Come check out new plays by Kids with Guns’ members Delaney Britt Brewer and Ben Cikanek in:

The 4th Annual New York One-Minute Play Festival
80+Plays. 40+ Playwrights. 30+Actors. 7 Directors. 1 Minute.

Astoria Performing Arts Center
30-44 Crescent St (@30th Rd)
Astoria, NY, 11102

September 25th & 26th, 2010, 8:00 PM

for tickets and info visit: www.apacny.org

It’s theater boiled down to its essence. Sixty Seconds from lights up to lights down. The much-anticipated short-form theatre festival returns for it’s fourth year in partnership with the red-hot Astoria Performing Arts Center! Curated by Dominic D’Andrea, the program will present over 80 plays all under sixty seconds by some of the most exciting emerging and established writers in the American Theatre.

The 2010 One-Minute Play Festival Playwrights Are:

David Simpatico, Daniel McCoy, Michael Golmaco, Meghan Sass, Josh Conkel, Matt Gunn Park, Corina Copp, Laurel Haines, Erica Saleh, Bekah Brunstetter, Janine Nabers, Alexis Clements, Eric Bland, Peter Gil-Sheraton, Jen Silverman, Mallery Avidon, Anna Moench, Eric Winick, Maya Macdonald, Paul Thureen & Hannah Bos, James Carter, Tanya Saracho, Micah Bucey, Tom X. Chao, Rose Martula, Andrea Ciannavei, Enrique Urueta, Ben Cikanek, Liz Duffy Adams, Michael Bradford, Robert Saietta, Tommy Smith, Alejandro Morales, Avi Glickstein, Delaney Britt Brewer, and more!

And Alumni Playwrights:

Matthew Paul Olmos, Michael John Garces, Adam Szymkowicz, Callie Kimball, Sibyl Kempson, Caridad Svich, Christine Evans, Clay McLeod Chapman, Anton Dudley, Qui Nguyen, & Saviana Stanescu.

Directed by:

Robert Ross Parker (Co-Artistic Director of the Obie Award winning Vampire Cowboys Theatre Company), Scott Ebersold (Co-Artistic Director, Packawallop Productions), Jordana Williams (Gideon Productions), Dominic D’Andrea (Festival Curator), Morgan Gould (Associate Director, Young Jean Lee’s Theatre Company), Melanie Williams (Artistic Director, Red Fern Theatre Company), & Tom Wojtinik (Artistic Director of APAC.)

Video Flashback! Check out this review we unearthed from Time Warner Cable’s channel 57 back in 2007. This is Hi! Drama on Delaney Britt Brewer’s An Octopus Love Story.

Critically acclaimed playwright and prolific interviewer of dramatists, Adam Szymkowicz conducts his 200th meeting with our very own Delaney Britt Brewer. Read their exchange here.

An excerpt from our 2010 world premiere production of Delaney Britt Brewer’s Wolves is featured in the March/April 2010 issue of The Dramatist. Brewer developed the play, in part, as a 2008/2009 Dramatists Guild Fellow. Read the excerpt (in PDF format). Or, check out our recent video interview with Brewer as we discuss her formative years in Stuttgart, her play An Octopus Love Story, and our August 2010 production of Wolves.

Meet Delaney Britt Brewer, the playwright behind our upcoming (August 2010) production of Wolves at 59E59 Theaters. Delaney also penned our critically acclaimed 2007 production of An Octopus Love Story. A KwG company member since 2006, Brewer is also a veteran of Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Youngblood program.

Delaney Britt Brewer wrote An Octopus Love Story and Wolves. Watch a video interview with Britt.

Quirky allegory in the theater can be charming, and Delaney Britt Brewer uses the device beautifully in An Octopus Love Story. In this play about how we can sometimes deny our instincts in pursuit of companionship, the playwright includes a fanciful tale of a sea creature that crawls out of a marine biologist’s tank. The main plot involves Danny (Josh Tyson) and Jane (Kelli Holsopple), a gay man and a lesbian who tie the knot as a publicity stunt to protest the ban on same-sex marriage.

It’s a clever setup for this comedy of manners, directed with gentle buoyancy by Mike Klar, even if, like Brewer, he stumbles occasionally—particularly in the portrayal of the two public-relations flacks (including Jane’s lover) who conceive the mock-marriage. More successful are two characters that could be caricatures: an evangelical reporter (Andrew Dawson) who interviews the “happy couple” and Jane’s beauty-queen stepmom (Krista Sutton). The production’s best moments, though, belong to Danny and Jane, appealingly rendered by Tyson and Holsopple. These are characters of enormous pluck and charm. In fact, they almost seem like a 21st-century equivalent of Rock Hudson and Doris Day. As their friendship grows, they start to resemble that lonely octopus, reaching out a tentacle for contact. — Andy Propst

One of the things that keeps theater so interesting is that you never know where you’ll find great work. On a bad night, you can have a dispiriting experience on Broadway. Two days later, you can discover a gem of a play in a black-box space on the fourth floor of a nondescript office building on West 21st Street, which is where Delaney Britt Brewer’s alternately hilarious and bittersweet comedy An Octopus Love Story may be found.

Presented by the unfortunately named Kids With Guns company, the play begins with an intriguing premise and runs with it: A gay man named Danny (Josh Tyson) weds a lesbian named Jane (Kelli Holsopple) as a protest against the ban on gay marriage. The intended point is that people of different genders are free to wed even if they’re homosexual, they don’t particularly like each other, and they have no plans to procreate, whereas legal marriage is forbidden to true lovers of the same sex, whether or not they want to raise a family.

Brewer’s credits to date are scant, but she has the stuff to become one of our finest playwrights if she’s not snapped up to work in TV or film. An Octopus Love Story is notable for wonderfully well-rounded characters and uncommonly sharp, witty dialogue. (HE: Do you wanna stick around for dessert?” SHE: “It is getting late…I’m trying to be responsible.” HE: For who, for what? It’s a crepe. I’m not asking you to freebase off the kitchen stove.”)

The author’s extraordinary talent is evident throughout. For example, a scene in which newlyweds Jane and Danny are interviewed by an obnoxious reporter (played to the hilt by Andrew Dawson) threatens to veer into absurdity but is kept on track by the excellence of the writing and the acting. Similarly, the fact that the role of Kathy — Jane’s stepmom from Las Vegas — transcends caricature is a great tribute to Brewer and to the lovely performance of Krista Sutton.

The balance of the cast is equally terrific. Tyson, who looks like a cross between Broadway’s Matthew Morrison and Matthew Fox of Lost fame, is completely charming as Danny. Michael Cyril Creighton and Jenny Greer are spot-on as Danny’s friend Alex and Jane’s female lover, Tosh, the two rather abrasive characters who hatch the marriage plan. (Tosh is the kind of person who likes to boast that she graduated “magna cum laude” but is unable to pronounce that phrase properly.)

Then there’s the gorgeous Holsopple, who by all rights will zoom to major stardom in no time at all. Her performance is so endearing that sympathetic sighs from the audience greeted several of her utterances during the performance under review. And when Holsopple’s Jane performed a karaoke version of Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” one could sense everybody in the theater developing a huge crush on her.

Though Mike Klar’s direction of the actors is exemplary, he might have tended more carefully to other aspects of the show. Nearly every scene ends with an awkward blackout, and the actors can be heard stumbling around in the dark as they enter or exit the stage between scenes. (Having recorded music cover the blackouts would do much to help the production’s flow.)

John Wolf’s lighting is probably as good as can be expected given the venue and the low-budget circumstances, but Brian Sidney Bembridge’s scenic design is decidedly unattractive, with its hideous, blue-flowered couch, bright blue floor, streaked plexiglass windows, and an unnecessary clear plastic curtain that will make you think you’ve wandered into Bed, Bath, & Beyond.

Ultimately, such flaws scarcely matter. An Octopus Love Story is one of the best written and acted plays currently on the boards in this town, whether those boards be in the Times Square area or the Flatiron District.

Reviewed By: Michael Portantiere · May 7, 2007  · New York

Jane (Kelli Holsopple) is so insecure she leaves the lights on when she goes out “so everything’s how I remember it when I get back.” Desperate for assurance, she leads on a smitten male co-worker (Eric Kuehnemann) even though she has a live-in lover, the arrogant Tosh (Jenny Greer). Tosh is so controlling she won’t even let Jane indulge her taste for guilty pleasure movies and comfort food. (“She caught me once, on a Cactus Flower and Tater Tot night.”) Lacking confidence, Jane puts up with the emotional abuse.

Meanwhile, Danny (Josh Tyson), a sweet-natured, gauntly handsome waiter, has far too little ambition to satisfy his old friend Alex (Michael Cyril Creighton), who also happens to be Tosh’s partner at a public relations firm. Danny toys with the idea of graduate school, without a clear idea of what he might want to study. But the two PR pros have cooked up a novel plan for the shiftless Jane and Danny, who have never met: have them get married while publicly avowing their homosexuality, thereby calling attention to the absurdity of laws that grant two opposite-sex strangers the benefits of marriage while denying the same benefits to a loving, committed same-sex couple.

If I were writing about a sitcom, the next sentence would naturally be: “Hilarity ensues.” But playwright Delaney Britt Brewer has serious things to say here, though they’re not the ones you might expect. Speckled with funny moments and clever dialogue, the play is fundamentally about how unexpected, and how unstorybooklike, love can be. With its topical plot, flawed and fully realized characters, and direction as smooth and transparent as glass, it is both timely and universal.

Unafraid of controversy, Brewer digs into the complexities of emotions and gay identity. As Jane and Danny develop mutual affection, Alex – whose own feelings for Danny may be deeper than he has let on – lashes out at his friend for betraying the cause. But how much is love responsible for the plan’s backfiring, and how much is it Alex and Tosh’s just desserts for manipulating their friends for a “higher” cause? Danny finds the guts to defend himself: “Don’t try to stop it because it doesn’t fit your image. That would be the ultimate malevolence.”

Tosh, too, may have had a hidden motive for the arrangement, besides the political protest. Touting her Ivy League and Mensa credentials while committing malapropisms (“I’m glad you two have endeavored such a close friendship”), she proves in the end – as Danny tells a heartbroken Jane – “pathetic,” if entertainingly so from our standpoint.

The central image that gives the play its name is emblematic of Brewer’s ability to merge higher concepts with slightly elevated but believable dialogue. Jane tells Danny that, like the animal of the title, “I climbed out of the tank…to be with you,” knowing it wasn’t an environment she could live in. “If I could find another octopus in the tank…I would choose that over you.” The flowering of Jane’s courage, and to a lesser extent Danny’s, forms the backbone of the story, and Holsopple’s bravura performance locks it all together, with more than able counterbalance from Tyson and excellent performances from Creighton and Greer, both of whom make the most of their scenes.

The supporting cast also includes Krista Sutton as Jane’s stepmother, a former beauty queen who reveals an unexpected richness of character while representing the essential goodness of the human heart, and Andrew Dawson as a creepy fundamentalist bigot who is nonetheless – like the play – disturbingly smart and human.

Review by Jon Sobel for Blogcritics Culture. Published May 06, 2007 at 11:48 am.

An Octopus Love Story

by Kerri Allen

May 5, 2007

Just when you thought Neil Simon had no descendent in the 21st century, along comes Delaney Britt Brewer. Her snappy new comedy, An Octopus Love Story, is one of the most accessible and genuinely funny shows to hit downtown in quite a while.

Subsisting on good old-fashioned humor, the play opens with two co-workers at dinner bitching about the office. Marc, played by a goofy Eric Kuehnemann (who, sadly, appears only in this scene), is trying to woo Jane, the lovely office secretary. Trouble is, she’s a lesbian. Their conversation is quick and easy and has the entire audience laughing within a minute.

Jane lives with her girlfriend, the overbearing and pretentious Tosh (Jenny Greer), who works at a P.R. firm with Alex (Michael Cyril Creighton), a snappy gay man. Tosh and Alex devise a plan for a protest-cum-media blitz: Jane will wed Alex’s best friend, Danny (Josh Tyson). Since Danny is gay, this — the P.R. pair hopes — will expose the hypocrisy behind the opposition to same-sex-marriage legislation in New York. But their plan sinks when their guinea pigs unexpectedly fall for each other.

Beautiful Kelli Holsopple plays the rootless heroine — unhappy at work and denigrated at home. She flips between Brewer’s comedic and dramatic moments with ease and tackles both with equal talent. The other comedic hero is Creighton’s Alex, always bespectacled and with a necktie, who drolly delivers lines like, “You won’t just marry any woman — you will marry a woman of the Sapphic ilk, the cargo-pant oeuvre.”

While the play lacks for little, the same cannot be said of the production. Director Mike Klar’s scene changes are bulkily handled by the actors in blue light, and it’s clear they’re uncomfortable in the space even with the lights up. This dampens the production a bit, but a play this funny and touching doesn’t come ashore very often.

Presented by Kids With Guns at Center Stage, NY, 48 W. 21st St., NYC. May 5-20. Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com. Casting by Melissa Braun, Grant Wilfley Casting.