VirtVual
Out On The Town
SORDID LIVES: ALL-STAR LIVESTREAM BENEFIT PLAY READING
Beau Bridges, Bonnie Bedelia, Leslie Jordan, and Caroline Rhea are the headline names among a starry roster of performers participating in a special livestream reading to benefit 23 stage companies that have partnered with the newly established Del Shores Foundation and its mission to find and facilitate new southern queer artistic voices. The focus, of course, is on playwright Shores’ Sordid Lives, a 1996 “black comedy about white trash as a gay actor struggles to come out to his eccentric, dysfunctional Texas family.” Sordid Lives went on to inspire the cult-hit screen adaptation in 2000, the 2017 marriage-equality-themed sequel A Very Sordid Wedding, as well as LOGO’s prequel Sordid Lives: The Series. Produced and hosted by Shores with Emerson Collins, the one-night-only #SordidLiveStream will also feature appearances from Carson Kressley, Georgette Jones, Alec Mapa, Aleks Paunovic, David Steen, and Allison Tolman. Levi Kreis will perform, and a message to all will be dispensed by Olivia Newton-John. The artists are donating their time, with an auction of Sordid Lives memorabilia adding to the benefit. Sunday, May 31, at 8 p.m. on YouTube and Facebook. Visit www.delshoresfoundation.org. Compiled by Doug Rule
FILM ALAMO ON DEMAND: CURATED LIBRARY OF INCREDIBLE ENTERTAINMENT
Launched shortly after COVID-19 forced the closure of its cinemas, including two in Northern Virginia, this national arthouse film chain’s Alamo-At-Home series was such a success, the company has decided to expand its eccentric virtual streaming offerings — with a focus on “challenging, provocative, and occasionally batsh*t insane films.” And the Alamo’s new video-on-demand platform features plenty of films that fit that outlandish bill, including Butt Boy, Tyler Cornack’s comedy/thriller
about a detective who is out to prove his wild theory about a mentor of his, one he suspects “uses his butt to make people disappear,” and Porno, Keola Racela’s 2019 scary tale about a group of repressed teenagers in a small conservative town “visited by a sex demon that gives them a taste of the dark side.”
Hereford, who concluded that this “spare pas de deux earns its prizes, as Marianne and Héloïse’s slow-burning romance portrays, with flush familiarity, how falling in love both pins the women down and sets them free.” All tickets purchased benefit the Alamo chain as well as featured filmmakers. Visit ondemand.drafthouse.com.
Also available for streaming is Portrait of a Lady on Fire, featured on Metro Weekly film critic André Hereford’s Best Films of 2019 list. Writer-director Céline Sciamma’s women-in-love feature, focused on a painter and her subject in 1760s France, “wants to look like a painting, and it does so beautifully,” wrote
AVALON THEATRE: VIRTUAL CINEMA
Among the new offerings to come on Friday, May 29, through the “Virtual Cinema” of the Avalon Theatre in Upper Northwest D.C. is Papicha, about an improbable fashion show an 18-year-old female student in Algeria puts together in spite of a rise in social conserva-
MAY 28, 2020 • METROWEEKLY.COM
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