Seat Filler

After an off-off-Broadway premiere last year that somehow slipped through Seat Filler’s cushions, MilkMilkLemonade, out playwright Joshua Conkel’s darkly comic absurdist fable about the struggles of gay kids in small towns, returned with its exceptional cast intact for a brief run that ended November 13 at the Astoria Performing Arts Center. Andy Phelan played Emory, an effeminate 11-year-old who lives on a farm and choreographs ribbon-stick dance numbers. Michael Cyril Creighton, chain-smoking in Sordid Lives drag, played his disapproving Nanna, who confiscates Emory’s doll and makes him hang out with Elliot, a butch neighbor boy played by Jess Barbagallo. But Emory and Elliot already have an abusive sexual relationship, and the kids hilariously “play house” like a Tennessee Williams melodrama. LGBT theater troupes with tiny budgets should stage MilkMilkLemonade immediately.

Gay-porn auteur Jerry Douglas directed David Bertolino’s The Deep Throat Sex Scandal, a slight but spunky dramedy about the making of Deep Throat, Linda Lovelace’s notorious 1972 hard-core flick, and the obscenity trials that followed. Played with period-perfect charm by Malcolm Madera, Deep Throat’s Harry Reems narrated. By explaining that the story was only his booze-addled recollection, he forced the audience to forgive bad wigs, factual errors, and cartoonish characters like Rita Rehn’s butch lesbian filmmaker, but the production’s cheesy low-rent aesthetic generally complemented the subject. Out character actor Frank Blocker also gave one of the funniest performances of the year as a flamboyant makeup artist and a smarmy Memphis lawyer. Unfortunately, the play closed October 12, two days after opening, when 45 Bleecker Theater shuttered due to a landlord-tenant dispute.