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At Profile, just what the world needs right now: a comedy about a cult of chainsaw-wielding killer secretaries (social commentary included).

These are not your grandfather’s secretaries. Unless, of course your grandfather was a lumberjack in the fictional town of Big Bone, Oregon, in the 1990s. In that case, the women at the center of this latest Profile Theatre production very well could have known, worked with, and possibly murdered your grandfather. There are so ma

ny reasons to put on a play like this one, right now, and director Dawn Monique Williams homes in on those reasons with her skillful focus and expert direction.

For starters, there is the #MeToo movement: Women are freer to stand up and speak out about mistreatment – at least more than lumber mill secretaries in an Oregon timber town in the ’90s. The women depicted here were not free to do much: they couldn’t have sex or even eat solid food (strictly SlimFast diets all around, of course). But they took matters into their own hands once a month by murdering a lumberjack. The play centers on new secretary Patty (Claire Rigsby, a newcomer to Portland stages, who exudes the youthful naivete and excitement the role needs). Patty is so happy to be welcomed by the other secretaries, but she slowly starts to realize there’s something strange going on here.

Therein lies one of the other reasons for this play right now: men are not the only enemy women have. Sometimes, women’s expectations and demands of other women are just as difficult to navigate.

 

To read the full review, please visit Oregon Artswatch.

 

An unforgettable love story inspired by one of the most romantic movies of all time. Stephen Sachs directs Deaf actors Deanne Bray (Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye, Heroes) and Troy Kotsur (title role in Cyrano at the Fountain, Big River on Broadway) in Sachs’ newest play, inspired by the screenplay for Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter. The world premiere of Arrival & Departure will open on July 14 and continue through September 30 at the Fountain Theatre.

In Sachs’ new spin on the classic 1945 British film, a Deaf man (Kotsur) and a hard-of-hearing woman (Bray), two married strangers, meet accidentally in a New York City subway station. As their casual friendship develops into something deeper, each is forced to confront how their simmering relationship could forever change their lives and the lives of those they love.

“A train station is a place of transition, a place people go when they’re on their way to someplace else,” notes Sachs. “‘Arrival & Departure’ is not only a travel term. It expresses the journey of change that the people in this play are experiencing. What happens when you find your soul mate, but the circumstances of life get in the way?”

Kostsur and Bray are married in real life, and Sachs wrote the play with them in mind.

“This is my valentine to the two of them,” he says.

 

To read the full review, please visit Broadway World: Los Angeles !

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The bed rotates and most of the show unfolds from out of the cabinets!

 

“Truth is, I can’t imagine a world without Nick Meglin. I first met him shortly after I moved to New York in 1976, when I brought my portfolio to MAD. I wasn’t at all ready for the big time yet, but he gave me a lot of encouragement to keep plugging away until I was. For several years after that, I would cross paths with Nick, particularly when he was moderating various MAD panels, and he would always have more words of support and encouragement. This meant a great deal to me, for in those days (and for years to come) Nick Meglin was to a large extent the public face of the MAD staff. He was smooth, charming, glib, funny and always ready with an anecdote. To me, he was MAD. For him to suggest that someday I might be ready to contribute to MAD was akin to Charlie winning the golden ticket to the Chocolate Factory.

That day finally came in 1981, when I got my first assignment for the magazine. Four years later, when Nick and John Ficarra were named co-editors, I became a regular contributor. It was unlike any professional relationship I had in over twenty years of freelancing, mainly because of Nick. He was intensely interested in everything about the people he worked with: ‘What were your parents like?’ ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ ‘Hey, you like opera, too?’ ‘Your jacket’s kind of shopworn — why don’t you trade it for this snazzy corduroy number I just got from John Boni?’ Working with Nick was like a weekly therapy session in a used-clothing emporium.”
– National Cartoonist Society

“Nick Meglin was a sharp-witted editor who helped shape the fledging publication once he joined MAD in 1956, the year that Al Feldstein became the magazine’s top editor.

Meglin — who died Saturday of a heart attack at age 82, according to MAD magazine — was for so long the soul of the gifted staff. Bill Gaines, the late founder and publisher of MAD, called Meglin “the heart of the magazine” — a man who was crucial in building and nurturing the magazine’s stable of all-stars.

‘Feldstein was not humorous. He appreciated humor, but he didn’t inspire humor,’ Jaffee tells The Washington Post’s Comic Riffs. ‘Nick inspired humor.’

‘He was a bit zany. . . . He had a great appreciation for the satirical viewpoint — he was gifted with that kind of natural understanding.’

Meglin also helped MAD grow from being ‘a satire of other comic books’ to spoofing politics and pop culture at large. At its circulation peak during President Richard Nixon’s administration, MAD had more than 2 million readers.

‘Nick’s sense of humor was a defining part of MAD magazine,’ says Tom Richmond, a Reuben Award-winning caricature artist at MAD. ‘No other single person had as much to do with creating and perpetuating the MAD ‘voice’ as he did. Both as a humorist and as a person, he was without peer.’

‘Nick was amazing — he was a poet, a good editor, a good writer and artist,’ Aragones says. ‘He could do everything pretty well, and he would crack jokes.’ And what made Meglin especially vital to the magazine, Aragones says, was that the big-hearted editor was ‘a unifier.'”
– As ‘the heart’ of MAD magazine, Nick Meglin influenced much of American comedy, The Washington Post