Rick Groel

Grapefruit

Cecilia Dougherty

Jill Garellick, Azian Nurudin

With an all-female cast, featuring Suzie Bright as John Lennon, Cecilia Dougherty's Grapefruit plays with the romanticized history of the iconic Fab Four, gently mocking John and Yoko’s banal squabbles and obsessive rituals of self-display. Based obliquely on Yoko Ono’s book, the piece works on many levels to reposition this mythic tale of the Beatles by casting '80s women in mod drag—effectively mapping the lesbian sub-culture onto heterosexual mass culture. Discounting the importance of reproducing facts and historical accuracy, Dougherty gives an incisive reading of the creation of pop culture icons: it doesn’t matter who plays John Lennon because ultimately John Lennon is not a person anymore. As a star, he is a projection of our society’s collective needs and desires.

Laws of Gravity

Nick Gomez

Peter Greene, Adam Trese

Jimmy and Jon are a couple of Brooklyn guys who somehow never found their way into workaday society; they never found their way into big-time crime, either.

Ambition

Hal Hartley

George Feaster, Hannah Sullivan

Follows a day in the life of a young artist who longs for professional success and the attention of beautiful women, but who encounters only frustration and violence.

The Clown Tape

Rick Groel

This is a bizarre documentary/mockumentary that I happened upon one day at my local Goodwill. It tells the story of a man who travels across country, from San Francisco to Brooklyn, dressed up as a clown. He does this in an effort to recreate a similar voyage undertaken by a man in the midst of an existential crisis some years earlier.