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"Marissa Bantry is 11. She has long blonde hair her mommy brushes and braids. One day, someone is watching. The next morning, Marissa goes missing."

"Video text, soundscape, animation combine in this stage adaptation of lauded novelist Oates's provocative work. The Corn Maiden is a brutal look at the secrets of the individuals embroiled in a kidnapping in affluent Skatskill-on-Hudson, from the girl's weak-willed single mom . . . to her aloof substitute math teacher . . . to a sullen trio of her schoolmates (who seem to know much more than they let on) . . . and finally, the girl herself."

These short animations were scattered throughout the show to reveal the main character Jude Tahern's subconscious desires and feelings. The films serve as windows into her true feelings.

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John Wayne meets his own “Heart of Darkness”. In reference to the 1968 propaganda film “The Green Berets” that he made in response to the Vietnam War, John Wayne engages in a series of tribulations that involve demonstrations of masculinity, autoeroticism, seduction, castration, and necrophilia. For generations, John Wayne served as the model for young men and soldiers to follow; further widening the gap between Hollywood’s perception of war and war’s reality. This film specifically references the Vietnam War era, and the complete inversion of the idyllic American mythologies that John Wayne created. Vietnam became the nightmarish version of the American dream, and John Wayne’s manly frontier idealisms could not be more out of the place. In the end, the “Duke” can only engage with reality and history in a perverse way.

Screenings:

• Other Cinema: "New Experimental Works", San Francisco, CA
• Los Angeles Erotica Film Festival, Los Angeles, CA
• Atlanta Underground Film Festival: "Animation Attack!", Atlanta, GA
• Gitana Rosa: "Confessional" screening, Brooklyn, NY
• Floating World Comics: "Floating World Animation Festival", Portland, OR
• Evil City Film Fest, New York, NY
• National Museum of Women in the Arts Film Festival, Washington, D. C.
• San Diego Women's Film Festival, San Diego, CA
• Bushwick Film Festival, Brooklyn, NY
• Whitehot Magazine Festival, New York, NY
• Artist Collective: "Modern Day House of Horrors", Brooklyn, NY

Reviews:

"Art student Vivian Wong's sexually graphic, animated "Kill John Wayne" (part of the fest's Animation Attack presentation at 9 tonight at East Side Lounge and 9 p.m. Saturday at the Plaza) criticizes the late actor's he-man, all-American image, especially in the wake of his chest-thumping stance regarding the Vietnam War and his propagandistic drama "The Green Berets." Wong's clear intention: take no prisoners."

--Bob Longino, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution