Axis Company presents EAST 10TH STREET: SELF PORTRAIT WITH EMPTY HOUSE, a new play by and about Downtown performance icon Edgar Oliver and directed by Randy Sharp. This look at a life on the fringes of New York's Lower East Side comes on the heels of what could be Oliver's breakthrough role in the upcoming film from Napoleon Dynamite's Jared Hess, Gentlemen Broncos (opposite Sam Rockwell), as well as a national advertising campaign for mobile phones in Ireland that has become a cult phenomenon.

In EAST 10TH STREET: SELF PORTRAIT WITH EMPTY HOUSE, long-standing, downtown theatre icon Edgar Oliver takes the audience on a fantastic voyage through the strange rooms of the apartment house where he has lived since his first years in New York. Inhabiting the dark, mysterious halls of an East Village tenement building are a dwarf Cabalist, a possible Nazi, the landlord's former wet nurse who apparently lives in a nest of rags, and many other memorable persons. Edgar leads the audience up to the final room, his own, at the top of the derelict stairs, wherein lie the secrets of his own family and the unbelievable odyssey that brought him there. This incredible cast of characters illuminate the sad, funny, brilliant and deeply personal story.

Georgia native Edgar Oliver started performing in New York at the Pyramid in the mid-1980's alongside artists including Hapi Phace, Kenbra Pfahler, Samoa and playwright Kestutis Nakas. As a playwright, many of Oliver's plays have been staged at La MaMa and other downtown NYC theatres, including The Seven Year Vacation, The Poetry Killer, Hands in Wartime, Motel Blue 19, and Mosquito Succulence. As a stage actor, he has performed in countless plays including Edward II with Cliplight Theater, Marc Palmieri's Carl the Second, Lipsynka's Dial M for Model, and numerous productions at Axis including A Glance at New York (Edinburgh Festival & NYC), Julius Caesar, USS Frankenstein, Hospital, and Seven in One Blow. Edgar is also one of the most beloved story tellers at The Moth. His film roles include That's Beautiful Frank, Henry May Long (directed by Axis' Randy Sharp) and Gentlemen Broncos. His published works include A Portrait of New York by a Wanderer There, Summer and The Man Who Loved Plants (published by Panther Books).

East 10th Street: Self Portrait with Empty House written and performed by Edgar Oliver November 6 – 22, 2008 Thursday – Saturday at 8:00 pm $15 Adults/$10 Students/Seniors / heres edgar at home on 10th st, speaking

im going to try and see this next thursday, opening night!!!
- bill 10-31-2008 12:28 pm [add a comment]

edgars play is reviewed here
- bill 11-12-2008 5:33 pm [add a comment]

Did you call him and tell him we loved it?
- jimlouis 11-12-2008 6:52 pm [add a comment]

i dont think i have or remember the #. ill drop a note to 104.
- bill 11-12-2008 6:58 pm [add a comment]

from the NY press

There is, perhaps, a pervasive undercurrent of nostalgia in Oliver’s play, but the acting never errs toward the cloying or the sentimental. In the end, the hybrid actor and author becomes a polyvalent, shape-shifting bard—a chronicler of lost lives who reveals (as the title of the play suggests) as much about himself as he does about his ensemble of weirdoes. For Oliver, life itself is a stage, and he molds these eccentric personages, who passed through life anonymously, into characters worthy of Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky. The infernal existences of these netherworld inhabitants is captured through an intoxicating prism, that of the narrator’s own disarming, poetic sensibility.

i mean this in the most flattering and positive way. this tune should have been written about helen and edgar :

Cruella De Ville Those Two Dreadful Children...


- bill 11-16-2008 6:01 pm [add a comment]