Atlantis/Synopsis

“Atlantis and Other New York Tales,” captures the climactic performance of writer, critic, teacher, prophet, pornographer, Samuel R. Delany, as featured guest at the famed Judson Memorial Church’s Millennium Festival.

A one man performance, a monologue not unlike those of Spalding Gray, but Delany is absolutely unique. He performs rather than reads, stories from five of his books. Whether auto-biography or fiction, his voice suggests direct experience, it is sharply focused and real. All the action takes New York as its location and the cultural signs of race, class, and gender as subject… usually from a gay and decidedly sexual point of view.

The stories range from the Jewel Box Revue (a touring transvestite show of the 50’s & 60’s), his uncles’s tobacco picking in 1920’s Connecticut, anonymous sex in New York’s lost pleasure districts, and finally, to public sex with a homeless man. Somehow, Mr. Delany makes even the outrageous fascinating, humorous, and shockingly easy to enjoy.