Tom Pearl

A raucous, angry exorcism of relationships and assorted fears, shadowed by the Big One: the plague of AIDS.

Ricky is a young man who takes care of his sick mother. His father hovers at the edge of the picture, so Ricky provides for himself and his mom through prostitution, running errands, and acting as a caregiver for a blind man. Through the course of the film, Ricky befriends Janey, a young woman he finds beaten by her ex-boyfriend, and Trenn, a mysterious young man in trouble with the law. The three of them navigate a dark and confusing world. It uses many of the actors who have come to constitute the Dar A Luz company, including Tony Torn, Tom Fitzpatrick, Juliana Francis, and Tom Pearl. It will disappoint those who approach it looking for a film analogue of the “faster and louder” aesthetic that critics have used to characterize much of Abdoh’s stage work. The Blind Owl does use a variety of techniques reminiscent of his stage direction, giving it an unusual theatricality.

Quotations From a Ruined City was first performed as a workshop production for the Los Angeles Festival in a former shoe store on Hollywood Boulevard. The production subsequently moved to a vacant pajama factory in New York's meatpacking district and went on to be presented by multiple European presenters. It was Abdoh's final work. "Quotations from a Ruined City is a sort of apocalyptic follies: an evening of song, dance, poetry, nudity and torture set in a world whose center has clearly long ceased to hold. Created and directed by the gifted young theatrical cult artist Reza Abdoh, the work is a kaleidoscopic catalogue of images of decay and destruction that range through the centuries and around the globe."--New York Times, 1994.

Join us for a screening of Reza Abdoh’s extraordinary, site-specific work Father was a Peculiar Man, an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov staged in New York City’s Meatpacking District in the summer of 1990. Produced by Anne Hamburger’s En Garde Arts, Father was a Peculiar Man showed how brilliantly Reza applied his specific site-based approach that he developed in Los Angeles to New York City’s urban infrastructure. One of the goals of En Garde Arts’s site-specific journeys through New York’s Meatpacking District was to use the local architecture as a theatrical set while at the same time evoking and playing with the history of the place. The half-deserted cobblestone streets south of Chelsea enhanced the play’s nineteenth-century references. The neighborhood’s past as both a meatpacking and transportation hub via the High Line trains as well as a former center for after-hours sex clubs merge as perfect background for Reza’s spectacular tableaus of gluttony and lust.

True story of Nikola Tesla's sudden disappearance before receiving the 1917 Edison Medal. Discovered hours later disoriented in Bryant Park...what happened?

In cases ripped from the headlines, police investigate serious and often deadly crimes, weighing the evidence and questioning the suspects until someone is taken into custody. The district attorney's office then builds a case to convict the perpetrator by proving the person guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Working together, these expert teams navigate all sides of the complex criminal justice system to make New York a safer place.

In cases ripped from the headlines, police investigate serious and often deadly crimes, weighing the evidence and questioning the suspects until someone is taken into custody. The district attorney's office then builds a case to convict the perpetrator by proving the person guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Working together, these expert teams navigate all sides of the complex criminal justice system to make New York a safer place.