The Barry Years

Rich in swagger, invention, mischief and heat...the crispness and bite of Barbagallo's text is, recursively, a love letter to writing itself. - Time Out NY

The Barry Years includes three plays from writer-director-performer Jess Barbagallo, who has shaped an entire generation of New York theater with his tender haywire wit. My Old Man and Other Stories follows Barry-a forlorn Tom Waits impersonator with a water-stained floor and romance-induced insomnia-through a sequence of episodic scenes featuring emotional incompetents seeking love without compromise. An homage to small-town decay and reduced expectations, My Old Man and Other Stories is at once lambent with unrequited longing and crisp as the mechanics of life.Barry returns in Weekend at Barry's/Lesbian Lighthouse (Helen Shaw, Vulture), Barbagallo delivers a devastatingly precise and zany send-up of the contemporary art world that teeters on that silver highwire between despair and hilarity.Weekend at Barry's: Greatest HitsLearning to love in this way is a form of radicalism because it means that perverse love-that is the love we do against the structures that seek to organize us in brutality-is the only love.