A Ride on the Irish Cream
Opening Night: January 13, 2016
Closing: February 6, 2016
Theater: Abrons Arts Center Henry Street Settlement
Written and created by Erin Markey, “A Ride On The Irish Cream” is a musical anchored inside the memory of a Michigan backyard on the bank of the Kawkawlin River. A live band and original score become the space for the thrills and terrors of a relationship between Reagan (Markey), a vainglorious self-made girl, and Irish Cream (Becca Blackwell), her family’s pontoon boat/horse. They are in love, but when their relationship is tested by dust ruffles, sex for money, severe T-storms, and a secret cellar, the only way to stay together is to remember all the parts of themselves their bodies tried to forget.
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January 22, 2016
“Huh?” Such is, on occasion, my unhappy reaction upon leaving a show. But in the case of “A Ride on the Irish Cream,” it expressed my befuddlement going in. On the website of the Abrons Arts Center, where this new music-theater piece by Erin Markey is being performed, the précis of the plot describes it as a romance between “a vainglorious self-made girl” and “her family’s pontoon boat/horse.” What’s with that slash? Surely, you can be either a pontoon boat — although I’ve never seen an actor portray one onstage, until now — or you can be a horse. (That’s comparatively old hat.) How on earth can you be both simultaneously? Apparently, in the whimsical imagination of Ms. Markey, who wrote, created and stars in the show as that vainglorious girl, Reagan, all things are possible. Few, unfortunately, are comprehensible in this peculiar hybrid of rock concert, performance-art piece and quasi-musical. (There’s a small chorus line, and a smidgen of acrobatics and choreography.)
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