Bell Book & Candy

I wanted to give a shout-out and note of congratulations to the folks at Gravity & Glass/Triptych Theatre for Chapter Two of Bell Book & Candy, a very fun collection of morbid romantic one-acts (or, perhaps, morbid one-acts concerning love and relationships). Yes, one of my short pieces, "Relationships," is featured in it, so I really can't write any sort of formal review (lest it devolve into statements concerning "Comtois' dynamic voice for the stage," or, "This eminently blowable playwright..."). But suffice it to say there wasn't a clunker in the bunch ("the bunch" being eight short plays dealing with love, the supernatural and the macabre).

I particularly enjoyed Damon Heath Sager's "Dead Girlfriend," about a guy who refuses to accept the loss of his lady friend and Steven Fechter's "The Mission," about an Iraq War vet trying to...um...comfort...his dead war buddy's widow. "The Mission" also features Sutton Crawford, an actress I've never met, but have been a fan of, having previously seen her in two plays that have made my annual "Top Ten" list (Abe Goldfarb's 2004 staging of Titus Andronicus and Four Chairs' A Guy Adrift in the Universe in 2007).

There's even a short musical about King Kong being bemused at how his life lead him to be climbing the Empire State Building and getting shot at by planes.

And seriously, how adorable is Summer Baldwin as the armless Timex in Christopher Bell's "A Curious Thing?"

Anyway, it was a lot of fun. You should check it out.

I'm hoping to catch Chapter One, which features a whole different set of one-acts (they run concurrently at CenterStage on 48 West 21st Street). It runs until February 14 (Valentine's Day). You can get tickets here.

Believing in a thing called love,

James "Drooling Date" Comtois