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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE JUNE 5, 1998

EVENINGS OUT

Performance piece is a tribute to satirist Flanigan

by Elissa Sonnenberg

Cincinnati-In Sitting with Terry, Cincinnati artist Pauletta Hansel tells the story of helping to care for satirist and activist Terry Flanigan through the final months of his life as he was dying of AIDS-related causes in 1996. In the one-woman performance piece, Hansel presents a collage of journal entries, poems, dreams and stories which deal with issues that affect every life.

Directed by dramaturg Michael Burnham, Sitting with Terry mixes the serious with the humorous, the fanciful with the disturbing.

"Sitting with Terry deals with how I pushed through my own fear to connect more closely with Terry and with my own grief," explained Hansel. “It also challenges the audience to explore boundaries in our community between gay and straight, male and female."

Both Hansel and Burnham worked with Flanigan as part of his TS&M Productions. Terry Flanigan and John Ray founded TS&M in 1976.

Together Flanigan and Ray wrote, produced, directed, and acted in original stage plays exploring social and historical themes with satire and music from 1976 through

Pauletta Hansel

1989. Working in alternative venues in Cincinnati, TS&M mounted musical extravaganzas dedicated to the proposition that absolutely nothing is sacred, rules are made to

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be broken, and the meaning of theater is fun. And all on shoestring budgets.

Christmas in July, The Bowels of New York, The Bizarre Backyard Theatre Awards Show, and the three hour spectacular 12 to 30, the Mystery Years were all mounted in backyards in Walnut Hills. The Gomorrah-a-Go-Go was twice presented at the Dance Hall and Apotheosis of the Frog Persons was staged at a nightclub downtown.

Flanigan's last artistic venue was video. The feature-length The Prim Reaper was presented at several theaters in Cincinnati. John Ray's 1997 Wanda Wilde: Christmas on the Edge was TS&M's first

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production since Flanigan's death, and was dedicated to him.

Hansel, a native of eastern Kentucky, works as an assistant director of community development for the Urban Appalachian Council. Her poetry has been published in regional literary publications including Appalachian Journal and Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel. Public readings include the York Street Reading Series and Mix it Up: Cincinnati Women in Performance.

With help from Burnham, Hansel has made the leap from poet to solo performer in this funny, sad, and ultimately human drama.

"Usually, I accept the limitation of poetry: one picture, within one frame, giving entry into some larger space." Hansel explains. "But for the experience of being with Terry throughout the process of his dying, and for the grief and transformation which I both experienced in myself and observed in others who were there, the frame of a poem was not nearly large enough.

"Terry died in August 1996. By December of that year I knew what I had to do, if not exactly how or why. I needed to somehow take the many frames, many layers: poems and dreams and journal entries, and fashion them into a piece which could somehow transcend a frame. And once done, I needed to say it out loud."

Sitting with Terry will be performed at the Dance Hall, at Vine and Daniels Sts. in Corryville, June 5 and 6, and June 11 through June 14. For tickets or information, call 513-681-5304.

Elissa Sonnenberg is a Cincinnati freelance writer.

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