Out with the old and in with the new..... AUSTIN DRAMA CLUB offers up
OEDIPUS REX Oedipus Rex is a Greek tragedy from back in the time of The 300 Spartans and Alexander the Great. It was a time before the Romans and gladiators. It was a simple time when bad children were taken out of the city and left in the middle of nowhere for someone else to find and raise.
The story is a rags-to-riches to stabbing-out-your-own-eyeballs kind of thriller.
Most of the cast returns from the '08 production, including Julio Mella as Creon, Jennifer Fielding as Jocasta and Erin Jo Montanna as Chorus. Japhy Fernandes joins the cast as the messenger, and coffeehouse poet Java jumps in as the shepherd. Kat Eason bellies up to the project as the the prophetess. Ashley is in it, too!
Erin Jo re -directs the show with a vision setting the characters and the story in the land of hippies and flower power. She wants everybody to have their fair share of the peace. Look for more comic relief than you might expect in a story of incest and mistaken identity.
The show opens January 14 and runs three weekends on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. For more details, email Japhyfernandes@live.com To see pictures from other Austin Drama Club productions visit the ADC Myspace page.
Going to an Austin Drama Club production is like Alice's falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. Their venue is a house just off E. 7th Street in Austin, Texas, and you enter through a scruffy back yard surrounded by a chain link fence. When my son and I arrived, Jennifer Fielding was standing by the gate on back yard duty. Her question was, "Have you been here before?"
It wasn't a speakeasy challenge question, but rather an offer of guidance. Finding one's way into the theatre space isn't easy the first time, for that small house has been converted with curtains and a miscellany of improvised, tiered seating into a 25-seat ad hoc theatre. Sightlines are so constrained that three closed-circuit televisions offer alternative views into the corners of the playing space. Lighting consists of inexpensive floorlamps and wall-mounted goosenecks wrapped with aluminum foil and masked with gels in deep red and blue.
You could call it underground theatre, except that it isn't underground. Japhy and Ellen Fernandes and friends are more of a cult, one that is dedicated to dark and somewhat deranged productions of the classics, each done on half a shoestring. Their output is impressive. In 2009 they filled out Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays with three-week runs of Talk Radio, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Fool for Love, Henry V, The Wizard of Oz, Richard III, After the Fall and now, again, Hamlet, their fifth presentation in three years of the epic of the melancholy Dane.
Under Japhy's direction, this is a six-person Hamlet, edited down for a two-hour staging that includes two ten-minute intermissions. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern disappear -- as they did in Laurence Olivier's 1948 version. Also gone are Fortinbras and the gravedigger, much to my disappointment. What remains is a quirky Freudian psychodrama in which Shakespeare's language shines fitfully out of the dark.
The character transformations are often striking and often inexplicable. For example, Rob Novak's Hamlet dresses in white tights and short dark tunic but sports a Tyrolean hat and an ice ax, as if old Europe had somehow slipped in space and time. Casey Allen as Leartes (sic) looks like one of the three musketeers. Although Christopher Harris proved himself an articulate and focused actor in their previous Macbeth, here plays Horatio as a dimwit with a pistol.
The favor that Kat Eason as a juicy Ophelia in tight bustier seeks to return to Hamlet is a Playboy magazine with centerfold deliberately unfolded. The Player King phones in his performance -- literally -- and The Mousetrap is an eerie black-and-white pantomime on the television sets. Julio Mella's Polonius shuffles and mumbles. When Hamlet skewers him through the arras, neither Hamlet nor Gertrude investigates the identity of the corpse. After Hamlet berates her, Ellen Fernandes as Gertrude responds with scornful laughter when her son sees the Ghost.
Playing Claudius, director Japhy Fernandes applies an appropriately theatrical demeanor and uses impressive tone and phrasing, although in an occasionally flutey voice. The strength of his personalization of the confused king carries over the other actors like a big clear-channel radio transmitter dominating other signals.
The cast surprises us with the entirely unexpected and unforeshadowed means of Ophelia's demise, a plot development that suggests a rich and enigmatic undertext. There's madness in this Denmark, but Hamlet isn't the lunatic.
The Fernandes couple and friends are waving torches in a menacing darkness. There's potential treasure there, but unfortunately it is never fully revealed. If you can bear with ambiguity, you'll take away some food for thought. And perhaps you'll develop a taste for alt-Shakespeare.
Hello Theatre Fans, The Austin Drama Club welcomes you to come enjoy the underground biblical hit from so long ago......
Salomé by Oscar Wilde November 5 - 21, Thursdays - Saturdays, 8 p.m. Austin Drama Club
Do you remember the story about the John the Baptist, the guy who gave Jesus the idea to dunk heads under water as a sign of spiritual re-birth? Do you remember how John the Baptist met his maker and why? It had to do with one hot, lit babe called Salomé who because of her pervert of a dad, King Herod, does a little dance and gets what she wants tonight as the moon turns a bloody red.
Back in the day Oscar Wilde was the bomb playwright. His plays stand the test of time and most are of the light, farcical nature. Salomé was his private play for close friends and those he could trust with secrets. Oscar later did some time in a brutal English prison for confessing his gentle disposition and his weakness for young men. Up until then had been seen in the best of society and had adapted quite well. Wit and play writing were the focus of his life and he had no interest in political martyrdom. Salomé was first performed by the Austin Drama Club in August of 08. The vision for the show belongs to poet Casey Allen who returns as director with most of the original cast. Casey turns King Herod's bash into a costume party where Herod (Christopher Harris) comes as Elvis. Casey plays John, the doomed prophet. Erin Jo E. is his angry wife. Kat Eason returns as their daughter Salomé with a dance of the 7 veils not to be missed.
