By Stephanie Meditz

The set for “Crooked Shadows” consists mostly of real items that belonged to Rowe’s grandmother, including her wedding dress.

Actress and playwright Shawneen Rowe will honor her late grandmother Rosa by showing modern audiences the relevance that her story still has in their lives.

She will travel back in time and experience her grandmother’s story firsthand in “Crooked Shadows,” a one-woman show directed by Erin Layton on June 2 to 4 at The Broom Tree Theatre in Astoria.

In the opening scene, Rowe describes her grandmother as “the best book [she’s] ever read” and takes the audience on the journey of her life, including the first influenza pandemic in 1918, WWII and the Great Depression.

“I think we sometimes forget that there are individual stories that make up these major events, so [I hope] to kind of put a face on what those experiences were like,” she said in an interview.

She also said that her grandmother’s loss of her father at an early age and her mother’s remarriage to an abusive man were common threads throughout most of her experiences.

“There are a lot of bridges and parallels to things that we have all experienced over the past three years,” Layton said in an interview. “Our first pandemic of the century and understanding a little bit more about how domestic violence presents itself, and family dynamics, family structure, generational sin, how all those things are as…relevant today as they were when Rosa was growing up.”

With two daughters of her own, Rowe finds it important to tell women’s stories of abuse.

One prop in “Crooked Shadows” is a radio that belonged to Rowe’s father.

Before her grandmother’s death, she collected recordings of her grandmother telling these stories, thinking she could use them someday.

“It was a matter of recording the story, recording the laughter and the joy that I felt or the pain that I felt when she told me the story and sewing it together in a compelling way for the audience,” she said. “And I feel like it’s a project that may never be finished.”

Rowe began writing “Crooked Shadows” before the Covid-19 pandemic, but after living through it, she included more details about the pandemic that her grandmother lived through.

“That’s where the conversations really start with audience members. It’s ‘I can see myself reflected there,’” she said. “So I feel like it’s this kind of amoeba of a story that continues to grow with the core of it always focusing on my grandmother.”

Layton, who is a solo performer herself, will make her directorial debut with “Crooked Shadows.”

“Having the opportunity to be on the director’s side of the table as opposed to the performer’s side, I not only selfishly see how much I know and understand as a performer and a storyteller, but really have an opportunity to put on an objective lens about storytelling structure,” she said. “I feel very privileged to be in the position of director for Shawneen’s piece…Shawneen is very adaptive. She is herself a seasoned actor. She’s also an excellent writer.”

“Crooked Shadows” is also Rowe’s debut with City Gate Productions.

“[Layton] has really been a wonderful sort of theater angel to shepherd me through this because I hadn’t had a director before,” she said. “I had performed it all over the place, but I had only been doing it with my own eyes…it doesn’t really work that way when you’re inside the play and you can’t see inside.”

Layton said that audiences are generally drawn to extravagant, flashy productions and often miss out on the powerful storytelling that can come from a single performer.

“It’s a gift. We have an opportunity to really engage with this one person and to listen,” she said. “And I think listening is altogether lost in our society, just really leaning in and actively engaging with someone’s story.”

The play’s set consists almost entirely of real memorabilia from Rowe’s grandmother, including her wedding gown, bed linens and all the handkerchiefs that she gave her granddaughter as a child.

During the play, Rowe pulls items and story starters from her grandmother’s “hope chest.”

Throughout the play, Rowe will pull items out of her grandmother’s hope chest.

“Things like that can resonate with an energy that adds to the flavor of something,” she said.

Rowe hopes that audiences will leave the show with a “warm, fuzzy feeling,” but also the desire to have conversations about women’s place in society.

Writing the play allowed her to “[generate] conversations as an activist regarding domestic abuse or women not having a voice or all of these things that…we think are so much better, but we seem to be backsliding a little bit.”

Tickets for “Crooked Shadows” are available for $15 at https://www.citygateproductions.org/nextshow.

The June 2 and 3 shows will begin at 8 p.m., and the June 4 show is at 3 p.m.

“I loved my grandma so much,” Rowe said. “It’s about her life and how we can look at people’s lives through the lens of our own and what we can learn.”

By Stephanie Meditz

BNW Rep held a staged reading of “The Hook” on the barge at The Waterfront Museum in 2019. Photo by Jody Christopherson.

For the first time, Arthur Miller’s unpublished screenplay “The Hook” will be staged at the same geographic location as the true events on which it is based.

On weekends from June 9 to June 25 at 8 p.m, Brave New World Repertory Theatre will present the screenplay’s American premiere as adapted for the stage by Ron Hutchinson and James Dacre onboard the barge at The Waterfront Museum in Red Hook. The show will also host a preview on June 8.

A Brooklyn Heights resident, Miller penned “The Hook” after he learned the true story of Pete Panto, a longshoreman and activist who worked the docks of Red Hook in the 1930s and was killed by the Mob for fighting corruption in his union.

The titular hook thus refers both to the literal hooks used by longshoremen to hoist crates and goods onto ships and to the neighborhood of Red Hook.

At the beginning of the Red Scare, Columbia Pictures insisted that Miller ascribe corruption on the docks to communism rather than the Mob, and he refused.

“Miller never wanted it to be produced. It languished for seventy years in the archives of the University of Austin, Texas until…an English set designer went to Texas and got the archives,” director and BNW Rep co-founder Claire Beckman said.

When Miller scrapped the screenplay and director Elia Kazan used his idea in the film “On the Waterfront,” they moved it to Hoboken, New Jersey rather than Red Hook, where Pete Panto lived and worked.

“The Hook was Miller’s idea. That really would’ve been stealing his intellectual property because he’s the one who went down to the Hook and did all of the investigation and interviews,” she said. “What I’m trying to do as…the founder of a Brooklyn-based theater company and a Brooklynite myself is right that wrong and bring the story back to the community, literally…where it took place.”

Although there was a strong shipping industry in Hoboken, it was far from the actual docks on which Panto fought corruption.

“He really mobilized men and stood up against this machine, and that happened in Brooklyn,” Beckman said. “Pete Panto was born in Brooklyn, he was the son of immigrants. And it’s important to me, especially because he finally, just recently got a tombstone because his body was in an unmarked grave for many, many years… and he’s sort of being celebrated this year,” Beckman said.

Beckman first read about “The Hook” in Miller’s autobiography, “Timebends.”

She had been waiting for the rights to “A View from the Bridge” until, in 2017, Waterfront Museum captain David Sharps connected her to designer Patrick Connellan, who had just designed the set for the UK production of “The Hook.”

Connellan then connected her to Ron Hutchinson, an Irish playwright and adapter of “The Hook” who was coincidentally moving to Brooklyn.

“We met in Brooklyn and we read the play on the barge in the middle of the winter around a pot bellied stove,” she said. “And I cast the show with actors randomly…just so we could hear it. And it was the first time it had ever been read in America. And on the water, no less.”

The American premiere of “The Hook” will take place in the same location where Pete Panto fought corruption in the 1930s. Photo by Jody Christopherson.

They held a staged reading of “The Hook” in 2019 and were set for a full stage production in 2020 until the COVID-19 pandemic struck, followed by the Omicron variant in 2021.

“This has been a long time coming and we’ve had many, many very devoted supporters waiting patiently for this production, so everybody’s really excited,” Beckman said. “As an industry, theater has been hit really hard by the pandemic.”

The barge at The Waterfront Museum will leave doors open during performances of “The Hook” to ensure a safe, well-ventilated environment.

Beckman has also directed and acted in several Miller plays, including the role of Catherine in “A View from the Bridge” and later Beatrice, protagonist Eddie Carbone’s wife.

“He’s probably my favorite American playwright,” Beckman said. “I’m absolutely in love with his work.”

When she met Miller and he autographed her copy of “A View from the Bridge,” he wrote “I hope you did it good.”

“I feel that I had his blessing, in a way, even though he never lived to find out that I was going to do this American premiere,” she said.

Beckman believes that the Miller estate granted BNW Rep the rights to “The Hook” precisely because the production would take place in Red Hook.

“They know that that would mean a lot to Arthur Miller, who is now gone,” she said.

“The Hook” remained unpublished and unproduced for seventy years.

Now entering its twentieth anniversary season, Brave New World Repertory Theatre’s mission is to make theater more accessible to Brooklyn communities, including actors, writers and audiences.

“It’s very important to me to celebrate both our favorite 20th century Brooklyn playwright and this Brooklyn hero, Pete Panto, who has gone unrecognized for a long time because his story was overshadowed by a story that became about Marlon Brando and Hoboken,” Beckman said.

Beckman said that “The Hook” is the culmination of the twenty years of work in BNW Rep to build a closely knit community of artists with experience working together.

“Part of the mission of our theater company is to examine plays of social justice,” she said. “I have a diverse cast, and I have had to address and figure out how to address issues of race within the context of his play.”

Despite the different social context in which Miller lived and wrote, Beckman considers him a social justice writer of his time.

“I share a kinship with [Miller] I think, because I also am somebody who is driven by a desire to right social wrongs, to address social inequity, to address social justice issues, and to be able to do that in the borough I live in,” she said. “It’s an extreme privilege and a joy.”

Tickets are available for $35 or $18 for students and seniors at https://bravenewworldrep.org.

Loah made her NYC debut at Craic Fest four years ago. Pictured with Craic Fest founder and director Terence Mulligan.

By Stephanie Meditz

“Craic,” an Irish slang term meaning a good, fun time, is exactly what Craic Fest brings to each of its events. 

On April 28 at 7 p.m., Craic Fest will host a Craic Session as its annual spring festival at The Wolfhound in Astoria. 

Craic Fest began in 2004 as an extension of Film Fleadh, an organization founded in 1999 by Terence Mulligan to showcase Irish cinema in New York City.

Since then, the festival has been renamed Craic Fest, and it spotlights the best of both Irish music and film. 

Craic Fest has hosted many celebrities over its 22 years of operation, including Liam Neeson, Jim Sheridan and Cillian Murphy. 

Craic Session will be a one-night music festival to spotlight Irish artists, and it is a smaller scale version of the larger festival. 

“The initiative and the agenda for Craic Session is to get people out from Astoria and Long Island City,” Terence Mulligan, Craic Fest founder and director, said in a phone interview. “It’s not just an Irish cultural music fest. We’re reaching out to a diverse audience in Queens, and specifically in the Astoria area.” 

Headlining the Craic Session will be Irish singers Loah and Aoife Scott. 

Loah is an Irish-Sierra Leonean singer-songwriter whose music crosses genre boundaries with a mix of Afro-soul. 

“She’s Irish, but she also crosses over to other music genres because of her act,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons why we chose her…there’s a lot of Irish in Queens. But also it crosses over to people who like world music in general.” 

Loah has toured in the U.S., Ireland, the United Kingdom and Sierra Leone.

Four years ago, she performed to a sold out show at Craic Fest at the Mercury Lounge.

“That’s actually one of the best shows we had, with Loah,” Mulligan said. “People still talk about her set from four years ago.” 

Aoife Scott is an Irish folk singer-songwriter with soulful lyrics. 

She uses her heritage as a form of self-expression, and she often sings about history, political topics and parts of the world she has visited. 

“I sing songs that I think are important stories to tell, as any other folk singer would do,” she said in a Zoom interview.

She also tells stories in between songs to provide context. 

Aoife Scott is an Irish folk singer-songwriter who will perform at the Craic Session.

Since she comes from a family of musicians, Scott was hesitant to write her own music until her early twenties. 

“It took me a long time to get to become a performer and a musician. I kind of had told myself because of the weight of coming from such a musical family, that I was trying not to be in their business anymore at all. I wanted to go and do my own path,” she said. 

She will perform a set at the Craic Session with her partner Andrew Meaney. 

“It’s a bit of craic, a bit of madness,” Scott said. “My main aim is if I can make people laugh, make people cry by the end of my show, then I’ve done my job pretty well.” 

Scott frequently visits New York – last month, she performed a show at the Irish Center in Long Island City, and she visits the U.S. roughly twice a year on tour. 

Last year, she performed nearly 120 tour dates, only ten of which were in Ireland. 

“Performing for me is the main reason why I’m a musician. I love performing, I love telling stories and I love singing songs and connecting with people,” she said. “During COVID…I really realized how much it is part of my identity to be able to be a performer, to be traveling to places and to be sharing Irish stories with everybody else.” 

Scott will release her new album entitled “Selected” next month.

Craic Session was funded by the Cultural Immigrant Initiative and Councilmember Julie Won. 

This is the second year that Craic Fest has received funding from this initiative. 

“[Loah and Aoife Scott] are major headliners. They play at festivals all over the world,” Mulligan said. “We’re in a really fortunate position to showcase these two acts. Normally we wouldn’t be able to do that, because this grant gives us the opportunity to show two world class musical talents.” 

The Craic Session will also include a surprise musical guest as the opening act. 

“The opening act is a solo male performer who has a strong following on Instagram and he’s definitely going to be the next big thing out of Ireland. So people will be treated to an opening act who’s on the way up,” he said.  

The Craic Session is a free event, but it requires RSVPs at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/craic-session-tickets-589926836047. 

CraicFest will also host an LGBT film fest on June 15 at the New York Irish Center. 

“Eight Tales of Pedro” to open on May 5

“Eight Tales of Pedro” is a thought-provoking testament both to the Latino experience and the immigrant experience.

By Stephanie Meditz

Just in time for Cinco de Mayo, Queens Theatre will present a thought-provoking story about Latino identity and the immigrant experience. 

On May 5, Mark-Eugene Garcia’s award-winning play, “Eight Tales of Pedro,” will begin its run with music by Luis D’Elias. 

The play will feature music by Luis D’Elias, who has been with the play since its inception. 

The cast consists entirely of Latino actors, four of whom were part of the original cast at the play’s 2018 premiere. 

That same year, the play won the UnFringed Festival Best of the Festival Prize. 

Most recently, it won the 2021 Jerry Harrington Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Musical Theatre. 

“Eight Tales of Pedro” includes two settings that ultimately converge: Pedro and his companions traveling to Veracruz in 17th-century Mexico and six scared, uncertain immigrants in a van as they travel from Mexico across the border. 

“The stories are a series of folktales that take a storyteller from one side of Mexico to another in search of his love,” playwright Mark-Eugene Garcia said in a phone interview. 

The play has themes of Latino pride and honor in oneself. 

Garcia has always loved the Latino folktales of Pedro Urdamales and Juan Bobo, and he knew that he wanted to write a play based on them. 

He worried the stories would not be relevant at the time, so they remained on the shelf for years. 

However, the recent uptick in anti-immigration sentiment in the United States inspired him to stage them.

“It’s a very funny play and then it quickly turns into something that is now, and something that is personal and sometimes sad,” he said. “Really, what I want people to do is think and feel.” 

“Eight Tales of Pedro” follows two connected storylines: one from 17th century Mexico and one in the present day.

A California native who never learned Spanish, Garcia often felt like he did not live up to people’s expectations of him.

“I started thinking about how we have this identity as…people of color who are kind of caught between two worlds,” he said. “It was about finding pride, but also about talking about the situation that Latinos in this country face…I’m brown enough for him, the guy who was just judging me on that, but often not for the people in my life.” 

Garcia hopes that “Eight Tales of Pedro” humanizes immigrants for the public and sheds light on the commonalities between people. 

“Sometimes when you look at the news or you look at people’s rhetoric or so on, we hear about numbers…but we don’t think of them as people,” he said. “For me, the important part of this story was looking at people first and then their immigration status or where they’re coming from or where they’re going.” 

Garcia is especially excited to present “Eight Tales of Pedro” in Queens, where he has lived for the past sixteen years. 

“I had no idea what diversity was until I moved to Queens,” he said. “I met people from countries I’d never known about and I learned about cultures I’d never even thought about…Queens Theatre is that center of it all. It’s just a beautiful, beautiful place that centers on humanity and storytelling, and that’s something that I feel my show does.”

The play’s cast consists entirely of Latino actors.

Garcia was thrilled to work on this project with director Rodrigo Ernesto Bolaños, his husband. 

“Something I joke about is that he’s in the business of making my dreams come true, because I put everything down and he’s like, ‘Okay, this is how it’s going to happen,’” he said. “We’ve been really lucky to have this experience with this show. I feel that it’s kind of a love letter to each other and to what we do.” 

Garcia described a scene in which two characters pull a blanket out of a backpack and it becomes a mountain that people climb. 

Although it was a difficult task, Bolaños found a way to bring that scene to life onstage. 

“It’s a really cool moment of magical realism that I can’t think of anyone else being able to pull off other than the two of us,” Garcia said. 

Tickets for “Eight Tales of Pedro” are available for $20 or 4 for $75 with code 4FOR75 at https://queenstheatre.org/event/eight-tales-of-pedro/ or by calling (718)-760-0064. 

The May 5 performance will include open captions in Spanish, and the May 7 performance will be audio described.