ONE FLEA SPARE

From the Houston Chronicle:

One Flea Spare is haunting and beautiful

A strange and beautiful poetry pervades One Flea Spare. It is chiefly this quality that distinguishes Naomi Wallace's prize-winning drama in its sturdy Houston premiere by the enterprising little Mildred's Umbrella Theatre Company.

Clearly meant to provoke and disturb, the play is set in London in 1665, the year of the Great Plague.

The aristocratic Mr. and Mrs. Snelgrave, having endured a 28-day quarantine imposed after the deaths of their servants, are about to flee to the presumed safety of the country when a guard catches two intruders breaking into their house. Thus, the Snelgraves are forced into another 28-day quarantine in a boarded-up room of their house, this time with the unwelcome refugees: Bunce, a stoical sailor; and Morse, a mysterious adolescent who turns out to be a serving girl from a neighboring household where all have perished.

With the conniving guard Kabe popping up periodically as their sole contact to the outside world, the four play out various conflicts, revelations and lewd propositions as they wait to see if they will live or die. In the extremity of their situation, with bodies piling up in the blighted city around them, the established social order unravels and moral strictures disintegrate.

Wallace is as much concerned with class struggle, social injustice and sexual politics as she is with the torments of plague-ravaged 17th-century London.

More here.

Big time congrats to my pals back in Houston with Mildred's Umbrella for the fab reviews they've been getting for this show. I mean, it took years for H-Town's underground theater scene to get the Chronicle's grand poo-bah of theater, Everett Evans, to even notice that the scene existed. And now Evans is gushing. It couldn't have happened to a more talented and nicer group of people: I'm not surprised by the attention they're getting. With the sad demise of IBP, and yet another indefinite hiatus for my Houston theater home, dos chicas, Mildred's Umbrella is now unarguably the best that underground theater in the Bayou City has to offer.

Really, I think they're better than the assembly line stuff produced by the Alley. But what do I know? I've just got an MFA in theater. Oh wait, that means I know a lot. Yep, better than the Alley. At any rate, the show closes this weekend, so if you're in Houston, you'd better go check it out. I'm sure it's great.

And here's why I know it's great: I'm playing Kabe in a production of the same play in New Orleans opening Thursday night. That is, I know the script really well, and I know Mildred's Umbrella well, too. Put them both together and you get great art. That's how I know.

And hey! The one I'm in is great art, too. I've found a group of young upstarts here called the Cripple Creek Theatre Company which is "dedicated to producing dramatic works of cultural, historical, and political relevance in order to provoke the general public into social action." Right on, man. They're a political company. I just can't believe my luck running into these people; I've found a ready made solution to my always vexing problem of how to fuse my artistic impulse with my political impulse. I'm doing some theater in which I totally believe, and it feels fucking great.

This is also my New Orleans debut, which is significant, if only to me, because I so utterly adore the culture here--this is a town that has always respected artists and the arts, I mean, for centuries; as Wynton Marsalis once said, or something to this effect, in other cities they have history, but in New Orleans people do history. Acting in the Big Easy is like nothing I've ever experienced.

Anyway, if you're here at some point over the next four weekends, come and check us out. You won't be disappointed--see the above linked Cripple Creek site for performance info.

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