CUT TO: INTERIOR. NIGHT. DETECTIVE stands, smoking, in a pool of light:
It's a steamy Friday night in this crummy town, the kinda night where there's only two things to do: make like cats in heat under the AC on high, or shoot somebody. On a night like this, a man's blood is bubbling, and a smart broad would be keeping herself and her kids locked up and safe, but . . . all the broads aren't that smart. So, I'm the dumb sucker who turns up first on the scene, and then waits around till the lab guys show up with their body bags to clean up the mess.
"Screamingly funny, at the same time painful and poignant." - Molly Smith, Arena Stage
Part domestic drama, part film noir, [Hot 'n' Throbbing] "is stupendous button pusher about how we are all complicit in today's mingling of sex, violence and power. " - The Washington Times
a) wife beating b) murder c) suicide d) child endangerment e) all of the above
"If you answered "e," you've seen Luna Theater's production of Paula Vogel's bizarre play, Hot 'n' Throbbing. But nobody can wipe the smile off your face faster than Vogel, since all of the above are also, of course, horrifying. Vogel's specialty is surreal and hilarious drama about deadly serious social issues: Her Baltimore Waltz (for which she won the Pulitzer) is about dying of AIDS, and How I Learned to Drive is about pedophilia. Luna - a company specializing in contemporary, quirky, and disturbing plays, including its recent Orange Flower Water and last season's Grace - is a perfect match for Vogel's tricky show, and this production finesses the disturbing combinations of styles. The usual suspects: Plump single mom (Catherine Palfenier) supports her family by writing pornographic screenplays, "adult entertainment" for women. Her hot-stuff teenage daughter Leslie Ann (Melissa Lynch), who might be sneaking out nights for pole-dancing, confesses S&M fantasies. Calvin (Noah Herman), the smart, geeky younger brother, is a voyeur whose masturbation sessions involve a catcher's mitt. Clyde (John Lopes), the absent dad, violates the restraining order against him and breaks into the house to confess to his ex-wife his sexual insecurities and despair. . . . What enlivens this cliché dysfunctional-family drama is Vogel's addition of two noirish figures (Kirsten Quinn and Allen Radway) behind smoky windows who provide stylish voice-overs; sometimes they're the voices inside Mom's head as she writes, sometimes they take over the action and announce "jump cut," and sometimes they quote relevant passages from Melville, Joyce, Nabokov and D.H. Lawrence. . . . This is drama with something important to say, and Hot 'n' Throbbing says it in a radically new, entertaining, and intriguing way."
Photos: Aaron Oster
7pm
8pm
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Funding provided from: The Phoebe W. Haas Charitable Trust B, The Philadelphia Cultural Fund and the Samuel S Fels Fund