FringeArts is bringing New York cabaret icon Erin Markey to town for “A Ride on the Irish Cream.” The live and poetic musical story of sexual awakening explores the relationship between Reagan, a self-made girl, and Irish Cream, her family’s pontoon boat/horse.
Markey was inspired to write the piece to evoke images rooted in her childhood while rejecting the grown-up need for logic.
“It’s very much deeply inspired by the relationship I have with my partner, Becca Blackwell, who is also performing,” Markey explained. “It’s inspired by the aesthetics of my childhood. It’s deeply autobiographical. Queer people in the audience immediately tap into the matrix of feeling around secrecy and exploration and desire and all that kind of stuff immediately. It’s not explicitly there in plot but it’s there in feeling. Other people who maybe don’t identify as queer sort of have relationships to all that stuff too so they sort of get in the pocket of that immediately as well.”
Markey added that the character of Irish Cream has a lot of similarities to Blackwell.
“Their relationship is very dynamic in terms of power shifts and moving back and forth between a complete seriousness around very absurd things and a complete absurdity around very serious things,” she said. “The character is inspired by Becca’s personality, which is fun, dirty and poetic.”
A live band onstage will help flesh out the story reflecting the emotional ebb and flow of the relationship between the two main characters.
“The story is basically the music,” Markey said about the band’s role in the story. “The way we rehearsed for the show was so that everybody would be off book and the music would totally be in our bodies. Originally, I wrote the band members as characters. Then as the piece evolved, it made more sense for them to be more loosely related to what I decided they were, which was a tree and a cloud and a waterfall, but to more take on the elemental qualities of what those things mean sensually in a room and how they might translate into music. So it’s all of us as an ensemble trying to work in deep cahoots about what needs to be the feeling onstage at any given moment.”
FringeArts presents “A Ride on the Irish Cream” through Feb. 18 at 140 N. Columbus Blvd. For more information or tickets, call 215-413-9006 or visit www.fringearts.com.