OPEN, SAYS-A ME

posted by James Reel

    Previews galore from me in the latest Tucson Weekly. Not enough space for ’em all, alas, so first comes a two-in-one package. Or is it three-in-one?

    Two local theater producers are thinking big this weekend.
    Arizona Onstage Productions, which usually presents offbeat shows in small venues, is moving into the Temple of Music and Art this weekend and next for its most extravagant (and mainstream) production to date, The Full Monty. Meanwhile, Chamber Music Plus Southwest is cramming two different shows into a single weekend. One, with live classical music, has Sharon Gless (of Queer as Folk and Cagney & Lacey) narrating an imagined correspondence between poet Emily Dickinson and "Swedish Nightingale" Jenny Lind; the other, with an original jazz score by Avery Sharpe, presents Jasmine Guy (A Different World, Dead Like Me, many Broadway shows) in Raisin' Cane: A Harlem Renaissance Odyssey.

    Gavin Kayner's output as a writer includes six full-length plays, two one-acts, several shorter pieces and three screenplays. And that's just since he retired from teaching five years ago.
    As if he weren't busy enough, Kayner has formed a company--Piquant Plays Productions, or P³--expressly to mount his play Thumbs. Kayner describes it as "the story of a young man named Isaac who, stripped of an emotional and a spiritual context, loses a grip on his sanity. With the help of a psychiatrist facing his own dilemma, Isaac struggles to gain some grace by unraveling the knot of his past."
    Says Kayner, "It's an idea play, about the eternal and infernal questions we're all burdened with. I don't know the answers, and it's much more interesting to the audience if I don't. I'm trying to be entertaining and provocative, and give people something to talk about afterward--unlike The Odd Couple, which, once you've seen it, you've seen it."