Steel Magnolias, Trinity Street Players at First Baptist Church, July 31 - August 9

I was invited this past weekend to attend the closing performance of Steel Magnolias, produced at the First Baptist Church, 901 Trinity Street, by the aptly named Trinity Street Players.

The audience filled the black box theatre, a converted space on the upper floor of the church, in which banks of raised seating stood on three sides of the rectangular playing space.

Both the venue and the disposition of the stage brought to mind one of the essays in UT philosopher Paul Woodruff's book last year, The Necessity of Theatre: The Art of Watching and Being Watched (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). After thirty years of work, like me, he returned to an early passion for the theatre. "Instead of writing about Aristotle," he comments in the introduction, "I have written a kind of poetics of my own."

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .