Lauri Bortz

"In an America of the near future, or perhaps the recent past, where men can only wed others of their kind, and women are relegated the tasks of breeding and housekeeping, one happily married couple, Jakob Blythe and Tobias Folwen, have their bliss briefly interrupted." Thus begins the tragic-comic opera A Modicum of Passion, based on the play by Lauri Bortz, with a musical score composed and conducted for string quartet by Elliott Sharp. This release features an all-star cast of vocalists: jazz sensation Devorah Day, punk prince Ben Miller, (x-Destroy All Monsters), R&B crooner Eric Mingus and indie rockette Joan Wasser, plus a fabulous four musicians--Stephanie Griffin, Conrad Harris, Amy Kimball, Garo Yellin--who are accomplished in all of these genres and more.

A Modicum of Passion is a woeful tale of depraved indifference. In this microcosm, empathy is shattered by surrealistic time/space, and love fails to conquer much, if anything at all. The story unfolds in classic operatic format as Elliott Sharp's expressionism takes eerily beautiful twists and turns. This is Sharp at his most lyrical and gothic: the hummable melodies will no doubt surprise his ardent followers. But, loveliness aside, Lauri Bortz's darkly absurdist libretto has found its perfect musical match.

The CD release party for A Modicum of Passion took place December 12th, 2004, at Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan. A concert performance of the opera was given with most of the original cast, conducted by Elliott Sharp. Two more hours of incredible music followed. Featured acts included Third Border, Ben Miller's latest duo with Jena H. Kim of Butterknife Krush, and Pothole Skinny, Jersey City's premier psychedelic band with guest vocalist Devorah Day.

"One of the things that impressed me most about the whole piece--other than the story, which I like for a lot of the usual arbitrary/personal taste reasons--is the tightness of the overall structure from beginning to end. To work well, a story like the one you've told has to have its few crucial plot and character elements presented with enough room for each to breathe, but not so much that any become tedious. You did a good job with that. On the way home from the live performance, I commented that it reminded me a lot of the structure used on some of the better-realized episodes of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected, an anthology show from the late 70s/early 80s based on Dahl's (and a few others') stories. I guess that's sort of out of left field, but it was an immediate response that I had.

A Modicum of Passion was given a #1 pick by Joe Harrington in the Village Voice's 2004 music critics poll: Pazz & Jop. In Earshot Media's January 2005 report, A Modicum of Passion was 101 of 200 records favored by Canada's biggest college radio stations: Earshot Online. The opera spent the entire winter of '05 on the charts of WXDU, Duke University's station WXDU. It also received airplay on KDVS (UC Davis) and KZSU (Stanford) in California: KZSU.

Jersey City's Lauri Bortz is a well known playwright and the founder of Abaton, the book and music publishing imprint on which this short opera is released. Set in a future urban America where women have lost most of their power, the plot finds a male couple waiting for their first heir, whose blissful relationship undergoes "complications" with the arrival of Minette, a female infant at first rejected by one of the men. Things change, until the finale.. well I won't reveal the plot here (unfortunately, the libretto is not included in the CD, but it is available from Abaton). Elliott Sharp's score calls for the Yellin string quartet and singers Devorah Day, Ben Miller, Eric Mingus and Joan Wasser, and its harmonies are less strident than usual, though you wouldn't say that while listening to Miller and Mingus's hopeless, oblique river of symbolic fake grief, the concluding "Here today, gone tomorrow". Elsewhere, like in the magnificent interlude "Blue by who?", the New Yorker's lines are played by the Yellin quartet with sapient sensitivity, a kind of cross between Bela Bartók and post-Schoenbergian bitter indulgence, very pleasant to the ears and not too heavy for the data storage capacity of the brain.–MR

FromParis Transatlantic.com

Purchase the CD A Modicum of Passion via paypal with any credit card for $15.00 postpaid worldwide.

The New Abaton Library is pleased to bring you To-Night at 8:00, two illustrated tragicomedies by Lauri Bortz. Included in this volume are A Modicum of Passion and Fixed, Ms. Bortz's first published works (1997).

Her autograph, her cleavage; yours for the taking

Lauri Bortz is the author of several plays and the co-creator of Sordid Lives, a weekly episodic drama that was performed at The Pyramid in the East Village during the early '90s. Bortz's first play, Two Minus God, was adapted for film and screened at The United Nations' Dag Hammarskjold Theater. Two subsequent one-acts, Dragons and Dust and an early version of Fixed, were presented by the AWD Resident Theatre Company as part of their Triple Dare series at The Creative Place Theatre, New York City.

To-Night at 8:00 explores a bizarre yet familiar world imbued with mutant social codes and jolted by rude awakenings. You are certain to find yourself both wildly amused and gnawingly perplexed while under the influence of Ms. Bortz's keen wit and intellect.

The illustrator tickles the author pink (while once she was black as night)

On the press junket in Amsterdam; "Nether say nether!"

Illustrating this book are twenty-four drawings by New York artist J.D. Fleishman, who has had numerous exhibitions in the United States and Europe. Fleishman is a former adjunct professor of graphic arts at the Parsons School of Design. Her work is included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art NYC and the Arnhem Museum in Holland.

To-Night at 8:00 has been called: "epic in its weirdness" by John Strausbaugh, New York Press, and "startling, satirical, truly experimental" by Professor Leonard Ashley, Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance Volume LX 3 (1998)

Lauri Bortz's set designs for A Modicum of Passion...

and Fixed.

A Lauri Bortz/Mark Dagley stopmotion animation short based on Fixed was screened at The Hudson County Film Festival on February 20th, 2004 at The Jersey City Museum. The festival traveled to Hoboken and Manhattan the following spring.

You can purchase To-Night at 8:00 by credit card directly from Abaton Book Company for $16.50 postpaid within the United States and Canada. For shipping charges to other countries, please contact Abaton.

This handsome volume contains two tragic farces, Skirting the Issue and Catfight, both of which explore themes of gender in language, role-playing, role modeling, and the education of the American youth. The book is profusely illustrated with vintage advertisements that have been appropriated and altered by the playwright and Brazilian-born artist Roberto Cabot. PLAYBORTZ's cover image is based on a painting by renowned visual artist/musician Mark Dagley.

Rave reviews:

New York Press

Read Magazine

Skirting the Issue was awarded first prize in the Pen and Brush competition of 2000. The Washington Square Playwrights presented a staged reading of Skirting the Issue at the Jefferson Market branch of the New York Public Library on September 30th, 2000. Ms. Bortz costumed, directed and co-starred in this reading with Nora Breen, Mark Lien, and Melissa McNeeley.

A repeat performance was staged at Bowery Poetry Club on December 17th, 2002.

A radio version of Skirting the Issue, adapted and directed by DJ Thurston Hunger of KFJC FM and featuring station staffers, aired on March 5th, 2001. Professor Peter Appelbaum directed a reading of the play at the 2001 JCT Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice in Dayton, Ohio.

Lauri Bortz's set designs for Skirting the Issue

Release party at Jan Van der Donk Rare Books in Chelsea

Here's what Allison Abaton, the lady in red, has to say about her mentor. A Life Less Ordinary Allison is Vice President of Harvard's WINC (Women in Color), the student group that sponsored the notorious 2003 feminist career panel featuring none other than Lauri Bortz.

The proud author

PLAYBORTZ is often on the syllabus for Professor Laura DeSena's writing workshop at New York University, either sandwiched between Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher and Schnitzler's Hands Around or preceded by Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Here are some inspired illustrations for PLAYBORTZ by the spring 2003 class. The professor's pet was wondering ... Is Bortz Dead?

Both PLAYBORTZ and To-Night at 8:00 have been recommended by The Kansas Anarchist.

To order PLAYBORTZ, please contact Abaton Book Company, Amazon.com or your local bookstore.
ISBN: 0-9677326-3-8

Retail price: $15.00

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Read Lauri Bortz's interview with Magical Maya in the spring 2003 issue of
The Brooklyn Rail