Photo Flash: ALL ABOUT MARRIAGE at the HOT! Festival

The HOT! Festival, Dixon Place's annual summer queer performance series, will present a semi-staged reading of the evening-length first act of ALL ABOUT MARRIAGE, the epic marriage play by RYAN TRACY, on July 26, 2011 at 9:30pm. Featuring Mikéah Ernest Jennings (The Shipment; Bellona, Destroyer of Cities), William Dixon Popp (Monodramas at New York City Opera; OTHER WORLDS), and Michelle Mola (Rumble Ghost). The reading is $15. For more information, please visit www.dixonplace.org. 

All About Marriage is an epic play on how our lives, friendships and families are interconnect by our marriage practices and beliefs.

Act I-evening-length on its own-opens with a "Prelude" where a young couple W (Michelle Mola) and M (William Dixon Popp) ironically convince themselves to fast-forward from one-night stand to the wedding altar.

In Act I, Scene 1 - "Prenuptial," Abbie (Mola)-a liberal, suburban-to-urban transplant-has finally, if somewhat ironically, decided to marry Broc (Popp), her high school sweetheart. On the day of her wedding, she is aided by two Co-Maids of Honor, her best friends from college, gay-and-gay-married Bennie (Mikéah Ernest Jennings) and single-and-30 Regina (Daiva Dupree). Abbie's naïve view of marriage is challenged when her mother, Vicky, long divorced from Abbie's father, Donald (Lynn Berg), brings a stranger as her unannounced date to the wedding. When Abbie threatens not to go through with the wedding because of her mother's actions, everyone is left with the task of getting her to follow through with it, which, not without some hysterics, she does.

After the ceremony, Act I, Scene 2 - "Post-nuptial," Abbie is a wreck and fears the moment she must confront her mother, who only seems to know how to cause conflict. When she does just this, the entire ensemble plunges into chaos until the Reverend Zachary Ryan, a do-good Unitarian Universalist minister who presided over the wedding, emerges as a deus ex machina, preaching a message of "togetherness" that somehow convinces everyone to continue...to the reception.

Performers include Lynn Berg, Audrey Crabtree, Daiva Dupree, Mikéah Ernest Jennings, Michelle Mola, William Dixon Popp, Alyssa Simon, and Bjorn Thorstad.

The reading of All About Marriage will be directed by Ryan Tracy.

Photo Credit: Nev Schulman