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| Bastion Carboni (photo: John Anderson) |
Bastion Standard Time
Austin theatre's 'enfant terrible' swapped his poison pen for a Poison Apple, but he still gets people talking
Playwright, actor, director, and onetime theatre critic Bastion Carboni has a weird sense of humor. He'll start a sentence by laughing loudly at something he just thought of and say the joke that just occurred to him out loud. It doesn't always get the same reaction from others.
This time, we're at Home Slice Pizza, and Carboni has just come up with an idea that he's thrilled with for a photo to accompany this Chronicle profile. "It should be a photo of me with an apple shoved into my mouth, like a suckling pig, in skin-tight jeans, with the words 'c'est ne pas un enfant terrible,'" he declares, a reference to a number of things: René Magritte's famous painting, The Treachery of Images, of course, but also the name of the theatre company that he started last year, Poison Apple Initiative, as well as a blog post by local author Spike Gillespie, in which she castigated Carboni as an "enfant terrible" for his decidedly no-holds-barred approach to theatre criticism.
Carboni served in that role for the arts and culture website Austinist for a little over a year, finally leaving last February to pursue his endeavors with Poison Apple Initiative full time, and, one can safely conclude, because he was tired of how angry people got with him for saying the things that he said about Austin theatre.
