POOF! - Ancram Opera House

This is an excerpt about POOF! from my August 2021 review of the three Plein Air plays, one of which was POOF, that AOH produced last summer.

....The most transporting play of the triptych, the last, is “POOF!” written and performed by actor/author and LGBTQ+ activist Celeste Lecesne, who wowed audiences with his 2015 Drama Desk- winning solo show “The The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey”. “Poof!" is set in a woodland glen under the spreading trunks of a 200 year old oak. Celeste enters through the wild gardens of the glen as a fairy, both as a real (i.e magic) fairy and, well, a real fairy (what they used to call gays). In a most imaginative monologue, with uncanny puck and razor-sharp wit, Celeste weaves the legend of fairies (and their magical ability to survive) with a world history of repression, culminating with a contemplation of the earth on the environmental edge today. In an amazingly spiritual stream of consciousness - Celeste’s language is rhapsodic - “Poof!” emerges finally as a prayer for the future. Amen. “Poof’ is theater as pure as it should always be.