Still Life with Iris, UT Drama Department, October 31 - November 7

Steven Dietz wrote Still Life with Iris for the Seattle Children’s Theatre, which produced it in 1997.

The UT production now onstage at UTPAC is as marvelously iridescent as a soap bubble lifting into the night sky. It won’t be much longer lived than a bubble, either, with only 8 performances scheduled.

Scenery, costume, lighting and special effects are impressive, as well they should be – the back page of the program reads like a movie title crawl, with well more than 100 individuals involved in the technical aspects alone.

UT actors embrace Dietz’s fantasy world and have a good time doing so. Particular credit goes to Stevi Baston in the title role as Iris and to the nefarious, court-of-Versailles-mannered couple, the Goods (Matrex Kilgore and Ashley Hayes). I enjoyed the bumptious Annabelle Lee (Betsy Clair Cummings) and Michael Bowman as Mozart.

Dietz posits a magic world called “Nocturna” in which the inhabitants all have special duties for the greater world – for example, painting the spots on ladybugs, teaching the wind to whisper or howl, or hauling the moon up every night. Nocturnans wear thickly padded coats that preserve their memories – and the tailor (called the “Memory Mender”) fussily admonishes them to keep their coats in shape, so no knowledge will dribble out of broken seams or unfilled buttonholes.

A huge moon hangs over this prancing fantasy land, looming against a galaxy of stars and a dim, billowing horizon of waves or hills.

Into it comes the intruder Mr. Matternot (the somber, good looking Nick Spain), with the mission of enticing Iris out of her coat and away to an island ruled by “the Goods.” At his conniving, Iris’s mom (Molly Searcy, left) doffs her coat and suddenly doesn’t recognize her own daughter any more.

Iris goes away with him, coatless, but carrying a worn leather pouch with a single button we’ll discover to be carrying fragmentary images from memory.

Grotto and Gretta Good in their island realm collect the best of everything – but only one exemplar of each. Their palace is defined by eccentric angles and its surprising collection (“Imagine,” says Grotto, gesturing, “We have ONE drape, but it is the best one that exists!”)

The sky over the palace is dark, with a single star.

The Goods needed a girl and a boy for their collection, and Iris appears initially to fill the bill. She winds up wearing one silver shoe (“the best shoe in the world!”) and receives as a present the best doll in the whole world, which is inexplicably sealed away in a locked box.

As her counterpart, the Goods acquire a young man with brilliant yellow coat and a keyboard on a strap -- the young Mozart (Michael Bowman), who is baffled when he loses his musical instrument and is encouraged to compose, instead, on a piano with a single key and a single note.

From there, the plot thickens, of course. After all, what child would want to be a museum piece, even if she could not remember clearly anything different or better?

Mix in a stray female free spirit, attached to a multicolor fabric chain and in search of her misplaced sailing vessel. This Annabel Lee (Betsy Clair Cummings) is just as decisive as Iris is disoriented, although she doesn’t have any clear explanations for the state of the world.

That makes the odds 3 to 2, and the Good Guys Iris, Annabell Lee and “Motz” combine in the naïve effort to overcome the decisive dispositions of the dubious Goods.

A tailor called in for some mending turns out to be the Memory Mender (Brian Fahey), who drops a few helpful hints. . . .

And so on. All comes out well; the ladybugs get their spots, the wind learns again how to whisper and howl, and that big old moon gets hauled up once more.

The show is charming, the actors breathe life into characters who are written as two-dimensionally as Javanese shadow puppets, and the spectators can smile at the familiar tinkling Mozart tunes on the soundtrack.

Annabel Lee, sure, that’s Edgar Allen Poe, isn’t it? “It was many and many a year ago,/In a kingdom by the sea. . . / I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea;/But we loved with a love that was more than love - / I and my Annabel Lee.” (But come to think of it, that Annabel Lee wound up dead, in a whitened sepulcher by the sea.)

Grownups writing for children sometimes can't resist a knowing wink. For example, in the published version of the play Dietz includes a shred of Keats as a preliminary: "And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,/ And she forgot the blue above the trees,/And she forgot the dells where waters run,/ And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze."

But more important than those considerations – where were the children?

This play is written for audiences of the enchanted ages from 6 to 12 years of age. They can laugh and embrace its non-sense and can root unabashedly for the heroine struggling to understand the arbitrary world of decisive, wrong-headed grownups. They would love the magic and the spectacle; they would grasp immediately the bewilderment of a girl whose mother stares blankly at her.

But as far as I can tell, Still Life with Iris is playing at UT to audiences made up of university students and other grownups.

For this Halloween performance, I had the Joker on one side of me and Marilyn Monroe a couple of rows behind us. But theirs were probably not the fantasies that Dietz was seeking to fulfill.

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ADDENDUM, November 3: Thanks to UT Producing Director Denise Martel, who informs ALT that Still Life with Iris will play two shows for fifth graders from the Austin Independent School District, Wednesday and Friday. Shows are sold out -- so nearly a thousand kids will get to experience the production!

Daily Texan review by Aboubacar N'Diaye, November 6

Production photos and information, UT Drama Department

Costume sketches for Still Life with Iris

Google preview of published edition of Still Life with Iris, including most of Act I