THE HANGOVER REPORT – Joey Merlo’s MIDNIGHT COLESLAW’S TALES FROM BEYOND THE CLOSET!!! campily intersects queerness and the macabre

John William Watkins, Charlene Incarnate, and Priscilla Flores in Joey Merlo’s “Midnight Coleslaw’s Tales from Beyond the Closet!!!” at The Tank (photo by Richard Termine).

Over this past weekend at The Tank, I had the opportunity of catching up with Midnight Coleslaw’s Tales from Beyond the Closet!!! The evening of one-acts has been masterminded by Joey Merlo, the auteur theater-maker responsible for the atmospheric one-man show On Set with Theda Bara, which played a successful extended run at The Brick in Brooklyn earlier this year. Merlo’s latest continues down the path of camp and melodrama, with a more overt emphasis on horror and queer culture, making it ideal theatrical fare during this Pride Month.

The evening is emceed by the drag queen Midnight Cowboy — played with amusing snark by Charlene Incarnate — who is deliberately built in the mold of cult icon “Elvira, Mistress of the Dark”. She’s joined by a skull sidekick who also seems to be clearly inspired by another recognizable figure in retro culture, the creepy, decrepit host of HBO’s long-running television horror anthology series Tales from the Crypt. The show also reunites Merlo and the great David Greenspan, a beloved downtown actor of the gothic persuasion (he starred, masterfully, in the aforementioned On Set with Theda Bara), who appears in the third (and shortest) vignette of the evening.

The three plays that comprise the show — each directed with a clear sense of aesthetic by Nick Browne — are “The Chair in the Closet”, “Daddy’s Girl”, and “You Kids Listen Up: In My Day…”. Each straddles parody and the macabre with wicked glee, harkening back to the golden days of New York’s anything-goes avant-garde theater scene. Throughout, the acting is uninhabited and on point, with Greenspan being particularly affecting as an aging queen who reminisces about the long-gone era of the queer decadence of his youth. The show’s framework makes it amenable for future volumes, which I personally wouldn’t in the least be opposed to.

RECOMMENDED

MIDNIGHT COLESLAW’S TALES FROM BEYOND THE CLOSET!!!
Off-Broadway, Play
The Tank
1 hour, 30 minutes (without an intermission)
Through June 23

Categories: Off-Broadway, Theater

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