Hottest Tickets at FringeNYC — Final Update
August 25, 2010
I thought I’d give everyone a final report on the most popular shows at FringeNYC 2010. The measurement here is based on number of tickets sold via Ticketweb links on our nytheatre.com pages. Here’s the top ten:

Two Sizes Too Small
Gate B23
A Matter of Choice
Jew Wish
Ghost of Dracula
Pigpen Presents: A Nightmare Story
Jurassic Parq: The Broadway Musical
Bunked!: A New Musical
Saving Throw Versus Love
By Hands Unknown

Posted by Martin/nytheatre.com

Our last performance at this year’s Fringe Festival is this Wednesday at 9. The critics are raving about our premiere run; don’t miss out on this exciting theatrical event.

The practice of lynching remains one of the ugliest parts of American history. Unearthing the past, “By Hands Unknown” offers its audience a look inside the lives of those it affected most. A collection of historical dramas written in the early 1900s, conceiver and co-director (with Harvey Huddleston) Kym Gomes’ construction of the stories hits hard, rolling from heartbreak to heartbreak. It’s the kind of content that builds emotions and is quick to win over audiences.

… Nancy Keegan and Phil John give standout performances, each playing a variety of roles. Safiya Fredericks gives a forceful recitation of poetry between the plays, accompanied by guitarist Nathan Yates.
—Natalia Tamzoke, Backstage (August 16, 2010)

**** (Out of five; “Recommended”)
By all conventional rules, gathering a half-dozen playlets and sticking them together with carefully intoned poems should feel like a student project. Actors bustle in and out, the same point is made ad nauseam (sic), and the whole thing concludes with a choral recital of a senatorial resolution. Eek. And yet Kym Gomes and Harvey Huddleston’s production of six short plays about lynching, written between 1919 and 1938, actually gains resonance from its dogged reiterations. It does, after all, bear repeating that thousands of men, many of them just teenagers, were killed in this country by rabid white mobs. Of the four authors represented, the most interesting is Georgia Douglas Johnson, in whose plays the silence of God—a congregation begs vainly for divine intervention, hymns drift through an open window—parallels the silence of an indifferent government. It’s damning and important work, and the cumulative effect is devastating.
—Helen Shaw, Time Out New York (August 20, 2010)

Brava Company’s By Hands Unknown bills itself as “a collection of powerful historical dramas,” seven short plays all dealing with the practice of lynching. Although the promotions state the plays were “based on eyewitness accounts,” I somehow didn’t realize this meant the plays were all written in the 1920s and 1930s. I hadn’t thought writers of the period gave the topic much ink—as I suspect may be true of others, the Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit” is the only anti-lynching statement I was aware of. This is probably what motivated creator Kym Gomes to dig up these seven plays, all of them “little known and largely unproduced,” to give them all their due.

A hefty ensemble of 18 actors guides us through the works—there is “Aftermath,” featuring a young soldier home on leave from the trenches of World War I, only to have his patriotism shaken when he finds that while he’s been off “fighting for freedom” in France, his father had been lynched a year prior; his sister simply couldn’t bear to tell him the news. In the heartbreaking “Safe,” a young mother is just going into labor when a lynching sets up outside their house. A visiting neighbor tries to usher her away from the sight by telling her “your job is to make sure your child is safe,” which leads the mother to choose extreme and sad lengths to ensure her baby boy’s “safety” when he is finally born.

… The final play, though, is striking—and Gomes adds a contemporary coda to underscore it. With his 1938 work “Kill That Bill!”, playwright Robert E. Williams used transcripts from a Senate session in which several Southern Senators filibustered to block a proposed anti-lynching law. The cast seems to have great fun with this work, giving the Senators real moustache-twirling nastiness; but at the play’s end, Gomes screens clips from a recent Senate press conference held to announce an official “Lynching Victims Senate Apology Resolution.” Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) and John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) explain that 200 such bills were presented before Congress between 1880 and the 1950s, and all were voted down, largely blocked by the Senate; in 2005 the Senate issued a formal apology for their failure to act, and the cast assembles onstage at the end of the play to recite it. The fullest impact of this moment didn’t hit me until I got home, however, and looked up the resolution—even though the Senate apologized for past failures, there still is no anti-lynching law in this country to this day, and I honestly wonder why.
—Kimberly Wadsworth, nytheatre.com (August 13, 2010)

Everybody involved with By Hands Unknown would like to thank everyone who came out Friday for the world premiere of this important theatrical project. We have five more performances scheduled at this year’s Fringe.

Photos © Claudia Turbides

A Brava Company/Chelsea Rep LAB Production

Conceived by Kym Gomes
Directed by Harvey Huddleston, Kym Gomes
Associate Directors Carmen Balentine, Ravin Patterson
Music Director Bruce Baumer
Costumes by Jennifer Anderson

Featuring Carmen Balentine, Michael Bunin, Valerie Elizabeth Donaldson, Safiya Fredericks*, Kym Gomes, Matt Hammond, Phil John, Nancy Keegan, Jamil Moore, Brett Pack, Alison Parks, Ravin Patterson, Jihan Ponti, Rick Schneider, Stefania Diana Schramm, Vonetta Steward, Temesgen Tocruray, Nathan Yates

Follow this link to get your tickets today!

Performance dates for By Hands Unknown at the 2010 New York International Fringe Festival are :

Friday, August 13th at 9:00 pm
Tuesday, August 17th at 6:45 pm
Thursday, August 19th at 3:00 pm
Saturday, August 21st at 4:45 pm
Wednesday, August 25th at 9:00 pm

By Hands Unknown has been assigned to The New School For Drama Theater located at 151 Bank Street in the heart of the West Village. Stay tuned for performance dates to be announced next week!

The producers of By Hands Unknown would like to thank everyone for coming out Monday night to support our first fundraiser. The generous support of friends and family is most appreciated and helping to make this exciting project possible. Keep checking back here for the next one or sign up for our RSS feed to get all the latest updates. In addition, we’re working on an online donations page for anybody who’d like contribute that way.

Join Brava Company and Chelsea Rep LAB for our first FringeNYC 2010 fundraiser this Monday. There will be complimentary passed shots from 7:00-8:00 and Happy Hour drink and food specials all night.

Monday, June 7th
7:00-10:00 pm
Obivia Lounge
201 Lafayette Street (Located on the corner of Lafayette and Kenmare)
$20.00 suggested donation at the door

Please come out and support our groundbreaking and historical work.