Two solo plays, each written and performed by the woman whose life it draws on, will share a bill as Two Women, Two Lifetimes, One Evening at NFT@WP Theater on the Upper West Side, November 28 through December 20.
Woodie King Jr.'s New Federal Theatre is hosting the pairing: The Crone Barrier by June Ballinger, produced by Impact Theatre NYC, and Just Me by Perri Gaffney, produced by Perri Tales. Previews are November 28, November 29 and December 2, all at 3pm, and the opening is Thursday, December 3 at 7pm.
In The Crone Barrier, Ballinger looks back from the age of 70 at a life in which she was repeatedly told her responses to trauma were not those expected of a woman. Signed up by a friend for an unorthodox empowerment workshop, she works back through her childhood, marriage, losses and experiences of violation, with the Virgin Mary as an unexpected guide. She plays every character herself, her younger self and her late ex-husband included. The title borrows from astronomy: it is modeled on the heliopause, the boundary where the sun's outward push meets the pressure of interstellar space. Astral photographs by Michael Goldstein accompany the cosmic passages, and Fay Van Alstyne Simpson, artistic director of Impact Theatre NYC, directs the piece, which is still in development.
Gaffney's Just Me is a multimedia piece drawing on American folk tales and the West African griot tradition. It follows a precocious girl growing up in Black America between the 1950s and the 1970s, from a wedding at the age of five (and a phone reunion with the groom decades on) to her anger at the Dick and Jane readers, a summer spent facing Jim Crow in the South, and the friend who taught her to be brave. Dwight Smith directs, with projections, sound and scenic backdrops by Fredric Michaels.
"Some people know me as compassionate and considerate. Others think I'm an uncompromising know-it-all," Gaffney said. "'Just Me' is about how that little girl became both." Elizabeth Van Dyke, NFT's producing artistic director, said the two women "come from different worlds, but they share the same gumption."
Ballinger was in the original Broadway cast of Pack of Lies and ran Trenton's Passage Theatre Company for 22 years; on screen she has appeared in Only Murders in the Building, The Blacklist and Law & Order: SVU. Gaffney's solo play The Resurrection of Alice, adapted from her own novel, brought her a Helen Hayes Award nomination, and her Off-Broadway credits include A Raisin in the Sun and Harlem Duet.
Performances run Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays at 3pm and Thursdays and Fridays at 7pm, with a running time of 2 hours 15 minutes including an intermission. General admission is $30 to $49, and Wednesdays are pay-what-you-can. The Crone Barrier includes discussion of sexual assault. NFT@WP Theater is at 2162 Broadway, at 76th Street. Tickets are available from the New Federal Theatre website.
