Archive

There are four sides to every story... Yours, Mine, the Truth, and what the Crazy Guy Outside Licking the Road thinks...

Blue Bar

Go to front page.

30.December.2003

New iTunes 40.

25.November.2003

Photoshop Phun!

21.November.2003

Milboard iTunes 40 debuts

18.November.2003

More reviews are in...

From the City Paper...

Anger Box: Calling all you sworn enemies of the Lord Jesus Christ, his minions, and his counterparts. Take up your abortion tools and your tempeh-stained copies of The World Famous Atheist Cookbook and hie thee over to the Source Theatre, where Cherry Red Productions is giving a spirited (if decidedly unspiritual) airing to the secular-humanist self-congratulation-fest that is Jeff Goode's Anger Box. Goode, as usual, laces high-concept camp with stinging satire, but he's fighting well above his weight class, using a string of 10 monologues to throw windmill punches at the notion that anyone could possibly believe in God. The playwright settles for tossing out caricatures of the religiose and assorted other nutjobs to all us lefty loosies who revile religion as the root of all evil. The script adds up to a variety show of ridicule, with Goode seeming to hardly care if the monologues thematically converse and the evening quickly sinking into a succession of laugh lines--along with the usual Cherry Red method of fishing for giggles just by saying things like "papal semen" out loud. Even in its funnier scenes, as when the goddess Nike (Monique LaForce) lays out her grudge against the fellow deity who made the brilliantly careerist name change to "God," Box seldom floats above the level of Saturday Night Live set piece. Still, director Michelle T. Hall has inspired her cast, especially Jenny Morris as Charon, the Wisconsin-accented waitress of the underworld, and Kate Debelack, who brings deliciously misplaced intensity to her virgin obsessed with having the pope's baby. "There's something about him," she says. "He's so infallible--you just want to fuck him up!" But Box is really just preaching to the converted. (RLL) Source Theatre 1835 14th St. NW. Fridays & Saturdays at 11 p.m. $15 to Dec. 27 (202) 298-9077

Anger Box
by Jolene Munch
Published on 11/13/2003

Someone bounced Jeff Goode’s reality check. The celebrated playwright of such raw works as The Eight: Reindeer Monologues and Poona the Fuckdog and Other Plays for Children is angry, and perhaps justifiably so. His psyche goes under the microscope in full magnification in Cherry Red’s world premiere production of Anger Box.

Sometimes funny, but always politically incorrect, Goode writes with a pen-as-sword mentality, leaving no group unscathed, no person without offense. His ten solo pieces shrewdly examine various facets of opinions on Christianity and other faith-based ideology with humor and boundless voracity. His monologues converge as one long rant, courtesy of ten "Pissy Peeps. " From a moody prostitute sleeping with Satan ("Yes, he’s rough, but so is the commute ") to his psychopath virgin waiting to rock the Pope’s world ("Celibacy sucks ass "), Goode’s characters offer skewed perspectives on the realities of life in America and elsewhere.

Director Michelle T. Hall’s production is straightforward, treating the material with a traditional approach when it should be anything but. Goode’s script offers endless staging opportunities, but Hall’s actors seem confined by the bare space and inhibited by the box itself. The point is missed on a lot of talking heads.

The best scenes of the evening are delivered by Ian Allen in a dry, non-theatrical piece on non-believers; Tony Greenberg’s hilarious Jesus freak cum elfin Santa worshipper; and, in the funniest turn, of the evening, Monique LaForce as a tyrannical Nike, goddess of victory (you know, she did come before the shoe). LaForce offers the most conviction as the narcissistic champion who claims, "This Jesus kid -- he plays a good game, " and "There was a period during the Trojan War when I was named ‘Most Popular Deity’ seventy-nine weeks in a row. Let’s see Britney do that! "

Anger Box is not without its earnest questioning: In the final piece of the evening, Kathleen Akerley offers the best artistic interpretation in the provocative "This Rock, " a monologue about God’s ability to test faith during and after the World Trade Center attacks. Akerley’s beautiful but startling moment of sobriety is the redemptive savior in a brief collection of lukewarm, hit-and-miss scenes.

Anger Box
By Jeff Goode
Through 12/27
Cherry Red
At Source Theatre
1835 14th Street NW
$15
202-298-9077

12.November.2003

"Powerful... Chilling... The anger is palpable."

'Anger Box': Something Wicked This Way Comes

By Tricia Olszewski
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, November 12, 2003; Page C09

Leave it to Cherry Red Productions to stage a 75-minute show about God containing lines that can't be quoted in a family newspaper. But the show is, after all, titled "Anger Box," and what's a good tirade without a few -- or very, very many -- choice expletives?

"Anger Box" is a series of 10 monologues on topics ranging from the everyday, such as troublesome neighbors and tests of faith, to the taboo or fanciful, such as lusting after the pope or being Satan's girlfriend. It's written by Jeff Goode (author of an earlier Cherry Red work whose title can't be printed here), and each monologue is performed by a different actor. Many in the cast will be familiar to fans of the theater company, which used to boast it was dedicated to smut.

Now -- at least for the run of "Anger Box" -- Cherry Red, bless its wicked heart, claims to be dedicated to Jesus.

"Anger Box" opens with an eponymously titled diatribe, delivered by Jason Milner, that's not explicitly about God but rather about morality.

Dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans and sporting a dark, bushy beard, Milner looks like a drywall contractor who's barely making ends meet. His monologue, one of the most powerful of the evening, begins as a sound-off that could very well be coming from your neighbor: The foreign-born owner of a nearby gas station was killed, but nobody liked him anyway, and besides, when it's so difficult for Americans to start a business, why should locals be forced to put money in an immigrant's pocket every time their trucks run out of gas? The anger in these sentiments is palpable, but then the rant goes a chilling step further, suggesting that Milner's character is much more than a mere bigot and demonstrating how a dangerous mind can lurk behind an Everyman demeanor.

Though bookended by a similarly gut-wrenching reflection on Sept. 11, 2001, by Kathleen Akerley that sarcastically muses on God's artistry that day -- so precisely assembling the people who needed to be "tested" beside those whose time was simply up -- "Anger Box" mostly keeps the philosophizing light and shamelessly silly. Highlights include Monique LaForce, who gives a hilarious performance as Nike, slightly drunken goddess of victory who lost status when humanity developed the "It's how you play the game" attitude; Yan Xi as a power-hungry Devil-lover who justifies her relationship with her gangsta-like boyfriend by saying, "Yes, he's rough, but so is the commute!"; and Tony Greenberg, sporting a button-bursting red suit, Bible and pasted-on grin, who asks the members of the audience whether they've accepted Santa Claus as their personal savior.

"Anger Box's" theme, however, seems to be best expressed in "None-Believer," delivered by Cherry Red Artistic Director Ian Allen. Allen discusses the false logic of "just wars" (the point being to kill evildoers, "not the evildoers' children, not the Red Cross workers") and contends that most people wouldn't behave the way they do if they truly believed God existed. Claiming that he can't find a believer who isn't stumped, after asserting faith, by the simple inquiry "Really?," Allen spouts off a wonderfully breathless speech about the certainty of the Almighty and then says, "That's the correct answer." "Anger Box" doesn't profess to have all the answers, but it sure makes the questions fun.

Anger Box by Jeff Goode. Directed by Michelle T. Hall. Costumes, Rhonda Key; lighting, Jason Milner; sound, Lucas Zarwell. Approximately 1 hour 15 minutes. Through Dec. 27 at Source Theatre, 1835 14th St. NW. Call 202-298-9077.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

6.November.2003

Anger Box press photos night

If you would like more info about the show, go to Cherry Red's website. In brief, though, it's ten angry monologues (hence the title, Anger Box) all of which have something to do, in one warped way or another, with religion or God or something of the like. It's funny, and pissy, and at points will even poke into the dark corners where people put things like faith, conviction, beliefs and all that other stuff. It's really a great show, and I'm continually shocked that they wanted me to be a part of it.

At any rate, without further adieu, pictures of me.

The shot that may end up in the papers

"Why does it have to be a special category?"

Hands? They go in pockets.

Hands? They should be flung out to the sides.

16.April.2003

Boston invasion continues...

[Dispatch from Police State of Washington] More photo phun as Dann Brown (star winger of the Boston Bruins and ace reliever for the Washington Senators) paid a visit. Too much walking was involved, and I swear next time I meet someone at Dupont Metro, I'll remember all of the fine eateries along SEVENTEENTH STREET. Jesus, I'm dumb sometimes.

20.January.2003

Coyote Women? Got 'em!

[Freaks exposed!] The latest photo of me has an inordinate amount of hair on my cranium. Rumors are that I'm attempting to excersize what few follicles still participate in the follicle-excersizing process. This is the cast, director and stage manager (me) of the latest Cherry Red show, Coyote Woman.

31.October.2002

This really isn't CNN...

[One obsession after another.] I'm not nearly as fanatical about the greatness of CNN since after 9/11 (when they completed their dumbing-down process begun for OJ in 1995), but while I find them often insipid, I still like them enough to continue collecting their ID promos, which I have collected for you here. These are the 5-second "This is CNN" snippets, as they've appeared over the years. The files included are:

• cnn1995: This version was recorded by me in 1995, but it may be somewhat older in origin, as it sounds very similar to the IDs that appeared in their Desert Storm coverage in 1991.
• cnn1998: This version is very similar to the previous one, except the orchestration on the music bed is somewhat different, and James Earl Jones re-recorded the tagline.
• cnn2001: This was a relatively boring (and, as it turns out, short-lived) ID that debuted early during the summer of 2001, when the network was going through its White Phase.
• cnnwtc: By far my favorite of the bunch, this is a highly orchestrated ID promo with a completely new music bed that seemed to have been written to capture the national fervor following the 9/11 attacks. Easily 5 of the most over-produced seconds in sound history, and I love every bit of it.
• cnn2002: This one made its debut right around the time that the WTC ID debuted as well, but took a back seat until this year, when the nation collectively got back to normal. It uses the same tag Jones recorded for the ID used after 9/11.
• cnn1998i: CNN International is a very different, much more worthwhile news channel than its American cousin. Better reporting, less glitz - what CNN used to be. As such, it's widely unavailable to the US market unless you're rich enough to afford extended digital programming. At any rate, the CNN-I promos are much more visually appealing and much less the marvel of audio production that CNN's are. Nevertheless, here's the one I was able to capture in 2000. It sounds like it uses a traditional CNN-I music bed, with the James Earl Jones tag as it was in 1998.

WANTED: If you have (or know where I can acquire) the ID promos for CNNfn and the defunct CNN/SI, or any other of the CNN channels, please let me know.

17.September.2002

Days of our lives: Counter-from-scratch debuts.

Bucking the trend of his own right-brainedness, webmaster J-fhqwhgad finally squeezes enough water from the Rosetta Stone to put a module on his web page that actually functions (!), counting the number of days he's been a pox upon the Earth. Right click and choose "View Source" for details.

5.September.2002

Again, from the top.

As recently unreported by Slashdot and Yahoo!, I've once again revived the effort to have a web site that marginally reflects the state of my life. Until that happens, however, here's a few links to what I've been doing with my life in the past few years.

Random blue bar promotes symmetry!