Mark Cofta’s theater picks: August features festivals

Philadelphia is truly becoming a year-round theater town. Even August, formerly a quiet month for the local scene, is packed with possibilities, despite summer's lazy, hazy, crazy days, and the looming Fringe Festival (September 9 - 24). This calm-before-the-storm month is actually hopping with festivals and performance series.

GayFest!

GayFest! — the brainchild of Quince Productions artistic director Rich Rubin — is now in its sixth year. He's again mounting four full productions of plays new to the area, as well as an Opening Party (August 12) and special events, including the third GayFest appearance by music-dance-comedy sensation The Bang Group (August 18 and 19).

Andrew Marvel's My Favorite Husbands (August 13 - 27), a comedy featuring a spurned lover crashing a gay Republican wedding, runs in repertory at Studio X with Tony Award nominee Chad Beguelin's Harbor (August 15 - 26), about two male newlyweds whose Sag Harbor bliss is shattered by one's sister and her teenage daughter. Rubin directs both.

At The Drake's Louis Bluver Theatre, David Kimple's MMF (August 19 - 27), staged by Shamus Hunter McCarty, concerns a woman and two men in a polyamorous relationship that's ending. It's in rep with Steve Yockey's Wolves, about roommates coping with a dangerous one-night stand, directed by Michael Osinski.

The Philadelphia Women's Theatre Festival

The second annual Philadelphia Women's Theatre Festival runs August 3 - 7 at the University of the Arts' Caplan Studio Theater.

Events include two staged readings — Tammy Ryan's Molly's Hammer (August 5) and Courtney Boches' Sure as a Star (August 6) — and an afternoon of full productions of solo shows by Lauren Fanslau and Polly MacIntyre (August 7), plus an Ethel Merman and Mary Martin revue, Together Off-Broadway, by Sarah Gafgen and Meredith Beck (August 4). The Women in Comedy Showcase at Fergie's Pub at 10 pm on August 6, hosted by Rachel Fogletto, features eight funny women. (For a closer look at the featured shows, check out our WNWN round-up of this year’s PWTF productions.)

PWTF is also committed to professional development. Playwright Jacqueline Goldfinger's workshop Next Step: Getting Your Work Produced (August 6) happens right after Amanda Coffin's Simone, a devised work about Simone de Beauvoir. Later, after Haygen Brice Walker's ten-minute play Buzzfeed, Donald Trump, and Dead Black Kids (August 6), actor and teaching artist Alex Keiper leads a 90-minute acting workshop, Practical Aesthetics: Connecting the Intellectual and the Visceral. On Sunday, actors Kimberly Fairbanks and Jessica Bedford join playwright Michael Hollinger for a Solo Performance Panel (August 7).

Automatic Arts

Josh McIlvain and Deborah Crocker's SmokeyScout Productions, producer of the delightful eclectic anthologies Nice and Fresh, is now called Automatic Arts, and its short-work showcases continue at Cliveden on Germantown Avenue with Home Entertainment (August 5 and 6). Five-dollar tickets include a beer, and the line-up features a film-poem by McIlvain, writer Yolanda Wisher, and musician Brent White; Loop Tour with actor Bradley Wrenn; an excerpt from choreographer Lauren Putty White's iStand; music by Chickabiddy; and more, including several one-act plays, sculptures, and other art works.

Theatre in the X

The outdoor summer group Theatre in the X, which performs for free in Malcolm X Park, offers a bill of three one-acts on August 7, 14, and 21: Suzan-Lori Parks's New Black Math, Jeff Stetson's The Meeting, and Love, Queens Who Suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by Heather Thomas and Jamila Capitman.