Playwright Joey Merlo, 2023 Brick Theater," On Set with Theda Bara"

 

Playwright Joey Merlo

2023 Brick Theater

On Set with Theda Bara

by Joey Merlo

Directed by Jack Serio

Starring David Greenspan,  

Frank J. Oliva (scenic design), Avery Reed (costume design), Stacey Derosier (lighting design), and Brandon Bulls (sound design).

“My films are all lost. Like I was lost. I appeared from the mist and into the mist I returned. They called me menacing, mysterious, unclean, lurid… but I was a star.”

Or longer:

My films are all lost. Like I was lost. I appeared from the mist and into the mist I returned. They called me menacing, mysterious, unclean, lurid… but I was a star.

Look at me there! On the screen! The organ music rising… I enter in a bejeweled headdress atop which sits the cycles of the moon. Undulating snakily, stretched sensuously out on a tiger skin rug I beckon to the weak man before me. I pantomime: Eyes ablaze and large lit up like two planets circling the sun. My skin, translucent. Eyes cast down on the prey. “