Rita Anderson’s High Tea at Medusa’s Court, being staged this weekend at the Overtime Theater, continues the playwright’s inventive distortion of mythological figures, literary giants and pop culture icons into darkly humorous tableaux.
Take Anderson’s The 27 Club, a suppositional grouping of Pulitzer-winning poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton who meet Amy Winehouse in limbo. The trio plays alcohol-fueled games of Truth or Dare until they realize that they can escape their prison by banding together to establish collective agency.
Similarly, the unlikely principal characters of High Tea at Medusa’s Court — the gorgon Medusa, soothsayer Cassandra and songstress supreme Billie Holiday — are interrupted by Photis and Lucius, the main characters of The Golden Ass (aka Metamorphoses) by Apuleius.
The gorgon allows the gate crashers to tell their tale of woe in order to determine their fate. High Tea’s cheeky patchwork of characters echoes The 27 Club’s in its absurd mashup of epochs and character motivations based on speculation.
$15-$20, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Aug. 21-22, The Overtime Theater, 4335 Vance Jackson Road #103-104, (210) 557-7562, theovertimetheater.org.
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