Email Author Alexis Soloski

2003 Stories by Alexis Soloski

• Eat Your Heart Out

  published December 30, 2003

  Visiting America in 1794, the exiled French minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord declared, "The United States has 32 religions... More >>

• Theater

  published December 30, 2003

  In Striptease, two men, business-suited and briefcased, discover themselves in a barren cell. Each had been hurrying along when a... More >>

• Paper Clips

  published December 16, 2003

  The Prisoners Property Act of 1869 permitted Scotland Yard to confiscate crime paraphernalia for instructional purposes. The resulting collection,... More >>

• Advanced Sex Ed

  published December 16, 2003

  A painted screen depicts the bucolic campus of Jubilee College, a small liberal-arts school. Above the screen stands Jubilee's motto, "Puberes ex... More >>

• Co-Ed Blues

  published December 2, 2003

  For some the past is another country, but for Amherst freshman Lily it's situated just an hour or so upstate. A gawky scholarship kid, she's... More >>

• Darkness Risible

  published November 18, 2003

  Deserted woods, remote make-out spots, creaky mansions—these are ghost story locales. The stretch of West 42nd between Sixth and Seventh is... More >>

• Theater

  published November 11, 2003

  Structurally unsound, Oren Safdie's architecture jargonfest Private Jokes, Public Places shifts uneasily from satire to comedy to farce.... More >>

• Table Talk

  published November 4, 2003

  At the East Village's Library bar, the Voice settled in for birthday cocktails with newly minted novelist (How Soon Is Never?,... More >>

• Picturing Lolita

  published November 4, 2003

  In 1912, painter Egon Schiele spent 24 days in a rural Austrian jail charged with immorality and seduction of a minor. Ever the self-dramatist, he... More >>

• In Search of Lost Ties

  published October 21, 2003

  The art of losing, intoned Elizabeth Bishop, isn't hard to master. But few could expect a more masterful comedy on the subject of lost-and-found... More >>

• Bonny Clyde

  published October 7, 2003

  The younger Rands, members of the first family of Middleburgh, New York, have taken a shine to the Big Apple. Cicely, the youngest, bleats, "Who... More >>

• An Arrow in Your Pocket, or Just Happy To See Me?

  published September 30, 2003

  Do not mistake this musical for Metamorphoses. Eschewing hoity-toity readings of the ancient myth as an allegory of flesh reconciling with... More >>

• The Mothers Grim

  published September 23, 2003

  In an alternate America, more menacing and tender than our own, mother Irene and daughter Annabella inhabit a trailer home in a nameless city.... More >>

• Why Hallucinogens? Why Not?: Sniedze's Medicine Show

  published September 16, 2003

  According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, more than half of high school students have experimented with drugs. The conundrum for... More >>

• Secular Psalms, Shoe Bombs: Ralph Lee's Grass Menagerie

  published September 9, 2003

  Events in the Middle East have recently been beastly, but rarely so beastie as in Ralph Lee's puppet play The Dancing Fox, performed by the... More >>

• What's the Best Dental Floss for Removing Broken Glass?

  published September 2, 2003

  As sideshow maestro Todd Robbins prepares to take a swig of gasoline and launch a fireball toward the eaves of the Soho Playhouse, midget sidekick... More >>

• Sightlines

  published August 26, 2003

  Though Madame Tussaud's features some gruesome statuary (Nic Cage, Whoopi Goldberg), it offers nothing so horrid as wax figures of a husband and... More >>

• Fringe NYC Gets All Het Up

  published August 19, 2003

  Before the Fringe went temporarily dark in the blackout, it began with its typical bang of swelter and disarray. Here, a heated account of its... More >>

• The Straights

  published August 19, 2003

  Remember that part in Cats when the pack of feral felines maul and eat a human baby? No? Well, that's likely because the "Cats Kill" number... More >>

• O Solo Them-O

  published August 19, 2003

  One wasn't the loneliest number, as the Fringe featured a full complement of solo shows. A selection: The Hermitage of an Exiled Chain... More >>

• Outta The Slammer

  published August 12, 2003

  Regie Cabico begins his solo performance with an earnest ode to Filipino Catholicism and gay sex. No sooner has he pronounced the final line,... More >>

• Paradise Regained

  published July 15, 2003

  Smallpox Hospital, on Roosevelt Island, first opened its doors and turned down its hundred beds a century and a half ago. It ministered to paying... More >>

• The Plays What They Wrote

  published May 20, 2003

  Prophesying the demise of New York theater continues to be a popular pastime. The accusation that writers don't script plays like they used to or... More >>

• Positively 4th Street

  published May 13, 2003

  In 1907 Anna M. Jarvis, a West Virginian spinster greatly mourning her mom's death, began a letter-writing campaign. She wanted to establish a... More >>

• Plays With Possessive Titles

  published April 1, 2003

  In 1965, satirical songsmith Tom Lehrer penned "Who's Next?," the second in his triptych of nuclear-war ditties. Cataloging nations with atomic... More >>