Ernest Kearney

EVERYONE HATES MARTIN SHKRELI. If you don’t know who Martin Shkreli is – you should. He’s the poster boy for that cancer which is rotting away at the American soul even as you read this. In September of 2015 Turing Pharmaceuticals, of which Shkreli was the founder and CEO, obtained the license for manufacturing Daraprim an antiparasitic drug needed by AIDS sufferers. Shkreli increased the drugs price from $13 per tablet to $750 per tablet demonstrating unfortunately that the benefits of ... full review

MARK TWAIN ANSWERS ALL YOUR QUESTIONS The celebrated writer and humorist begins the evening by dying in a hail of bullets from a police shootout that then evolves into your classic porno flick with the sound of a zipper preceding an officer bringing out for inspection his lethal weapon. Later in the evening Mr. Twain accidently immolates himself. Twice. While historical validity is not perhaps a high point here, Ed Goodman’s interpretation of Twain is truly an uncanny experience and one m... full review

A HORSE WITH A VIEW Last year Christopher Piehler delighted audiences with Reserve Champion, an autobiographical tale of how as a young boy he fell in love with horses. That love affair continues in A Horse With A View, a quartet of tales in which women break his heart and horses heal it. Piehler tells his adventures of horse back riding vacations among the “roos” in Australia, of sinking in Scottish bogs, and of how he disappointed everyone in Hungary by not being German. The show dis... full review

Wow. That’s about the most apropos comment across the board on Squeeze My Cans, Cathy Schenkelberg’s riveting, heart wrenching and ultimately redeeming tale of her decade plus involvement with Scientology. Wow to the account of her descent into the Kafkaesque universe of L. Ron Hubbard’s “religion” that first seeks to entice and then consume all that come within its grasp. Wow to the price both financially and emotionally the cult cost her. Wow to her eventual struggle to free herself and... full review

OFFICE BEAT A TAP DANCE COMEDY As conceived by Mindy and Gage Coperland with original music by Andrew Van Vlear, Office Beat is a tale of office politics and labor unrest told completely without dialogue. Well without spoken dialogue that is, but there’s plenty of snappy repartee in the marvelous toe-tapping feet of the Tap Overload Dance Company. Set in a happy hoofing workplace where productivity is paced with a two step, the story opens with a budding office romance between the r... full review

(A)PARTMENT 8 One thing I appreciated about (A)partment 8 is that it was indeed the fringiest of the Fringe. Annie Lesser takes the concept of the solo show to a fuller plane by joining a single performer with a single audience member. Here we have a performance that cannot be judged “good” or “bad”, but only if it worked or didn’t for the individual audience member who experiences (A)partment 8, and within the construct of the piece to have a participant run screaming from the site could ... full review

Deana Barone is a wonderful actress, and her one woman show offers some insight into the personal history that nurtured that talent. Her show is a touching homage to that furnace in which we all are forged, the family. What comes across the strongest in Barone’s presentation is the tenderness of these people, who are flawed, who bear with suffering, but who are family nonetheless. Within the insanity of that relationship lays the cross all humanity must bear, a cross that is the crux of both o... full review

THE CREEPS Wild eyed arachnid greets us in a darken room. We are invited to explore, but not get lost in the darkness. We encounter others in the darkness – A sensual succubus whose breathy whispers of passion carrying the hint of a threat;- An old man, his arms shaking as if nerve damaged; A disturbing laughing child-woman, missing her hands, who threatens to murder the baby we hearing crying somewhere near. One sounds like Sean Connery. Catherine Waller’s solo show The Creeps firs... full review

In 2013 Sarah Mitchell began interviewing a wide selection of individuals about “love”. A 72 year old man alone at the close of his life, the upwardly mobile hipster who cheated on his wife, the heavily medicated Vassar graduate, a three year old. Each segment is well performed by Mitchell and the overall results are both touching and life affirming. If the show has one omission, it is Mitchell’s sidestepping of what was her motivation in beginning these interviews. Still, it tugged at my o... full review

VOICES According to the program notes, voiceover artist Carla Delaney wrote this one woman show as a birthday gift to herself, and if that’s true it’s a better gift than a pony. Voices is just about everything a solo show should be, personal and universal, funny and sad, familiar and unique, with a solid and well articulated question serving at its core: “When did I stop listening to my own voice?” As a professional voiceover artist, it is only logical that in Delaney’s world everything shoul... full review