Location, Mental: Big Screen. Location, Physical: Off Off Broadway

Before I head out on my vacation I wanted to let you know about 3 affordable Off-Off Broadway productions, all of them dipped in movies. Though I'm not generally fond of direct film to stage transfers, I enjoy theater with the cinema on its mind. [Plus, it's an ideal way to work in my theater fascination on this here movie blog. Multi-tasking! -editor] Cross pollination of the arts fascinates... so long as the the stage play still knows it's live theater, the television series remembers it's a continuing narrative and so on and so on and so on.

The Rarest of Birds This is a one man show about Montgomery Clift which stars the hardworking Omar Prince. Prince, with dimpled chin and round eyes, looks a bit more like another star (Tony Curtis) but Monty's hair was right and he captures the voice, too. The voice: it's positively eery at times -hello mimicry! Prince studied all 17 of Monty's films for the performance. The play primarily focuses on the more lurid aspects of the great actors life, courtesy of enough personal demons for an entire family tree let alone one man. Watching it, you can't help but wonder why Hollywood still hasn't made a Clift biopic. It's got everything they love: the Hollywood on Hollywood theme, an opportunity for another celebrity to win an Oscar through mimicry, that whole stratospheric rise to fame and fortune with consequent fall from grace courtesy of drugs, drink and dark secrets. Why haven't they made one yet?
$18 ($15 for students) @ Wings Theater in Greenwich Village. Weekends throughout June.

Cinephilia is a play I've written about before by Leslye Headland. I loved it in its workshop phase. Since then this movie-mad seriocomedy about unhealthy relationships between cinephiles has had a run in LA. Now it's back in NYC. I highly recommend, especially for those of you who feel that the love of cinema sometimes messes with your personal life: quoting them, thinking of them in inappropriate moments, living through them. It's very funny and specifically catered to movie addicts like us.
$18 @ Theater Row on 42nd Street. Now through June 15th.

Kill Me Like You Mean It
This is from the Stolen Chair theater company. They did that swashbuckling Captain Blood meets Greek tragedy experiment I told you about a couple weeks ago. This particular play, part 2 of their 4 part "CineTheatre Tetrology (4 years, 4 productions, 4 classic film styles adapted for the stage)" melds film noir with Ionesco. I haven't seen it but I really liked their swashbuckler and I hear this one is similarly inventive and quite good.
$12 @ Williamsburg's Brick Theater in Brooklyn. June 5th and 8th only