Dug Up, Larry L. King Theatre at Austin Playhouse, October 10 - November 2

This show will fill the bill if you are looking for spooky entertainment for this Halloween season.

Director Laura Toner and Austin playwright Cyndi Williams tell us,
“Dug Up was inspired by the stories of post-Katrina New Orleans, her personal experience driving through the Louisiana bayou, the idea of Tennessee Williams writing a ghost story, and stories from her own childhood. Dug Up exists though in its own world, slightly out of time and reality. The stories and lies that the characters tell in this world are mostly based on true stories. . . .”

The action takes place in the courtyard of a moldering, foundering house somewhere in swamp country, where an outbuilding was converted sometime in the past, not too successfully, into tourist lodgings. Protagonist Dewitt (Jude Hickey) interacts with his sister Lissa (Jessie Tilton) and a negligée-clad long-stay tourist Marci (Liz Fisher), who may have murdered her husband. Mix in a storm that may or may not be a hurricane, various clean-picked skeletons of small animals, and a larger bone that looks disturbingly like a human femur.


You could go in any of several directions with elements like these, especially when it becomes evident that DeWitt is a naïve, perhaps simple-minded orphan who obsesses over dead pets to the extent that he digs them up and talks to them. The situation sounds perilously campy. Deepest dankest Louisiana, a clutching of dead bones, a looming storm, and slutty females with accents. The show could almost have begun with the phrase, “It was a dark and stormy night.“

Playwright Williams, to her credit, chose to raise the mark considerably above that. Her characters speak a special, highlighted language and deliver long speeches set with glistening poetical images as sharp as broken glass. There is a mystery that we intuit, then grasp, and finally understand.

This type of discourse requires a special indulgence from the audience, a redoubled suspension of belief, because we are initially tempted to reject that eloquence from apparently stereotypical characters. This is all the more true because Williams often makes them monomaniacal monologuers, whether or not they are onstage together.

Both acts open with Lissa speaking directly to the audience; DeWitt apostrophizes the dug-up skeleton of his beloved little doggy “Flossy.” When finally enticed out of her room, Marci re-tells DeWitt’s doggy story and delivers in emphatic monologue her own highly emotional story of early marriage, debauchery and a murderous struggle.

Williams and the cast earn that indulgence. Once past the intermission, we understand why Lissa is given license to address us directly, while DeWitt is hollering out a lot of his remarks to the always unseen “Audy’s sister” in the house.

We remain a bit uncertain whether we can accept the sudden emotional about-face of the initially antagonistic Marci, but I think the playwright simply failed to prepare that inflection for the beautiful, fierce Liz Fisher.

Jude Hickey as DeWitt and Jessie Tilton as Lissa worked with Williams over the past two years on this project, and it shows.

Hickey, in particular, invests an absurd character – potentially no more than a verbose simpleton degenerate – with grace, feeling and insight.

With his closing monologue, delivered on his knees as the waters close in, Jude Hickey floats before us a series of images of afterlife, exaltation, confusion, bewildered futile humanity and the deep warm wet earth, transcendent enough in his telling to serve as a prayer for all of us.

Pre-opening interview with playwright Cyndi Williams by Hannah Kenah, published in the Austin Chronicle, October 10

Ryan E. Johnson's review on Austin.com

Travis Bedard's blog comments on Dug Up, October 24

Avimaan Syam's review in the Austin Chronicle, October 30