A medley of six micro-plays celebrating the lust, love, comedy and wonder of human bonding. What happens when you slip out of your mask? When gods visit unannounced? When typists ignore the typos? When that shy girl at the Senior Prom asks politely to cut off your head? And when life begins to taste as sweet as it’s rumored to be?
Written & performed by Conrad Bishop & Elizabeth Fuller
Directed by Conrad Bishop & Whit Maclaughlin, music by Elizabeth Fuller
1m/1w, unit set.
Produced by The Independent Eye, premiering Jan. 23, 1998, at the Eye Theatre Works (Philadelphia, PA); touring 1998-2004 to PA, CA, DE, IN, MA, NY, with extended runs at Theater of the First Amendment (Fairfax, VA), Theatre X (Milwaukee, WI), The Noh Space (San Francisco, CA), Victoria Fringe and Manitoba Fringe; presented at Dell’Arte’s Mad River Festival (Blue Lake, CA) and National Ensemble Theatre Festival (San Francisco, CA). Total of 90 performances.
—Main Line TimesFlowing, poetic staging. The tone is frank, but warm and gentle; they achieve an intimacy with the audience through trust and respect. . . . Mating Cries is a joyous event, a deeply moving evening meant to be experienced with someone you love.
—The Philadelphia InquirerInventive skits, a script replete with insightful, poetic writing, and an appropriate sense of ease and intimacy between the actors. . . . Watching them here, you know they have no doubt that their coming together has been a good idea.
—Philadelphia City PaperAchingly beautiful . . . . At the end of the play, the elderly couple, having become the characters from mythology whose story they are telling, merge with Bishop and Fuller and finally with us in the audience—each of us in the process of being transformed by our own respective couplings, uncouplings and recouplings.
