“MY HAIR PIECE”
BY DANA BLOCK
A woman who has just given birth to the perfect little baby discovers she now looks like a sex bomb, thanks to breast feeding, and on a hot night out with hubby, escapes in a cheesy Mexican Restaurant and has a torrid romp with sex-starved Richard Gere who happens to be sitting across the bar from them. Chaos ensues.
My Hair Piece was first performed in Chicago in 1999 at the Rhinocerous Festival at Lunar Cabaret. Justin Hayford, reviewing it for the prominent arts newspaper Chicago Reader, said:
"You’ve got to have something to offer if you’re going to wade into the crowded pool of … solo performance in Chicago. Dana Block… shows she’s got the writers’ chops… [she] writes with efficiency and flair… she has a knack for creating images at once arresting and irreverent… Block will be a monologuist to contend with."
Venue: Nietzsche’s, 248 Allen St, Buffalo
Running Time: Thirty minutes
Admission: Pay what you can
Performances: Thursday, July 28, 7:00-7:30,
Saturday, July 30, 7:00-7:30,
Sunday, July 31, 2:00-2:30,
Wednesday, Aug 3, 9:30-10:00,
Thursday, Aug 4, 7:00-7:30
1 comment:
Small audiences are definitely a hazard with the festival (to say nothing of Buffalo in general--not that anywhere else is any better if you don't have major name recognition and press coverage). Tonight I went to a show with 3 other people in the audience (and then I performed one to about 10 people). But I have been really impressed with the quality of the performances even when the crowd is small to nonexistent. The MC Vendetta shows I saw (both at Nietzsche's and outside) had small audiences at first but she didn't let up an iota of intensity. I felt lucky to have witnessed them. Same with Scott Kurchak's My Life as an Ape: tiny audience tonight, but he played as if it was a full house, and that's a rare gift indeed.
I well know how discouraging it can be to play to a super-small audience. But I often think about a story the amazing performer Robbie McCauley once told me, about playing to about 3 or 4 people in NYC many years ago. As it turns out, one of those 3 or 4 people happened to be a critic, who wrote the review a friend of mine read that inspired me to bring her to Buffalo. The moral? You never know who's in that audience of 3.
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