Adjusted Realists In Association With The Strain Theatre Company Present PTERODACTYLS By Nicky Silver
Directed by Stephen Kaliski Starring Dennis Gagomiros*, Lori Kee*, Maggie Low*, Jeremiah Maestas*, and Roger Manix
July 17 - August 3, 2014
Teatro Circulo 64 East 4th Street New York, NY 10003 *Member of Actors' Equity Association
Twenty years before receiving his first Broadway production, Nicky Silver scorched onto the New York scene with Pterodactyls, a blazingly prophetic play that seems more urgent by the day. This viciously hilarious yet humane story about the rotting core of the American family suggests that our extinction is beginning not with an asteroid or an ice age but rather with a severed connection to the ones closest to us.
When a young man returns home with a diagnosis of AIDS, we expect mother, father, and sister to rush to his side. However, the entire Duncan family is too absorbed in its own individual miseries (Hypochondria! Marriage! Nostalgia! Hors d’oeurves!) to care much about a close-to-home case of a pandemic illness. Unable to communicate about a single thing, the Duncans start to disintegrate, and we begin to see that most horrific and iconic disease of the past fifty years is actually the least of their worries.
In 2014, Pterodactyls returned to the New York stage for a long overdue revival. Directed by Stephen Kaliski and starring Lori Kee*, Maggie Low*, Jeremiah Maestas*, and Roger Manix, this hard-hitting production brought vibrant new life to an early masterpiece of one of America’s most uncompromising voices. Transcending the categorizations of “AIDS play” or “LGBT-themed drama,” Pterodactyls is a desperate journey to the real source of our problems, the loss of the American family.