In her 2010 book, My Passion for Design, Barbra Streisand revealed that her three acre estate in Malibu features a mill house with a water wheel, a cottage, a mansion and a giant U-shaped barn with a silo - in the basement of which, she has built a cobblestone-paved street lined with shops. There is a mall in her basement - and the stores are used as storage, museum-like display of the things she owns. There is an Antique Shop, an Antique Clothes Shop, Bee's Doll Shop, and a Sweet Shop which boasts a frozen yogurt machine.
Buyer & Cellar - a play by Jonathan Tolins currently running at The Barrow Street Theatre in New York City - is set primarily in this bizarre wonderland of personal extravagance. In the one man show, underemployed LA Actor, Alex (portrayed through March 16th by Michael Urie), is hired to role-play a salesperson with Ms. Streisand.
Buyer & Cellar, which had been running since June, was called “...a seriously funny and remarkably sustained slice of absurdist whimsy.” by The New York Times and “... a small masterpiece” by The Observer.
The play is directed by Stephen Brackett who joins us to talk about the play and his career.
