“ For most of Joey Merlo’s horror-camp anthology show, “Midnight Coleslaw’s Tales from Beyond the Closet!!!”—directed by Nick Browne—the mood is erotic, goofy, and deliberately lo-fi: in one short act, a sexually compelling armchair comes between a hetero couple; in another, a woman (Jan Leslie Harding) is infantilized (and almost re-closeted) by her father’s ghost. Charlene Incarnate, a.k.a. Miss Bushwig 2017, plays our vampiric hostess, Coleslaw, who insures wind-tossed glamour by hauling around her own electric fan. The final one-act, though, pivots. “Life unfolds, paradise after paradise,” a lonesome man (David Greenspan) says, as his gay friends vanish into marriage and conformity. He’s haunted not by death but by a way of being, and this actual sorrow turns all the pretend shivers into something real.”

- Helen Shaw, The New Yorker

“At the Tank Theater, the playwright Joey Merlo and the actor David Greenspan, who had a cult hit last year with “On Set With Theda Bara,” reunite for “Midnight Coleslaw’s Tales From Beyond the Closet!!!,” whose rough edges are very 1980s East Village. Greenspan appears only in the last of this anthology’s three one-acts, a monologue in which he plays a therapist reminiscing about the freewheeling gay old times he much prefers to the normie present. The bittersweet, yet biting, piece is starkly different from the other two, not to mention the interstitial song-and-dance segments starring the lip-syncing “drag vamp” Midnight Coleslaw (Charlene Incarnate). The middle installment, “Daddy’s Girl,” does get my vote for the year’s most twisted psychosexual melodrama. As a boon to programmers, Merlo’s spook ride works for both Pride and Halloween.”

- Elisabeth Vincentelli, The New York Times

Cover Photo: Michelle Watt

Boarder Image: Richard Termine