Tom's irreligious girlfriend, announces that she's pregnant and that she’s not sure she can marry a priest. The family, it turns out, is its own vexing universe.

Grace is passionately performed and ingeniously staged—the sets are simple, consisting of permutations of the same three chairs and a table, moved unobtrusively on and off stage by actors entering and leaving scenes—and the night that I saw it the audience swelled with barely stifled emotion. In the end, though, the show has the feel of harmless ruse. Authors A. C. Grayling and Mick Gordon have sexed up their script—which is not so much a story as a schematic—by fracturing its narrative, so that, not five minutes in, we learn that something awful will happen (has already happened?) to Tom that no other character will discover until near the play’s end. The show unfolds under the dark shadow of our foreknowledge, which obscures an essential melodrama and a vacancy where character usually resides; in the dim light of grief we think the play is more powerful than it is, that it has more ambition, insight, and humanity than it does. If foreshadowing like this is a veil, it is also a kind of bait, to which we respond instinctively and helplessly in spite of the inelegance of the play's technique.

In short, Grace is the very essence of the highbrow: it grapples with a current issue; it ends ambiguously; and it upends our expectation of sequential narrative (so it must be art). The story may be messy, but the show's artistry, such as it is, feels empirical and, for all of its narrative jumble, cautious. So there is plenty to talk about on the drive home, but none of it will help you to think any differently about yourself, or your beliefs, or the human experience in general. Of course, it may be that this isn’t the point, or that such reevaluation is, despite everything, beyond the power of theatre to inspire. In which case we are left with a darkened theatre and a lit stage, and however one may feel the next day, or the next week, for ninety minutes we believe: not in science, and not in God, but in the urgency of the moment in front of us.

Indie-Dance Party with Gregor Mittersinker & Tim O'Keefe @ Local 121 - Saturday, April 4th, 2009

Come and check out Gregor Mittersinker & Tim O'Keefe mix a variety of Indie-Dance, Blog House, and home-grown remixes at Indie-Dance Party.

Every First Saturday of the Month at Local 121.
Free

The 'Mericans & Rt. 44 Record Release Party @ The Blackstone - Saturday, April 4th, 2009

Check out an early 9pm set by
T H E 'M E R I C A N S
as part of the RT. 44 Record Release Party

THIS SATURDAY 4 APRIL 2009

THE BLACKSTONE
1005 MAIN STREET
PAWTUCKET, RI 02860

401.726.2181

Click here to download The 'Merican's song Pawtucket

Click here to read The Providence Phoenix article about The 'Mericans

Greg Attonito (From Bouncing Souls) @ Firehouse 13 - Sunday, April 5th

Featuring:
Greg Attonito ( from the Bouncing Souls)
with Shanti & Vic Ruggiero ( from the Slackers)
and Matt Kelley ( From Lemon Lime Tennis Shoes)

8pm, $10

Click here for more information

Gallery Night @ Firehouse 13 - Thursday, April 16th, 2009

Click here for more information.