The House Of Yes Dec. 2-17, 2011

Written by Wendy MacLeod

Directed by: Robyne Parrish

With: Erika Cuenca, Virginia Wall Gruenert, Lauren Michaels
Justin Mohr, John Steffenauer

“…A fascinating blend of frivolous family politics and menacing political allegory….It is wickedly funny, disturbing and vividly written….MacLeod writes funny, frightening dialogue, and she touches the nerve of our cozy, vicarious involvement with acts of public violence”
San Francisco Chronicle

“Gripping, funny and worth its reputation.”
Time Out, London

“MacLeod gets us there with a fertile and original screwball voice that puts her in a league with such erudite young satirists of America’s privileged class as Nicky Silver and Richard Greenberg.”
Newsday

The Pascal family is the embodiment of dysfunction. Set in their formerly stately mansion in McLean, Virginia, the play begins when Marty Pascal brings his new fiancée, Lesly, home for Thanksgiving dinner. Nobody is thankful. Not puppyish younger brother Anthony, not alcoholic Mama who hurries to the kitchen to lock up the knives, and certainly not Marty’s twin sister Jackie-O, recently released from a mental hospital, whose passions are equally divided between a role-model fixation on Jackie Kennedy and an implacable incestuous addiction to Marty. Jackie-O goes over the edge and attempts to undermine Lesly and Marty’s betrothal, with deadly consequences.

Dec. 2-3, 9-10, 15-17 at 8pm
Matinee Dec. 11 at 3 pm.

Shaken & Stirred 2011

Interview with the Playwright, Virginia Wall Gruenert and the Director Robyne Parrish.

Oct. 7-8, 14-16, 20-22, 2011 Off The Wall Theater, Washington
Oct. 26-29, 2011 Theatre 54, New York, NY.


Tickets: Click Here

Shaken &Stirred 2011

Written by: Virginia Wall Gruenert
Directed by: Robyne Parrish
With: Karen Baum, Erika Cuenca,
Virginia Wall Gruenert, Robyne Parrish 


Off the Wall’s Theater’s highly successful debut production, Shaken & Stirred, is back!
Voted Readers’ Choice “Best of 2007″ in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Virginia Wall Gruenert’s powerful play recounts the stories of indomitable women struggling with the toll alcohol has taken on their lives, and the lives of those they love. Carrying all the despair, devastation, and fear that accompany addiction, these ladies valiantly attempt to summon up the strength to overcome. Don’t miss the re-staging of this compelling play before its New York City premiere at Theatre 54.

Shaken & Stirred - The Playwright

NOTES FROM THE AUTHOR

Bowery Bum.

That’s the politically incorrect term that could have applied to my paternal grandfather James, except that he didn’t come from the Bowery. He came, originally, from County Galway in Ireland to the great city of New York. His wife, my grandmother Catherine, came from County Monaghan.

Grandpa James didn’t live in the Bowery, either. He and my grandmother settled into a tenement on West 51^st St. in a neighborhood affectionately known to this day as Hell’s Kitchen, which at the time – the time being the late 19^th, early 20^th century - was a bastion of poor and working class Irish immigrants.

James, Catherine, and their three boys fell under the category of “poor.” In fact, I believe “dirt poor” would be a more accurate description. You see, James could not hold down a job to support his family – he was an active alcoholic. So when Catherine had finally had enough, she showed the iron backbone with which God blessed all Irish women and threw him out, making him homeless and making my father, the oldest son, man of the house. He was eleven at the time. He quit school, lied about his age, and went to work, while his mother got the rent lowered by scrubbing the halls and stairways in their tenement.

Fast forward almost twenty years later. My parents, not yet married, were out on the town in Manhattan with a group of friends when a panhandler approached them for money. My Dad recognized the vagrant as his father, pulled him aside, briefly spoke to him, and gave him a few bucks. As far as I know, that was the first time he’d seen James since he left home. It was also the last. Some years later someone – I don’t know who – notified my Dad that his father had died. My father paid to have him buried. Where, I don’t know.

The interesting part of this story is that it all came to me from my mother and my siblings. My father never spoke to me of Grandpa James. Never once.

- Virginia Wall Gruenert