2024 SoloFest 4
March 22 – 24
LONGING LASTS LONGER
Created and performed by Penny Arcade.
Direction and design by Steve Zehentner
Presented in collaboration with White Horse Theater Company
“The inimitable Penny Arcade brought the curtain down on Bridge Street Theatre’s monthlong SoloFest this weekend with her Longing Lasts Longer program. She also brought down the house with her astutely outrageous 70-minute spoken-word rant with music and her highly personal performance style, an ingenious, carefully crafted blend of informality belying the intricate nature of her show combining informality, intimacy, dance, audience interaction, and astute cultural commentary.” – Seth Rogovoy More …
“Thank you, Penny Arcade, for over fifty years of shit-kicking! You can watch Penny Arcade’s show, Longing Lasts Longer for $2 on Patreon, here: https://www.patreon.com/Penny_Arcade/ If we’re lucky, the Bridge Street Theatre in Catskill will bring her back!” – Tixie Starr on TrixiesList.com More…
Kick ass comedy with guts! Longing Lasts Longer is a unique blend of stand-up comedy and memoir set in a riveting rock and roll soundscape mixed live by Penny Arcade’s collaborator of 29 years, Steve Zehentner.
Longing Lasts Longer has been performed in 46 cities world-wide, winning Edinburgh’s Herald Angel Award, the Scotsman Fringe First Award, and the Adelaide Fringe Award. It’s a fierce, visionary, and ultimately forward-looking critique of the erasure of history, the rise of nostalgia and the pervasiveness of cultural amnesia created by international gentrification seen through the lens of New York City. It’s a crack in our planet’s post-gentrified landscape and shines a light on the path to individual authenticity.
In Longing Lasts Longer, Penny Arcade dares to tackle the straight jacket that binds today’s youth culture to the normalization of self-censorship and injects fresh air in the current lockdown of gentrification, the erasure of history and the cultural amnesia affecting not only our cities but our minds. As the new tide of political correctness threatens to sink radical comedy under the weight of New York City’s suburbanization, the international performance legend whose name has become globally synonymous with “Downtown New York Art,” makes it safe to think and laugh at the same time. Longing Lasts Longer is an evening of dangerous ideas and radical inquiry into what it means to be human, right here, right now.
No one in theatre, comedy or rock and roll does anything even remotely similar to Penny Arcade, where she combines poetics, comedy, and rock and roll into what can only be called cultural critique you can dance to. The camaraderie between her and longtime collaborator Steve Zehentner, as he live mixes the unique sound score made up of 100 song loops from some of the best popular music of the past 60 years, is infectious. You will be dancing in your seat!
Penny Arcade debuted in 1968 at 18 with New York’s explosive Play-House of the Ridiculous, the seminal, rock and roll, queer, glitter/glam, political performance theater that influenced everything from Hair to Punk. A Warhol Superstar at 19 featured in the 1972 Warhol/Morrissey comedy, Women in Revolt. Penny is the author of over 16 full length plays and hundreds of solo performance pieces. She is an independent artist who’s active career spans over 50 years, contributing to new art forms for every decade since the 1960’s. A highly influential performance and experimental theatre artist , her magnetic stage presence has brought her international renown, her compassionate yet unflinching honesty has influenced generations of artists everywhere, making her an icon of artistic resistance. Adelaide Fringe Ambassador for 2023, she recently performed Episode 3 – 1967-1974: Superstar Interrupted from Penny Arcade: The Art of Becoming, a memoir, live show and podcast being conceptualized and created by Penny Arcade and Steve Zehentner.
Steven Zehentner. A former architect, Steve Zehentner is a filmmaker, theater designer/director and archivist based in New York City. Since 1992, he has collaborated with Penny Arcade on dozens of shows including Sisi Sings The Blues – Vienna Festival, Love, Sex and Sanity, Rebellion Cabaret, New York Values, Bad Reputation, True Stories, The Penny Arcade Sex & Censorship Show, Old Queen and Longing Lasts Longer. Together they have created anarchic humanist spectacles, over 900 performances in 80 cities around the world. They are currently developing, The Art of Becoming, a nine-part live episodic memoir. With Penny Arcade, he is co-founder of the Lower East Side Biography Project, a video oral history documentary project that works to ensure that future generations have access to the mad souls of invention that built the Lower East Side’s reputation as an incubator for authenticity, rebellion and iconoclasm. The project streams its biographies live every Monday at 11pm EST in Manhattan on Time Warner Channel 34. Steve has worked in video production for over 25 years producing story-based social independent documentaries and promotional films for universities and non-profit organizations. His work is held in the collection of many museums, and screened at dozens of festivals. His short films, The Color Line: Racism in America and The Sunflower Project, a film that questions the limits of forgiveness through the lens of the WWII holocaust, have been broadcast on PBS. He recently produced a six part series on Multilingual Learners for the PBS children’s series, Let’s Learn. He is a recipient of an Aurora Film & Video Award, Herald Angel, Fringe First, NYSCA grants and MacDowell, Bogliasco, Orchard Project Fellowships.
White Horse Theater Company is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to producing and developing American plays. We seek to investigate and celebrate American culture by re-examining American classics and nurturing new American voices. We aim to champion great American playwrights by revitalizing their masterworks and shedding new light on their seldom-produced works. We strive to support emerging American playwrights by offering them developmental readings, labs and workshops. White Horse is committed to making high-quality theater and we aim to share our passion for American plays and playwrights withour fellow artists and audiences. www.whitehorsetheatre.com