Hunter Canning Phoebe Silva and Michael Criscuolo in “Decompression.”

Tickets go on sale for the Fringe Festival today, meaning the explosion of cutting edge, experimental and just plain out-there theater is right around the corner. It also means that a mountain of intriguing press releases have once again landed in The Local’s mailbox. Here are our 10 favorite excerpts from the 61 releases accompanying next month’s annual celebration of the avant garde.

I Married A Nun: “Recounts the wild life adventures of 78-year-old, ukulele playing, world traveling, bisexual, Bostonian, Jewish gal — Ms. D’yan Forest. Through her tales of fun with the nun, their tragic divorce, forbidden nights in the demimonde of Paris, humorous mishaps of falling off a camel in Tibet, the courageous Ms. D’yan Forest exposes her inner self for all to see. Throughout the show, the story is interspersed with meaningful parodies performed on her uke.”

Alice & The Bunny Hole. Josiah DeAndrea and Michelle Wood in “Alice.”

BANG! The Curse of John Wilkes Booth: “Features one actor playing 30 roles in this twisted shocker performed in verse, song, magic, sideshow antics and stand-up comedy. You’ll be astonished at how your American History books lied to you about Booth in this theatrical extravaganza that was banned from performance in Booth’s hometown of Baltimore! Plus, there’s a mummy involved! Was Booth really captured and killed by Federal troops in a burning barn in 1865, or did he escape, aided by a secret society, and live under various aliases until he committed suicide in Enid, Oklahoma Territory, in 1903? Prepare to be amazed!”
Read more…

On Friday, “Union Square” came to Houston Street: Nancy Savoca’s movie about estranged sisters who hash out their differences in an airy Union Square apartment opened at Angelika. The film is set just outside of the East Village: at one point, the more high-strung of the siblings, who runs a health food company not entirely unsimilar to actual Union Square company One Lucky Duck, gives her address as 886 Broadway, which would put her in the W & J Sloane Building, between 18th and 19th Streets. No wonder her sister thinks her place is “crazy awesome.”

Most of the “action” takes place inside this loft as the brash and boisterous Lucy (played by Mira Sorvino), who’s in the neighborhood to shop for tacky bags at Filene’s Basement (R.I.P.), tries to reconnect with the crunchy, cloistered Jenny (Tammy Blanchard), a vegan convert who’s so ashamed of her Bronx roots, her rough-around-the-edges Italian-American family, and her secret past as a (gasp!) smoker that she tells her hunky fiancée that she’s from Maine.

As The Times notes in its review, the movie is fairly theatrical in its contained setting and dramatic conversation. But perhaps the best bit of dialogue happens to be ad-libbed, and involves Andrew Cote, the beekeeper who a couple of months ago helped out with that Bowery swarm and then relocated some Central Park bees to the Sixth Street Community Center. Read more…

Despite the recent bad news, there are still plenty of great record stores in the East Village where you can walk in and get down with some new sounds. That’s why each week we’ll ask the clerks at our favorite shops what they happen to be listening to. Here’s what’s spinning at Turntable Lab.

Tim Schreier Left to Right: Carson DeYoung’s piece, Yok, Sheryo and Beau

Here it is! Cycle 4 of the Centre-Fuge Public Art Project, wherein curators Jonathan Neville and Pebbles Russell (a.k.a. Pebbles van Peebles) bring new art to a construction trailer on East First Street every other month. No celebrity cameos this time around, except of course for the artists themselves. Tim Schreier shot them at work between First and Second Avenues over the weekend. Read more…

Crystal Field, the executive artistic director at Theater for the New City, has issued an “emergency request” in an effort to raise another $14,000 for this summer’s Street Theater tour. This year’s free traveling musical, “99% Reduced Fat, or, You can Bank on Us,” is about “a young Gang Member who grows into a Community Activist, and a true citizen of New York City,” and will make stops in the Lower East Side, Bed-Stuy, the South Bronx, Coney Island, Harlem, and Jackson Heights, according to the release. You can donate here and take a look back at last summer’s show here.

The founder of Gathering Of The Tribes, Steve Cannon, says that negotiations are underway with his landlord, and that the lengthy dispute should be resolved by the end of the month. “It looks like she’s going to agree what we want,” said a confident Mr. Cannon. “I feel relieved. It’s going in my direction.” In April the founder of the art space won a legal victory when a Housing Court judge ruled that his dispute with his landlord, Lorraine Zhang, should be settled in State Supreme Court. Nevertheless, Ms. Zhang served Mr. Cannon with a 10-day notice to leave the building at 285 East Third Street in May. (The notice was ignored). Ms. Zhang would not comment on the latest developments in the saga, which has been brewing since March of last year.

Melvin Felix PS 122 at 150 First Avenue.

After months of delays, the overhaul of Performance Space 122 is moving forward.

A work order filed last week and pending approval by Department of Buildings paves the way for construction of two brand-new performance spaces in the venerable theater, which will cost an estimated $15.1 million. The plans call for more than 9,000 additional square feet to be added to the building at 150 First Avenue, all paid for by the city.

PS 122’s artistic director, Vallejo Gantner, said Wednesday that he was “delighted” that work will soon be underway. Since the city has already funded work on the building’s facade, replaced old energy-inefficient windows, and gotten rid of asbestos and lead paint, he estimated that the project’s full cost will be more than $20 million. He’s thankful for every penny.

“I think the city is kind of amazing that, in a time like this, they’re investing in cultural activities,” Mr. Gantner said. “The fact that it’s happening at all is such an amazing thing.”
Read more…

The street artist Phlegm had a busy day on Sunday. Not only did he add a character to the Know Hope mural on East Second Street, he also sprayed a surreal image on the gate of My Little Village Preschool on Avenue A. Videographer Matthew Kraus passed along this video of the process.

Noah Fecks The artist M. Henry Jones in his former studio. He is soliciting donations for a new project.

An artist who had to move to new digs because of rising rent is asking for a few bucks through Kickstarter — and offering some unique incentives.

M. Henry Jones, the longtime East Village resident who moved his studio to East 10th Street after a new tenant offered to pay nearly four times his rent on Avenue A, is soliciting donations for his new project: a series of portraits and animations covered in lens screens that make them look three-dimensional. The portraits are done using Mr. Jones’ own “Fly’s Eye 3-D technique,” a method that allows viewers to see depth in the images without the need for 3-D glasses.

So far, he has $2,000 towards his goal of $11,000 by July 29. The prizes for those who pledge money include lenticular mirrors, 3-D postcards, a signed coffee table book and — for a cool $5,000 — a “Giant Prototype SnakeMonkey Fly’s Eye 3D Lightbox.” The money will go toward buying materials to make the lens screens, frames and the panels that light up the portraits, according to the project’s description.
Read more…

Just a handful of blocks from where “Safety Not Guaranteed” is playing at AMC Loews Village 7 are the offices of Big Beach, the company that produced the endearing indie comedy about a wannabe time-traveler, played by Mark Duplass, and his adoring sidekick, played by Aubrey Plaza of “Parks and Recreation.” Since Big Beach was founded in 2004 by Marc Turtletaub and Peter Saraf, it has produced “Sunshine Cleaning,” starring Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, as well as the Sam Mendes film “Away We Go,” written by Dave Eggers and his wife Vendela Vida and starring Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski. Both followed the runaway success, in 2006, of “Little Miss Sunshine.”

The Local recently spoke to Mr. Saraf, who got his start working with director Jonathan Demme on Broadway and Bond Street, under the skylight of his office on Great Jones Street. As clouds shifted above, he spoke about his past, present, and upcoming projects and, of course, his chosen neighborhood. “It’s gone through a lot of changes over the eight years we’ve been here and over the 25 years I’ve lived in New York,” the producer said of the East Village, “but it remains still a very vibrant and exciting place where there’s a real history of great experimentation and great artistry going on. And yet it’s not all in the past. That present energy is still here.”

Courtesy Diana Diaz Diana Diaz (right) and her family in the early 80s.

Diana Diaz lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, but she grew up on the Lower East Side during the 1970s and 80s, and it’s the stories of Puerto Ricans of that time and place that she wants to tell. The N.Y.U. graduate and freelance writer, who grew up ducking into Alphabet City clubs and catching shows at the Nuyorican, has raised funds for a book that she hopes will educate the current wave of nightcrawlers who come to the East Village just “because it’s so gritty” or “because they want to have sex in a bathroom.”

“We have them in our murals, we have them in our kitchens, we have them in our anecdotes,” said Ms. Diaz of the neighborhood’s stories. “But if they’re not written down, our culture is lost.”

Last week, she raised $845 (well over the $525 she was aiming for on Kickstarter) to self-publish “Tales from the East Side,” which she hoped would be the first step toward a wider release. Read more…

Today at 1 p.m., a former CIA agent will team up with a Yonkers firefighter for a live-painting performance. Allow us to explain: The former Fed is Hank O’Neal, a longtime East Village photographer who goes by the handle XCIA. And the firefighter is Jef Campion, better known as Army of One.

Last week, guerrilla-art aficionados spilled onto East Ninth Street as the Dorian Grey Gallery hosted the opening of “Street Artists Unite!” For the exhibit, artists like Mr. Campion and John “Crash” Matos (whose work showed at TT Underground before The Melvins moved in) tagged the photos of Hank O’Neal, whose snaps of international street art were recently published in “XCIA’s Street Art Project: The First Four Decades.” (Mr. O’Neal’s Website features a gallery of his photos of the East Village from 1986 to 2010.)

Christopher Pusey, director of the Dorian Grey Gallery, spoke to The Local about the exhibit, which also features the work of AV ONE, BTA, COPE2, ENX, Fumero, Kid Lew, Screwtape, SEE One, Chris Stain, TMNK, and Robots Will Kill. It remains on display at 437 East Ninth Street, near Avenue A, through Aug. 5.

Photos: Daniel Maurer

The Melvins are widely considered the godfathers of grunge: Kurt Cobain, who drove them to shows in their Mel-van, was so heavily influenced by their brand of “sludge metal” that he once worried Nirvana would be considered a “Melvins rip-off.” So why did their latest show draw just under 150 people?

Rest assured, the band’s fan base isn’t dwindling as it enters its third decade. The half-filled basement of Lit was part of (what else?) a “Post Moral Neanderthal Retardist Pornography” art show.

Tom Hazelmyer, who produced the show (his Amphetamine Reptile record company put out a couple of the band’s 18 studio albums) said tickets sold out in about 20 minutes. The $50 cost of entry got attendees one of 300 handmade records as well as a wristband. Those who couldn’t get into Lit’s cave-like basement were able to watch a simulcast of the show next-door at TT Underground underneath Toy Tokyo, where Melvins-related artwork by Mr. Hazelmyer (a.k.a. HAZE XXL) and others graced the walls. Read more…

Melvin Felix

As Spanish soccer fans celebrated their Euro 2012 victory by thrashing in the Washington Square Park fountain yesterday afternoon, members of the East Village Book Club sat in a grassy corner of the park and pondered the birth of Frankenstein’s monster.

The book club had decided to take its monthly discussion, which usually occurs at Bar on A, outdoors for the first time since its inaugural meeting in Tompkins Square Park last November.

Melvin Felix The East Village Book Club

Sitting in a circle around cookies and chicken fajitas, the group of eight agreed that there was more to Mary Shelley’s classic novel than a mad scientist screaming, “It’s alive!”

“The movies massacred what the book was all about,” said Ranita Saha, a long-time member who commutes from the Bronx.

Jae Disbrow, the East Village resident who created the club, picked this month’s book for its philosophical and existential themes. “It gets a really bad rap,” she said. “I had to convince some of our members that it’s not like the book ‘Dracula.’ It has a lot of subtext and a lot of good things about it.” Read more…

Courtesy DMT Lt. Dick Craig (Joshua Schwartz) and
Janet Lawton (Lindsey Carter) in “Bride of
the Monster”

This weekend, you’ll want to jump on your last chance to catch Frank Cwiklik’s madcap stage adaptations of the works of Ed Wood, widely hailed as the worst director of all-time.

Using minimal sets in the Red Room theater, Mr. Cwiklik ingeniously deploys music, dance, projections, video screens and many entrances and exits to elaborately block his very skillful actors through Wood’s unintentionally bad dialogue. They seamlessly carry the plots and garner many laughs along the way.

“Downtown Theater is all about motion in small spaces, with limitations and low budgets just like Ed Wood did,” said Mr. Cwiklik, a prolific writer, director, and producer who is drawn to Wood’s works along with those of Shakespeare. “They tackle every genre,” he said of the two auteurs. “They come from the heart and are concerned with entertaining their audiences first.“

Mr. Cwiklik previously wrote and directed a popular S&M version of “Macbeth” called “Bitch Macbeth.” Since 1999, his company, DMTheatrics, has staged more productions than most put out in decades. Which, of course, brings Wood to mind. Read more…

Susan Keyloun

A day after a play based on the life of Coca Crystal and her cable-access show “If I Can’t Dance…” winds down its run at the Metropolitan Playhouse, an entertainer who might just be the Coca’s present-day counterpart will celebrate the second anniversary of her own underground talk show, “ReW & WhO?”

Rew Starr’s quirky two-hour internet show, blending live musical performances and interviews, tapes in the back room of Otto’s Shrunken Head (and occasionally at Branded Saloon in Prospect Heights) most Wednesdays. Next week, to mark two years, there will be special shows at Otto’s on Monday and Bowery Electric on Tuesday.

The Warholian premise of “ReW & WhO?” is that each guest receives 15 minutes of fame (literally). The guests are a broad spectrum of East Village talent ranging from drag queens to lounge acts to published authors to museum curators.

Wide-eyed and with boundless energy, Rew resembles a glam-rock Vargas pin-up. Not one to interview her subjects with measured indifference, she has a knack for getting them to admit their follies, true loves, and addictions. She’s gotten Richie Ramone to talk about his former backstage urinary antics and present love of gardening, and Angie Bowie (former wife of David) to confirm whether Keith Richards did, in fact, write “Angie” for her. Not bad for a 15-minute segment. Read more…

Mary Reinholz The Strand’s window.

Almost all of Nora Ephron’s books were sold out yesterday morning at The Strand, where a photo in the window depicted the literary dynamo posing with the bookshop’s owners, Fred Bass and Nancy Bass Wyden, during the filming of “Julie & Julia” there in 2008.

Today, a portrait of Ms. Ephron – a “writer and filmmaker with a genius for humor,” per The Times’s obituary – pops up on the The Strand’s Website when you search for her books, just two copies of which are said to be in stock (both are of her 2002 play, “Imaginary Friends”).

A clerk said the run on her novels (“Heartburn”), essay collections (“I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Reflections on Being a Woman,” “I Remember Nothing”) and screenplays (“When Harry Met Sally…”, “Julie & Julia”) started yesterday morning, after it was announced that she had died the previous night from pneumonia brought on by leukemia at 71. Classic collected essays from the 1970s like “Wallflower at an Orgy” and “Crazy Salad” were unavailable, but the store has put in orders for more. Employees at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square reported a similar shortage. Read more…

Courtesy Warby Parker The Warby Parker Readery at The Standard.

Some blocks north of William S. Burroughs’s “bunker” on the Bowery, The Standard, East Village is paying tribute to the neighborhood’s literary past by opening a throwback lobby newsstand stocked with the likes of Kesey, Kerouac, and Corso.

The Readery, as the book nook will be called, won’t just feature rare and vintage books by 60s authors, it’ll also sell 60s-inspired Warby Parker glasses and shades.

Neil Blumenthal, a co-founder of the hip eyewear company, said his company’s mission – of donating to international non-profits that train low-income women to give eye-exams and sell low-cost glasses – is very much in step with the Beat generation. “Much like those writers that were reimagining what it means to be an individual and to be an American, we’re trying to transform the optical industry. And we’re trying to remake what it means to be a for-profit company,” he said. Read more…

Coca Crystal

Coca Crystal lives outside of Woodstock, N.Y. these days but next week she’ll return to her old neighborhood for a once-in-a-lifetime meeting – with herself.

Danielle Quisenberry, an actress, dancer, and writer, is playing the former East Village Other secretary and scribe as part of “Alphabet City VIII.” The series, itself part of the East Village Theater Festival at Metropolitan Playhouse, consists of six solo performances based on the lives of East Villagers.

Full disclosure: Ms. Quisenberry discovered Coca Crystal (born Jackie Diamond) via The Local’s story about her physically and mentally disabled nephew, whom she cares for as a son while also battling cancer, and she tracked her down by reaching out to Sasha Von Oldershausen, the author of the piece. As research material, she used a recording of Ms. Von Oldershausen’s interview as well as YouTube clips of Ms. Crystal’s cult cable-access program, “If I Can’t Dance … Keep Your Revolution.” Eventually, she met Ms. Crystal herself. Read more…