Bridget Barkan, Marga Gomez Up Next in 'Glowberon' Series at A.R.T.'s OBERON

Afterglow Festival and OBERON continues its collaborative series Glowberon at the American Repertory Theater's Second Stage and club theater venue on the fringe of Harvard Square, OBERON.

The series that began in September with John Kelly's live memoir Time No Line features solo playwrights, cabaret performers, and performance artists throughout the 2017/18 Season. Glowberon is curated by Quinn Cox, founder of the Afterglow Festival in Provincetown, MA, and the summer Glow Festival at OBERON.

Tickets to all performances of the Glowberon series are $25 and are currently on sale by phone at 617.547.8300, in person at the Loeb Drama Center Ticket Services (64 Brattle Street, Harvard Square), or online at cluboberon.com.

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The line-up includes:

Bridget Barkan: DEAR STRANGER, I LOVE YOU

Thursday, November 16, 2017 at 8PM

Bridget Barkan shines her light on the local community that inspires this living alternative cabaret show. You'll be delighted and moved by her stories, characters, original and cover songs, improvisation, poetry, dance, and unapologetic truth. A musical journey from bad to new love, a dance between free love and committed love, the fight for self-love and ultimate infinite universal love that can bring us all together: Perhaps our struggles will usher in an endless season of love.

Barkan says that through the show, "I'm trying to share the lessons that I have learned: to create a heightened reality where we can listen to each other, where we can see strangers on the street and think, 'Maybe that person has a piece of gold to offer me. And maybe I have a piece of gold to offer them.' And we start to see each other as this beautiful web, this tapestry of souls."

Inspired by the stage shows of Whoopi Goldberg, Lily Tomlin, and Laurie Anderson and the music of artists ranging from Joni Mitchell to Erykah Badu, Barkan's genre-bending shows employs both her love of song, character building and storytelling. Not only a shape shifter with accents and body language, she is also a vocal chameleon seamlessly riffing her way through jazz, soul, R&B, folk, electronic, and traditional musical theater songs. Some have said she is like the secret child of Cindy Sherman and John Waters, raised by the ghost of Janis Joplin. In addition to her own marquee shows, she performs with the band Slow Knights (Del Marquis, Xavier, Rod Thomas) and appears regularly with fellow NYC-based artists Bright Light Bright Light and Murray Hill, as well as Lady Rizo and Joey Arias (both 2016/17 Glowberon series artists). She has previously toured the world with the pop/glam band the Scissor Sisters opening for Lady Gaga, sung with Lily Allen, and recorded with legendary house DJ and producer Todd Terry. She is a member of the inaugural class of Pub Club, the Joe's Pub Artist-in-Residence Program, as well as a teaching artist with Carnegie Hall's Music Connections.

"Beyond being a formidable and multi-faceted talent, Bridget has an unending emotional generosity," says Ana Matronic of the hit band Scissor Sisters. "Invest a little time in her, and she will give you everything - heart, mind, and soul."

Marga Gomez: LATIN STANDARDS

Directed by David Schweizer

Thursday, December 14, 2017 at 8PM

A New York Times Critic's Pick from the Under the Radar Festival, Gomez's new solo piece is a loving, funny, and true story of perseverance and creative addiction passed down from immigrant father to lesbian daughter. Mixing nostalgia, urgency, and comic edge Marga Gomez (2017 Glow Festival) portrays herself and a collection of vivid portraits of characters from 1960s Manhattan to present-day San Francisco as she ponders the ballads (or Latin standards) penned by her late father, comedian, producer, entrepreneur, and songwriter Willy Chevalier.

Gomez describes Latin Standards as "a father-daughter story intended as a survival comedy for everyone."

Gomez is the GLAAD Award and LA Theater Ovation Award winning writer/performer of twelve solo plays which have been presented at The Public Theater, La Mama ETC, Dixon Place, Highways, Bootleg Theater and internationally. The SF Weekly named Gomez one of "2016's Artists to Watch," and HuffPost named her an "Agent of Change" in 2015. She was an original member of the Latino ensemble Culture Clash. Her acting credits include Off-Broadway and national productions of The Vagina Monologues with Rita Moreno and Vicki Lawrence, HBO's "Tracey Takes On...", and Warner Brothers films Batman Forever and Sphere. Gomez can be seen in season two of the Netflix series "Sense 8."

Lady Bunny: TRANS-JESTER!

Written by Lady Bunny and Beryl Mendelbaum

Thursday, January 25 and 26, 2018 at 8PM

Second date added due to popular demand!

Foul-mouthed drag legend Lady Bunny usually shies away from politics-because it's one hell of a train wreck right now. But she doesn't shy away from gender politics. From the new pronoun we're forced to learn every time Will Smith's son puts on a dress, to Caitlyn Jenner reaching out to Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz to become his 'trans ambassador,' Bunny feels that it's time for the gloves to come off. Featuring new parodies of Adele, RENT, and Bruno Mars, punctuated by some actually insightful social commentary (well, she thinks so anyway). Trashing the current overemphasis on political correctness, Bunny breaks down some of the latest buzzwords that we're all supposed to remember for every occasion. The self-proclaimed 'pig in wig' brings her trademark huge hair to astound and offend - prepare to be challenged.

Actor/writer/performer and Afterglow Festival co-founder John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) says, "A scream for sanity from the nastiest, most big-hearted comic performer around."

With her glitzy outfits, sky-high wigs and false eyelashes long enough to embarrass Tammy Faye Baker, multi-talented drag artist Lady Bunny would turn heads even if looking glamorous was her only talent. But "she" isn't just another man in a dress: Bunny is a successful comedienne, DJ, actress, singer/songwriter and most famously, the emcee and creator of Wigstock, the outrageous drag festival of drag and music which electrified New Yorkers every Labor Day for over 20 years. Wigstock featured almost every queen who ever worked in NYC, but also attracted more mainstream recording acts who just wanted to join in the fun-including Dee-Lite, Debbie Harry, Boy George, RuPaul, John Cameron Mitchell as Hedwig, The B-52s' Cindy Wilson, Crystal Waters, Cece Peniston, Ultra Nate, Kristine W, Barbara Tucker and Vickie Sue ("Turn the Beat Around") Robinson. Soon, the festival became known as a hipper version of Gay Pride Day.

Joseph Keckler: SELF-PORTRAIT AS AN OPERA

Thursday, April 5, 2018 at 8PM

FAUXNIQUE: THE F WORD

Thursday, May 17, 2018 at 8PM

Calling on a powerful and versatile voice, Joseph Keckler presents a collection of colorful episodes from his own life-a trip on hallucinogens, and an expedition to the bondage store, for instance-in operatic form, as though they were epic dramas of life and death. He veers into vivid fantasies as well, leading the audience through terrain both humorous and haunting.

Keckler is a singer, musician, writer, and visual artist. His work has been seen at many venues including SXSW, Centre Pompidou, BAM, SXSW, Miami Art Basel, and PEN American Center and has been featured on BBC America and WNYC Soundcheck. He has been awarded a Creative Capital, NYFA Fellowship, and Franklin Furnace grant. Named the "Best Downtown Performance Artist" in NYC in 2013 by the Village Voice, Keckler made his Off-Broadway debut in Preludes at Lincoln Center. A collection of his writing, Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World will be published by Turtle Point Press this fall.

FAUXNIQUE: THE F WORD

Thursday, May 17 at 8PM

The F Word is FEMINISM! Let's hear it from the painted mouth of Fauxnique, the lady drag queen and dancing, singing raconteuse. A frank fabulist whose Fosse-lized focus and forceful frame forge fanciful factual fictions, Fauxnique's fashionably fierce form of feminism is filled with f***ing fantastic feats of hi-femme frippery. See why she broke through the glass ceiling of the male-dominated world of drag to become a queen among queens. A look at Feminism through the lens of Drag Cabaret and vice versa.

Fauxnique is the drag queen alter-ego of artist/choreographer/dancer Monique Jenkinson. Lauded for her "campy, intellectual juxtaposition of pop culture and high art" by San Francisco Magazine, Fauxnique plays with artifice and authenticity and lives to question essentialist assumptions about gender, art and culture. Informed both by Jenkinson's classical ballet training and a tradition of radical queer performance and theory, Fauxnique sees the performance of femininity as a forceful, vulnerable, and subversive act.

Fauxnique made herstory as the first cis-woman to win a major drag pageant and has performed in a variety of venues and contexts nationally and internationally, including Joe's Pub, New Museum, Judson Church and the Stonewall in New York; and Afterglow Festival in Provincetown among others.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian calls Jenkinson, "revelatory and inspirational ...a must-see because of her technical excellence, ability to create beauty, and rare personable flair for drama."

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OBERON is located at 2 Arrow Street at the corner of Mass Ave. in Harvard Square, Cambridge. For more information and tickets, visit cluboberon.com.

AFTERGLOW is an annual live performance arts festival in Provincetown, MA. Founded in 2011 by Quinn Cox and John Cameron Mitchell, Afterglow has earned Provincetown a star on the international festival map, reclaiming its heritage as the birthplace of the modern American stage. Afterglow has premiered and developed award winning solo plays that have moved Off-Broadway and beyond. Honoring Provincetown's artistic bond with New York's Greenwich Village and Cambridge, Massachusetts' progressive performance scenes, Afterglow has featured artists from all over the United States and Europe. Each September, Afterglow invites artists and audience alike to bask in the glittering light of pure, live artistic expression, after the full glare of summer.

Since its inception, OBERON, the A.R.T.'s Second Stage and club theater venue, has been a destination for nightlife in Harvard Square-a thriving incubator for local and emerging artists pushing the theatrical form and host to some of A.R.T.'s most innovative productions. Thousands of artists and performance groups mount work in the space each year. OBERON regularly features a wide variety of performers including aerialists, musicians, gender-bending sketch troupes, comedians, and burlesque acts.

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