Images by Ryan Joy: A Lie of the Mind by Sam Shepard, Capital T Theatre, May 12 - June 4

Images by Ryan Joy, posted at www.capitalt.org:

Capital T

presents

A Lie of the Mind

by Sam Shepard

directed by Mark Pickell

May 12-June 4

Salvage Vanguard Theatre, 2803 Manor Rd. (click for map)

Jake has brutally beaten his wife Beth and left her for dead. Her brain damage is significant. His guilt is crippling. Jake’s brother, Frankie, searches for the truth of Beth’s condition, while Jake’s father haunts him from the urn beneath his childhood bed.

A Lie of the Mind is both a chilling indictment of true love and an affirmation of its abiding ties. Capital T is proud to present this gritty, darkly humorous American drama by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Sam Shepard.

Click to view additional performance images by Ryan Joy at AustinLiveTheatre.com

FronteraFest Best of the Week: Women in Search of Love, January 30

Last Saturday's FronteraFest "Best of Week 3" brought us a lot of yin and very little yang. Of the five pieces brought forward, four were solos by actresses.

Yang did hold its own. The six "Confidence Guys" who did improvised Mamet gave us that playwright's expletives, elisions, incomplete understoods and macho pushiness to the life. After a quick poll of the audience they played it as salesmen in a failing car dealership. Maybe it was a set-up, but they had the edgy macho attitudes down pat. It could have been City Theatre's 2008 Glengarry Glen Ross if they'd substituted real estate for the automobiles.

Ah, though, the women! They captured my heart.

Melanie Dean was there as Lo, the seamstress from small town Texas, as I had predicted in an ALT review earlier in the week. It was a pleasure to hear the story of Kenneth Wayne Bradley's Seamstress a second time and to appreciate Dean's interpretation of that woman of simple heart and serene confidence.

Seattle performance artist Keira McDonald ended the evening with a wild, wild piece sending up the female astronaut who went nuts back in 2007 and drove across the country to pepper spray a love rival. I did a February 1 review of McDonald's Astronaughty for Austinist.com, part of ALT's outreach for new readers.

The two other solo monologues were meditations on the search for love. Brash Krissi Reeves and thoughtful Joy Loveall were single women looking at that subject at different ages, from different life stations and with different expectations. Women at different points along the Tao.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Seamstress by Kenneth Wayne Bradley featuring Melanie Dean, FronteraFest at Hyde Park Theatre, January 27

Is it ethical for a theatre journalist to accept a cookie from an actress in mid-performance?

How about if everyone in the audience has a chance at the home baked goods, because Melanie Dean has handed front-row spectators two big plastic bowls filled with cookies?

There were lots left when the bowl came along the third row. I dipped in without compunction, happy to trust in Melanie's persona as the garrulous small-town Texas widow who has been making wedding gowns since she was a young teenager.

Ken Bradley with his direct stare and imposing assurance is one of Austin's most distinctive actors. This piece, "Seamstress," shows again that he's a deft hand at writing character sketches. Last year Travis Dean rode Bradley's short script "Windchimes and Varicose Veins" in Capital T's I ♥ Walmart to a B. Iden Payne award as Austin's most outstanding featured actor in a comedy for the 2008-2009 season.

That script was a rant; this one's a ramble. Melanie Dean's in her workshop, addressing a new client, probably an awestruck young woman overwhelmed with our culture's bridal rituals. The seamstress is charming and reassuring, as she's fretting with notions both visible and invisible. As she fusses about the shop she chats to the spectators, stand-ins the apparently silent client. We hear how she wound up in this business because she was an assistant to her grandmother; how she fell in love with her slow-talking, courteous and methodically drinking husband; how her remarkable designs came to the attention of some big city designers, just at the wrong time.

Hers is a steady flow of reminiscence and counsel, a dreamy movement like a tubing trip down the Guadalupe of her memories. She's an artisan with a good heart, sharing good moments and regrets, putting her unseen client at ease. Melanie Dean makes this woman lively, friendly and entirely credible.

Bradley's Seamstress under Ellie McBride's direction is a neatly done cameo, a professional piece of work turned out with an eye to the cut, to the presentation, the detail and the tradition. Just like those imaginary bridal gowns that have sustained our seamstress over the years.

Judging from the length of the applause for Dean and for Bradley's script, I'm expecting to see this piece again tomorrow night at FronteraFest's Best of the Week, and probably again at the Best of Fest in February.

I'll be accepting a cookie then, too.


[illustration tweaked from Felicia Bond's cover for "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie" by Laura Joffe Numeroff, © 1985, a Laura Geringer book published by HarperCollins]

Upcoming: Flyers from FronteraFest

Picked up at the Hyde Park Theatre tonight: