Topher Payne’s Domestically Disturbed
In Mississippi, your husband could just as easily have been your cousin
Portia de Rossi’s memoir aches with pain, but ends with Ellen and self-acceptance
There’s a fine line between “want” and “need.”
You didn’t need another holiday cookie, chocolate-dipped goodie, or brownie hiding beneath powdered sugar. And definitely, you didn’t need the calories.
But oh, you wanted them. So imagine denying yourself those and almost all other foods. Imagine living on 300 calories a day, then read “Unbearable Lightness” by Portia de Rossi.
Holiday theater offerings
Each year, the holiday season in Atlanta seems to grow longer and longer. The first week of November, for instance, saw the debut of “White Christmas,” the kind of production normally reserved for December. The long season, however, means there’s no shortage of holiday fare in local theaters, from the familiar to the edgy.
Of course, no holiday season would be complete without Horizon’s annual “The Santaland Diaries,” based on gay writer David Sedaris’ “Holidays on Ice.” This is the 12th year for the show, which stars Harold Leaver as the often grumpy, openly gay Crumpet, forced to serve as a department store elf one holiday season. Back is sidekick Enoch King, the usual doses of snideness and “plenty of fresh jokes and references,” promises Leaver.
“The Holiday Ice Spectacular” will feature laughs as well as skating. It stars a cast of 16, including some recognizable skating names. Among the cast is openly gay skater Michael Stack, who promises fun for all kinds of audiences, gay and straight.
Pearl Cleage explores a Southern tradition in ‘Nacirema Society’
Atlanta native Pearl Cleage’s work has always been embraced and supported by the LGBT community. Now she hopes her new production — “The Nacirema Society Requests the Honor of Your Presence at a Celebration of Their First One Hundred Years,” bowing next week at the Alliance — is met with the same level of enthusiasm.
Described by Cleage as a romantic comedy, “Nacirema” deals with the beloved tradition known as the cotillion, especially popular in the South. As a new group of African-American debutantes gets ready to meet society circa 1964 in Alabama, their strong-willed grandmothers try to take care of their romantic lives. Trouble comes, however, when one debutante decides she wants to forego the life and move to New York to be a writer, and the racial issues of the day stir up.