Penny Arcade: Longing Lasts Longer

[fusion_builder_container type="flex" hundred_percent="no" equal_height_columns="no" menu_anchor="" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" class="" id="" background_color="" background_image="" background_position="center center" background_repeat="no-repeat" fade="no" background_parallax="none" parallax_speed="0.3" video_mp4="" video_webm="" video_ogv="" video_url="" video_aspect_ratio="16:9" video_loop="yes" video_mute="yes" overlay_color="" video_preview_image="" border_color="" border_style="solid" padding_top="" padding_bottom="" padding_left="" padding_right=""][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type="1_1" layout="1_1" background_position="left top" background_color="" border_color="" border_style="solid" border_position="all" spacing="yes" background_image="" background_repeat="no-repeat" padding_top="" padding_right="" padding_bottom="" padding_left="" margin_top="0px" margin_bottom="0px" class="" id="" animation_type="" animation_speed="0.3" animation_direction="left" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" center_content="no" last="true" min_height="" hover_type="none" link="" border_sizes_top="" border_sizes_bottom="" border_sizes_left="" border_sizes_right="" first="true"][fusion_text] "Penny Arcade combines the anarchy of Lenny Bruce with the pathos of Judy Garland,. She is provocative, intellectually stimulating, perceptive and hilariously funny. Penny Arcade is a wonder to behold; she manages to entertain, absorb and broaden the audience simultaneously. Beg, steal a ticket." -The List UK Longing Lasts Longer is a unique blend of stand-up comedy and memoir set in a riveting rock and roll soundscape mixed live by Penny Arcade’s collaborator of 29 years Steve Zehentner. Longing Lasts Longer has been performed in 45 cities world-wide, winning three top festival prizes in Edinburgh and Adelaide. Longing Lasts Longer is fierce, visionary and ultimately a forward-looking critique of the erasure of history, the rise of nostalgia and the pervasiveness of cultural amnesia created by international gentrification seen through the lens of New York City. Longing Lasts Longer is a crack in our planet’s post-gentrified landscape and shines a light on the path to individual authenticity. No one in theater, comedy or rock and roll does anything even remotely similar to Penny Arcade, where she combines poetics, comedy, and rock and roll into what can only be called cultural critique you can dance to! The camaraderie between her and longtime collaborator Steve Zehentner, as he mixes the unique sound score made up of 100 song loops from some of the best popular music of the past 60 years, is infectious! You will be dancing in your seat! In Longing Lasts Longer, Penny Arcade dares to tackle the straight jacket that binds today's youth culture to the normalization of self-censorship and injects fresh air in the current lockdown of gentrification, the erasure of history and the cultural amnesia affecting not only our cities but our minds. -- PENNY ARCADE (aka Susana Ventura) is an internationally respected writer, poet, actress and theatre maker, and one of a handful of artists who created and continue to define performance art. Penny debuted with John Vaccaro’s explosive Playhouse of the Ridiculous at age 17, and was a Warhol Factory Superstar at 19, featured in the Andy Warhol's Women in Revolt. With an artistic career spanning almost 50 years, Arcade occupies a unique position in the American avant-garde. HM Koutoukas referred to her as ‘the little sister of the avant-garde’ because of her long association with the architects of the American counter culture movement: Andy Warhol, Charles Henri Ford, John Vaccaro, Judith Malina, Taylor Mead, Jack Smith, Harry Smith, Tom O’Horgan, and Charles Ludlam among others. Her focus on the creation of community and inclusion as the goals of performance and her efforts to use performance as a trans-formative act, mark her as a true original in the American theatre. In this context, Penny has written over ten full-length shows including La Miseria, Sisi Sings the Blues, Bad Reputation and New York Values as well as and hundreds of solos. Her world famous sex and censorship show, Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!, has been performed in over 30 cities around the world and was successfully revived as a ‘landmark production’ (London Times) for its 20th anniversary in 2012. In 1991, Quentin Crisp chose Arcade as the woman he most identified with, naming her his anima figure and soul mate. Their friendship became professional as they undertook many performances together until his death at age 91. An Evening with Quentin Crisp and Penny Arcade is now available on DVD to mark Mr. Crisp’s centennial, and the actress Cynthia Nixon portrayed Arcade in the film on Mr. Crisp’s New York life, An Englishman in New York with John Hurt. In 2010, Semiotexte/MIT Press published a hardcover book on Arcade called “Bad Reputation: performances, essays, interviews.” Her award winning documentary The Lower East Side Biography Project, Stemming The Tide of Cultural Amnesia which she co-creates with long-time collaborator Steve Zehentner is broadcast weekly in New York on Ch 34 Time Warner and RCN 112 and simultaneously at mnn.org…