Last Chance

Catch it or Regret It

by Holly Otterbein

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Gold Mountain
Ends June 21, Pageant : Soloveev, 607 Bainbridge St., 215-925-1535, pageantsoloveev.com

Jessica Doyle’s watercolors (pictured) aren’t simply odes to nature. Just look at the colors: Next to earthy blues, browns and greens are hues you’d normally see only in fruit-flavored candy and dance clubs — sickly orange, lime green, hot pink. She further meshes the natural with the artificial by placing well-dressed ladies next to dirty tents, an upholstered chair near a shabby cabin and naked girls in extravagant roller skates. In the wrong hands, all this countryside chic could look like a hackneyed Cosmopolitan fashion shoot. But Doyle, painting both plain farms and decked-out people sensually, renders it a dream world, in which the urban and rural combine.

The Rose Tattoo
Ends June 21, $12, Old Academy Players, 3540-44 Indian Queen Lane,
215-843-1109, oldacademyplayers.org

This Tennessee Williams play is fond of stereotypes — Sicilian ones in particular. The main character, Serafina DelleRosa, regularly asks her Virgin Mary idol to give her signs, is sickeningly protective of her young, boy-crazy daughter, and spends most of the production weeping in a nightie. In other words, DelleRosa could easily become a bobble-headed Italian cartoon. But Susan Triggiani, herself an Italian-American with seven brothers and sisters, plays the character with enough self-awareness and campy deprecation that DelleRosa is both humorously unstable and — to a degree — relatable.

Houston and Bowery
Ends June 28, Crane Arts Building, 1400 N. American St., 215-235-3405, cranearts.com

Summer Yates is a packrat. Instead of hoarding old photographs, long-broken machines and tchotchke, though, she holds other people’s trash tight. Obsessed with the impermanence of objects — how can we bounce a check to buy a Williams-Sonoma dresser one day, and put it out with food scraps the next? — she picks up sewing machines, hair dryers, orange construction tape, glass shards and other pieces of filth from Manhattan’s East Village. Then she does the trash up nice: With copper wire, she constructs skeletal portrayals of birds and horses; with plastic tubes and red-stained glass, she makes an elegant wall hanging. Another man’s treasure, indeed.