A Queer Mountain Lion Leaps From the Page to the Little Island Stage

“It’s the perfect setting for this experiment,” Caitlin Ryan O’Connell, the director of a staged reading of “Open Throat,” said of Little Island, an elevated park situated on the Hudson River. The concept behind Henry Hoke’s 2023 novel, “Open Throat,” is an eyebrow-raising one: It’s a story about overdevelopment and climate change narrated by a mountain lion who muses on the lives of hikers and loved ones. Hoke was loosely inspired by the mountain lion known as P-22 whose regular sightings in the hills surrounding Los Angeles’s Hollywood sign, successful crossing of two freeways and eventual death captured the public’s attention in 2022. In “Open Throat,” according to the book’s publisher, the animal identifies as queer, and uses they and them pronouns. The book is “what fiction should be,” the novelist Marie-Helene Bertino wrote in her review for The New York Times , and it made several end-of-year best-of lists and awards shortlists. With an internal monologue that has poetically broken stanzas and a fluid sense of time and reality, “Open Throat” does not immediately call for theatrical adaptation. Yet a staged version of the work is premiering Wednesday as part of Little Island’s ambitious summer series of live performances at its outdoor amphitheater. The narration is divided among three performers, including Chris Perfetti, who is holding the book, and Calvin Leon Smith. “I think the beauty of it, and the reason we’re intentionally having three different voices, is making it universal,” Perfetti said. “It reads beautifully,” Zack Winokur , Little Island’s producing artistic director, said of the book. “The way it’s placed on the page is visually interesting. The way the voice exists is not like anything else. I kept thinking that it being so voice-driven would make an amazing show, and I didn’t know how to do it, which is the greatest thing in the world.” More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance A Secret Theater Society: Years before they ascended to influential leadership roles, these five women worked at the Public Theater and became cheerleaders for each other’s professional dreams. 15 Summer Theaters: Easygoing days of […]

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