It's back...

For three years running, Morning Milking Evening Milking has returned to New York City for a brief stint at Theatre for the New City. Now for the second time in 2001 (the play ran Feb. 28 - March 4 earlier in the year), Jim Farmer's satire plays at TNC, Oct. 4-21.

Farmer's Milking follows a family of four falling apart on a Louisiana plantation in the heat of the 1950s South. While Cat, the pregnant daughter of strong but haunted Papa and fragile, but poetic Mama, survives her marriage to the brutal, sexual Johnny-Lee, he grows closer to becoming a murderer. The whole thing is executed as a parody of Tennessee Williams' hothouse Southern dramas.

A film composer whose movies have included "The Real Blonde," "Living in Oblivion," and "Johnny Suede," Farmer wrote the plays Yonder Window Breaks and I've Been Drunk for Three Days and I Have a Gun along with the musicals Frontier Halloween, Pistols and Stamens and When Existential Things Happen to Good People.

2000's cast of Jane Grenier and Brendan O'Malley return with the addition of Celia Schaefer and Wilbur Edwin Henry, who played in the comedy back in February. Tickets are $10. Theatre for the New City is located at 155 First Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets. For reservations, call (212) 254-1109.

-- By Christine Ehren