#InTheLoop | New Queens-Inspired Play to Show Six Times from July 30 to Aug. 14
What’s a typical day in Queens?
A new poetic prose play ponders this question, and it’s about to hit stages in Astoria, Long Island City, Sunnyside, and Woodside between July 30 and Aug. 14. (Brooklyn and Manhattan, too.)
Sunnyside resident Juliann Lavallee’s newest work, Under Woodside, uses inspiration from the 1954 Dylan Thomas poem Under Milk Wood to depict a single day within a few borough blocks.
Here’s the schedule.
Friday, July 30, at 7 pm at Sunnyside Gardens Park, 49th Street and 38th Avenue.
Friday, Aug. 6, at 7 pm, Hunters Point South Park Kayak Launch across from Second Street and 56th Avenue.
Thursday, Aug. 12, at 7 pm, Astoria Park’s North Lawn, intersection of Shore and Ditmars boulevards.
Saturday, Aug. 14, at 7 pm, Doughboy Park, vicinity of 54th Street and Woodside Avenue, Woodside.
Admission is free, but Sunnyside Gardens Park requests that attendees purchase a $5 temporary membership.
Directed by Bryna Kearney, Under Woodside feels like a long-awaited, post-Covid group hug. It strives to capture NYC’s flavor in a way that resonates with natives, transplants, and vacationers.
Here’s a excerpt.
Voice I:
To begin at the beginning:
It is fall moonless night in the big city, starless and uncharged
black, the asphalt streets whisper and the hunched, beggars –
and – teens shuffle invisible down to the fast packed, fast
packed, cram packed, swaying cars of the seven line. The
apartments are as nosey as crones (though crones nose
not to-night from their frosty, window ledges) or nosey as
Taxi Man there in the huffled middle by the pool and clock
tower, the shops in take down, the Medicaid Office in the
peaky projects. All the people of the wound and spent city
are sleepy now.
“Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood marinated in my mind for over a decade and when the pandemic hit, and I could no longer leave my apartment, memories of my neighborhood bubbled,” stated Lavallee. “Thomas’s style became a framework to describe my city: the way the air chills at night, the sound of dishes clattering in restaurants, how other people walk and move on their way to work. Under Woodside became my pandemic baby, a way to be in the world I missed so much, inaccessible though it was outside my door. I attempt to capture the beauty of the efforts, little and large, people put into living.”
Other members of the cast are Caeden Musser (Fiona Fiddle, Fight Coordinator, Music Consultant), Alexandra Eller (Jasmine Little, Jenny Johnson, Second Woman), André Sguerra (Galo, Juan, Mr. Lymberopoulos, Relative Three), and Noor Mondal (Preeti Ghosh, Wife, Girl).
Editor’s note: For those who can’t get to Queens, Under Woodside will also show at Central Park’s Summit Rock, enter at W. 81st Street, on Saturday, Aug. 7, at 6:30 pm, and McCarren Park’s Bedford Lawn, Bedford Avenue and Lorimer Street in Brooklyn, on Friday, Aug. 13, at 6:30 pm.
Images: Juliann Lavallee
