GET INTO TROUBLE fundraiser, Trouble Puppet Company at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, August 1, 2013

[workshopping and performing at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, 2803 Manor Rd. -- click for map]

presents

Get into Trouble

 

with Trouble Puppet Theater Co.
Aug. 1, 2013, 7–11 p.m.
Salvage Vanguard Theatre, 2803 Manor Rd. Austin, 78722 -- click for map

Party with your personal demons! Join the Trouble Puppet Theater Company at their 5th annual party and festival of troublemaking. Admission includes live performances by Adam Sultan, Datri Bean, and others, as well as games, raffles, food by Counter Culture, and drink. Plus a sneak peek at Trouble Puppet’s upcoming show The Head, an original Trouble Puppet show, and the personal demons living inside the head.

Come in costume as your own personal demon (or angel) to receive additional raffle tickets! All for $15 at





http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/425542.

Funds raised support creation of our show The Head (opens Sept. 26).
 
Trouble Puppet Theater Co., Trouble Puppet Theater Company, led by Artistic Director Connor Hopkins, is dedicated to the creation of exceptional works of puppet theater and is the recipient of such B. Iden Payne Awards as Outstanding Direction of a Drama, Outstanding Original Script, Outstanding Production of a Drama, and Outstanding Puppetry. Trouble Puppet is a sponsored project of Salvage Vanguard Theater and is supported by the City of Austin Cultural Funding program, the Jim Henson Foundation, and individual donors.

Salvage Vanguard Theater is a hub for Austin artists, audiences, and arts organizations. SVT creates and presents transformative, high-quality artistic experiences that foster experimentation and conversation.

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Adam Sultan by Steve Moore and Zeb L. West, Physical Plant Theare, March 28 - April 13, 2013

(poster design: Jennymarie Jemison)

by Dr. David Glen Robinson


For the committed theatergoer, this was a long-awaited premiere. The blended live-action and puppet play previewed at the 2012 Fusebox Festival. The preview tantalized audiences with its potential for taking many different directions.


The premiere at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre on March 28 satisfied our aroused curiosity with a long sequence of wise story choices. They took us through some surprising ways yet never strayed from its emotional heart. Sure, it was about death, and innovative puppetry sustained all its moods and action; at the same time the production remained light, humor-filled and entertaining. 
 A demanding ticket buyer couldn’t ask for much more.


The play follows the character of Adam Sultan, played by the artist Adam Sultan, through to the far distant future of A.D. 2052 (not quite forty years from now). 

 Aged and infirm, Sultan sees and feels the loss of his artist friends all around him. Seemingly despairing, he collects mementos of their lives and seals those objects into glass jars. His bookshelf fills with the jars. Then one day a half-scale doppelganger puppet enters his apartment, drinks heavily and passes out. Sultan doesn’t know what to make of it; he never does know what to make of it. What’s sure is only that from this point forward puppets carry equal weight with human actors in conveying the story and its meanings.

(photo: Physical Plant Theatre)

The Physical Plant team of Steve Moore and Zeb L. West wrote and crafted the show. In addition to makiing unerring choices in a mature story revolving around death, they incorporated advanced concepts of new puppetry that took Adam Sultan to the edge of theatre and puppetry. 

Completely black-garbed puppeteers were visible onstage. In conventional theatre, anyone wearing black is a technician and therefore invisible in the sense of operating the play and not figuring in the scripted action; technicians are merely making it happen.


The Adam Sultan puppeteers pushed this envelope or bent this frame in several ways. First and most fundamentally, the puppeteers manipulated and changed the human actors throughout the play; they did so subtly and tellingly when they reshaped the postures and stances of the living to reflect advancing age, as for example in the touching moment when they placed wedding rings on the fingers of the lead characters. In addition, the puppeteers removed their black headgear to speak narrative voice-overs at a microphone stand at stage left. With this, the audience no longer held the puppeteers comfortably framed in invisibility as helpers for the story. Attention, audience: they might do other things, so be ready.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

ADAM SULTAN, Physical Plant Theatre at the Salvage Vanguard, March 28 - April 13, 2013

Physical Plant Theater

presents

Adam Sultan

March 28-April 13, 2013; shows at 8:00 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays.
(Two additional shows as part of the Fusebox Festival: April 18 and April 19 at 7pm.)
Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Road, Austin, TX 78722 (click for map)

Tickets: $12-$25 at http://www.physicalplant.org/adamsultan/ or at the door
LENGTH: 90 minutes

Created for adults, the play is appropriate for ages 15 and up
Fast forward 40 years and Austin’s bon vivant Adam Sultan copes with the loss of his friends and his community by collecting objects to remember them by. In this newdrama, Physical Plant considers the ways that death so often points eagerly at life. Arrive early to enjoy the lobby installation of mementos from the theater community. From the creators of the award-winning shows Nightswim, The Kindermann Depiction, and Not Clown.

Adam Sultan is real and lives in Austin. Great guy. Musician, composer, dancer, storyteller, actor, and teacher. The play is as a kind of speculative biography of Adam, as we imagine his life about forty years in the future. By then, Adam is in his eighties, many of his dearest friends have died, including his wife, and he’s contending with his loss by collecting mementos of the dead. Sometimes melancholy, often hilariously poignant, Adam Sultan asks how we continue to be influenced, moved, and changed by those we’ve loved and lost.

As part of the project, we’ve collected over 400 mementos from members of the theater and performance community. We’ll have those on display in the lobby along with audio of the people describing the significance of their objects.


Physical Plant Theater is the recipient of numerous B. Iden Payne Awards, Austin Critics Table Awards, and David Mark Cohen Playwriting Awards. We are dedicated to making work that is created entirely in Austin, often about Austin, and always deeply connected to this place and this community. Physical Plant is supported by the Creative Fund and by individual donors.
Salvage Vanguard Theater is a hub for Austin artists, audiences, and arts organizations. SVT creates and presents transformative, high-quality artistic experiences that fosterexperimentation and conversation.

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Kickstarter Appeal from Steve Moore for 'Adam Sultan,' Celebrating Austin's Theatre Community, Mortality and This Moment in Time

 



How would you as an Austin theatre artist want to be remembered decades from now? Steve Moore explains the rationale for his play Adam Sultan, scheduled to open at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre at the end of March and asks for your support.

Adam Sultan is a real person here in Austin - a composer, performer, teacher, friend. At the moment, he is still alive.

You can select your own memento and lend it to Steve and the Physical Plant Theatre Company, as many of us already have. You can also donate toward the $4900 the company needs to produce the show. Click HERE or on either Kickstarter logo for further information and to pledge.

 

Adam Sultan is a play slated to open in Austin on March 28th - just about two months from now.
The play centers around a real person in the world named Adam Sultan. Great guy. Lives here in Austin. He's a musician, composer, dancer, storyteller, actor, and teacher.

We imagine Adam's life about forty years in the future. It's the year 2052, and Adam is in his eighties. Many of his dearest friends have died, including his wife -- and much has changed. Including Adam. Over the years he's gone from happy and adventurous to cranky and withdrawn, in large part because the community he was once a part of has disintegrated around him. That's where we begin.

One day, seemingly at random, an exact puppet version of Adam arrives at his apartment. It can't see Adam and can't hear him, but it is definitely alive. It walks, eats, drinks, and sleeps. And it's living some version of Adam's own life....


Go to the Kickstarter page for more information. . . .

Adam Sultan by Steve Moore, Physical Plant Theatre and Trouble Puppet Theatre Company at Fusebox Festival, Salvage Vanguard Theatre

by Dr. David Glen Robinson

The big black box that is the Salvage Vanguard main theater was set with the props and furniture that said “small apartment.”  The scary, striking aspect of it all was the array of nine black-garbed human figures standing in it; they were puppeteers in full dress—veils, gloves and slippers/sneakers—and they stayed with us throughout the performance.

The performance began, lights up, with the entrance of two human figures, not puppets. Adam Sultan the character was played by musician and composer Adam Sultan; the character of Karen was played by Caroline Reck, master puppeteer of Glass Half Full Theatre.  Both characters wore red clown noses, and enacted an introductory scene showing them to have just returned from a clown’s funeral.  The clown noses had been a final request of the deceased clown.  They finished the scene by placing the novelty noses in a mason jar and sealing it.  Then they stood out downstage, facing the audience.  One of the puppeteers (Zac Crofford) also stood forward slightly with a bow and fired time’s arrow straight up.  Time then rolled through decades as a voice-over stated the names and years of death of actual, living members of the Austin theatre community.  Speculative causes of death were cause for hilarity in the audience as every name was known to many.  Meanwhile, the puppeteers—no spoiler here—manipulated the two characters, re-costuming them, and, with the puppeteer’s magic touch, imposing the movements and postures of advancing age upon the characters.

Adam Sultan is a powerfully imaginative work, yet in its infancy, a work in progress.  The performance piece is an offering of Physical Plant Theatre, written and directed by Steve Moore. It seems as though production credit should also go to Trouble Puppet Theatre Co. as seemingly all of the Trouble Puppeteers performed on the stage throughout the show and also fabricated puppets and several costumes. Perhaps Trouble Puppet shows up as a wholly owned subsidiary on Physical Plant’s flowchart; I don’t know.  Regardless of labels, these are the same artists who gave us the dark and innovative Crapstall Street Boys at the Fronterafest Long Fringe only a couple of months ago.  Clearly, they work at a furious pace.  In an introductory speech Moore told is that Adam Sultan has been in development only about a month.  What we saw tonight will be the first act of the full work, slated for production in 2013.  The prospect is most auspicious.

Click to read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .