photo by Gerard Stolk

The debate over Mayor Bloomberg’s soda ban raged on Tuesday, having started at 1 p.m. but lasting over 80 minutes past its initial expected ending time, the New York Times reports.

Representatives from the board of health, union advocates, consumer advocates, health experts politicians, even a speaker from Auntie Annie’s pretzel chain, flocked Long Island City to discuss how restricting the sale of sugar-based drinks over 16 oz. would affect both consumers and suppliers. Sodas this size would be legal in grocery stores, but illegal at street vendors, movie theaters, and restaurants.

But the Times says the expected approval is still likely, and that the next time the two sides met, it could possibly be in a courtroom.

According to the Times’ live blog of the event, as of 4:24 p.m., most representatives left the meeting, with only a handful of speakers left.

Mayor Bloomberg initially proposed the ban to reduce obesity in New York City which, according to Bloomberg’s numbers, affects 60% of the city’s population. Opponents cite there not being a proven connection between sugar and obesity and diabetes.

The meeting wasn’t expected to produce any sudden changes.

-Nick Gallinelli

Photo by Deborah Alexander

The post-Tonys summer haze is the time when New York theater tends to take a breather, with fewer high-profile openings until the fall. Quantity, however, has no bearing on quality, and with less competition for theatergoers’ dollars and time, there’s less excuse than ever not to go see Sovereign, Gideon Productions’ hidden gem currently playing at Long Island City’s Secret Theatre.

Sovereign shouldn’t be a secret to all; it’s the final installment in Mac Rogers’ visionary “Honeycomb Trilogy,” following in theatrically post-apocalyptic sci-fi vein of predecessors Advance Man and Blast Radius. For the un-indoctrinated, early events in “Honeycomb” saw an invasion of an insect-like alien species take over Earth, murdering most humans and enslaving the rest. An uprising, led by Ronnie Cooke, saw a war in which many of the survivors sacrificed their lives to extinguish the species and return the planet to some semblance of its initial human form.

Yes, the event of the trilogy took place on an epic, inter-planetary scale, and it was to Rogers’ credit that the playwright was able to cut through genre tropes and make the events of his plays both accessible and practical for a small stage and a company with limited resources. But what really serves each of these plays – which cohere as a trilogy and also each work as standalone works – was the emotional needle with which Rogers threaded his trilogy. Thanks both to Rogers and director Jordana Williams Sovereign succeeds most, and perhaps better than its two antecedents, as an intimate, emotional work, bridging the head and the heart without ever resorting to pathos or unearned sentiment. And it’s primarily the show’s two leads, Abbey and Ronnie Cooke, who provide the beating of that heart.

The show picks up twenty years after the events of Advance rocked the Coral Gables Cooke family and eight years after Blast. Gone are many of the action sequences and alien images of the earlier installments (though Sandy Yaklin’s set and Jeanne Travis’s highly evocative sound design remind us of past and present dangers.) Ronnie (originally played by Becky Byers, now played by Hanna Cheek), battle-scarred and hardened by a lifetime of fighting and loss, must lead her remaining followers on a new kind of quest: to reacclimatize to a life of liberation. And she must also face a decision that hits her closer than any other: whether or not to assassinate her wayward brother, Abbey (now Stephen Heskett, formerly David Rosenblatt), a traitor to the human cause. One of the central conceits to Rogers’ trilogy is that both siblings, in charting divergent paths, were governed by both reason and instinct. Neither was completely wrong or right, but made indefensible decisions caused by an indefensible conflict. Comparisons to real-life war abound in Sovereign, but are subtly tucked under the deepening rift between Abbey and Ronnie, and Cheek and Heskett could not be more captivating. Cheek oozes battle fatigue out of every pore and manages to lace in nuances of humor, vulnerability, self-doubt and even childlike reverie, while Heskett continually peels back the layers to show a man questioning the cause to which he has dedicated a lifetime. The emotional material here is so deft that it pushes for real estate on a par with Shakespeare, Ibsen and O’Neill.

If there is any deficit to Sovereign, it’s that the magnificent duet created by Cheek and Heskett cuts down on material for a talented supporting cast, including Matt Golden’s Zander, Ronnie’s by-the-book second-in-command, Erin Jerozal’s juvenile Claret, and Sara Thigpen’s damaged Fee. But as Sovereign, and indeed, the whole of “Honeycomb” teaches, there just isn’t time to do everything one might set out to do in life. So make the time to catch this show – you’ll regret it if you don’t.

Sovereign

June 14-July 1; $15-$18. The Secret Theatre, 44-02 23rd St., Long Island City, www.gideonth.com .

August Schulenberg asks clever questions in

Something wonderful is happening at the Secret Theater. Science fiction has taken over this Long Island City that’s begun to play host to a series of intellectually stimulating pulp theater, starting with Mac Rogers’ ongoing Honeycomb Trilogy with Gideon Productions there. Now, the provocative cyber-thriller Deinde joins the ranks as well. Who’d have thought such a small Off-Off-Broadway venue could provide such fertile soil for the sandbox of one’s mind?

Deinde, helmed by the winning team of playwright August Schulenberg and director Heather Cohn, is set in 2051. (Note: the two are part of the Flux Theatre Ensemble, which has mounted Deinde and provides the “F” in BFG, a collective sharing a half-year residency at the Secret; Gideon makes up the “G”). A team of dedicated quantum biologists faces a deadly virus, including Cooper Sands (David Ian Lee), whose wife is slowly dying from it. The team learns from intelligence expert Daniel Nemerov (Matthew Trumbull) about a system called Deinde (a humorous acronym for “Dineural Entangled Intelligence Network Device”), which will enhance their analytic capabilities and discover a vaccine for this scourge.

Apparently, though, in the future, what happens in practice is very different from what happens in theory. Elder team member Malcolm (Ken Glickfield) fears these “super-brains” will either alter or corrupt his scientists, and he’s within reason. It isn’t long before various side effects begin to tear his team apart at the seams, largely unfolding in a series of two-handers between members of the cast. Mac Silverhorn (an intensely committed Isaiah Tanenbaum) actively loses touch with his humanity, to the fright of best friend Bobby (Matthew Murumba) and intrigue of co-worker Jenni Long (Rachael Hip-Flores), who herself becomes detached from girlfriend Mindy (Sol Marina Crespo). Cooper, meanwhile, embarks on a new journey of his own, questioning loyalty to his wife over a connection to lead scientist Nita Ghosh (Nitya Vidyasagar).

A lot of these individual threads progress in ways you might expect, but woven together like a double helix, the carefully constructed Deinde becomes both suspenseful theater and intriguing bioethical commentary. What’s wonderful is just how much of this play’s progression happens in the minds of its characters, and, without showy visual effects, is communicated to the audience. Cohn is able to do this by eliciting touching, specific performances from her entire ensemble, from Lee’s palpably anguished Cooper to Trumbull’s awkward Nemerov to Tanenbaum’s funny-frightening Mac. Additionally, Will Lowry’s minimalist set design, quickly dispatched between scenes is wonderfully evocative.

Deinde takes a few turns for the self-indulgent. It’s currently far from a taut play, and could actually stand to lose about twenty minutes of its running time by trimming some redundant blubber. I also wish the relationship between Cooper and Nita had more of an ebb and flow to it, and that more attention was paid to the (de)evolution of Dara (Alyssa Simon), Cooper’s dying wife, currently an undernourished thread. But there is exceedingly more that works for Deinde than there is against it. Schulenberg has created a socially relevant cautionary tale about the uses and abuses of technology. And in saddling his message to a host of intriguing characters and a smart story, he comes to praise its possibilities, not bury them. Imagine that.

Deinde

The Secret Theatre, 44-02 23rd Street, Long Island City), thru May 12.

www.fluxtheatre.org