Upcoming: Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman, Arts Project of Austin at the Gemini Playhouse, November 18 - 20

Found on-line:

Death and the Maiden

A play by Ariel Dorfman

Set in an unnamed country that is, like the author's native Chile, emerging from a totalitarian dictatorship, the play explores the after effects of repression on hearts and souls. Paulina Escobar's husband Gerardo is to head an investigation into past human rights abuses. A Dr. Miranda stops at Escobars' to congratulate Gerardo. Paulina overhears them speaking and is convinced that Miranda supervised her prison torture sessions. She ties him to a chair and conducts her own interrogation, gun in hand. Escobar doesn't know whether to believe his distraught wife or his persuasive new friend. This white knuckle thriller is a riveting intellectual and emotional tug of war.

November 18, 19, and 20 at 7 p.m., with a 2:30 p.m. matinee on the 20th.
Tickets $15 adults, $12 students, seniors.

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Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill, AHS Red Dragon Players, October 14 - 21

Theatre is a lens. The audience and the players look through the action in the playing space to perceive a story in the collective imagination. That story may be entertaining, or trivial, or profound, and the clarity of the vision is directly affected by the skill of the players and the willingness of the audience to engage.

The themes may be familiar. Take vampires, for instance. The century-old thrills of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel got a new boost in 1997 with Buffy. Since then they've proliferated in romance fiction, the Young Adult section in bookstores and libraries, and even Gnap! theatre's Dusk, an ongoing weekly PG-13 improv series down at the Salvage Vanguard now entering its second season. Most of the recent stories about all those undead guys are suggesting the fears and pleasures of adolescent secuality, an eminently marketable commodity in these United States. And by the way, October is the time of the theatre season when spooks and ghosts and vampires are brought frequently out onto the state.

In contrast, the vampire that appears unexpectedly in the third act of Churchill's Mad Forest is a lot older. Billy Rainey appears tired, tired to death and beyond death, sunk in the discouragement of a Romania that hasn't changed in 500 years, despite the excitements of the 1989 uprising, the overthrow of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, his 90-minute hearing and the summary execution of Ceausescu and his wife Elena. Meeting the vampire in that powerful scene is Brazos Bell as an abandoned dog, desperate for food, companionship and a master. They dialogue and we understand the incomprehension between them. That scene in its magical realism captures the unsolved plight of Romania -- blood, time, history and a vulnerable desire to please.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Auditions: Different Stages: Humble Boy, October 18 & 19

Received directly:

AUDITIONS on October 18 & 19 by

for

Humble Boy

by Charlotte Jones

to be presented January 7 – 29, 2011 at the City Theater, 3823 Airport Blvd., Ste. D

Felix Humble, theoretical physicist, has left Cambridge and his search for a unified “Theory of Everything” to attend his beekeeper father's funeral–but finds himself in the middle of a hornet's nest instead. His overbearing mother Flora has exiled the bees, and taken the boorish next-door neighbor as her lover. Add a mousey family friend, a dutiful gardener, and a visitor from his own romantic past, and like the bees, Felix bumbles to find order amid the chaos. Winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, the Critics' Circle Best New Play Award and the People's Choice Best New Play Award.

Auditions Monday, October 18 and Tuesday, October 19

Times: 7 p.m. - 9 p.m.

Location: Dougherty Arts Center, 1110 Barton Springs Road

Plot Description: Humble Boy is a comedy about broken vows, failed hopes and the joys of bee keeping. All is not well in the Humble hive. 35-year old Felix Humble is a Cambridge astrophysicist in search of a unified field theory. Following the sudden death of his father, Felix returns home to be with his difficult and demanding mother. He soon realizes that his search for unity must be expanded to include his own chaotic life.

Roles 3 women ages 35 – 60, 3 men ages 35 - 65

Director Jonathan Urso

To make an appointment or for information call Carol Ginn at 444-3303

The script can be checked out at the office of the Greater Austin Creative Alliance at 701 Tillery Street, Suite 8-A. There is a $10 deposit (exact change or check only) for a 24 hour check out. G.A.C.A. Office hours are Monday-Friday, 10am-6pm. Call 512.247.2531 with any script check out questions.

Actors are strongly urged to read the script before auditions.

Arts Reporting: Stanley Fish: Humanities Programs Under the University Knife, New York Times, October 12

Found on-line:

In a response to last week’s column on “Howl,” the movie about Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem, Charlie from Binghamton asked, “What happened to public investment in the humanities and the belief that the humanities enhanced our culture, our society, our humanity?” And he speculated that it “will be a sad, sad day if and when we allow the humanities to collapse.”

What he didn’t know at the time is that it had already happened, on Oct. 1, when George M. Philip, president of SUNY Albany, announced that the French, Italian, classics, Russian and theater programs were getting the axe.

For someone of my vintage the elimination of French was the shocker. In the 1960s and ’70s, French departments were the location of much of the intellectual energy. Faculty and students in other disciplines looked to French philosophers and critics for inspiration; the latest thing from Paris was instantly devoured and made the subject of conferences. Spanish was then the outlier, a discipline considered stodgy and uninteresting.

Now Spanish is the only safe department to be in. Russian’s stock has gone down, one presumes, because in recent years the focus of our political (and to some extent cultural) attention has shifted from Russia to China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq. Classics has been on the endangered species list for decades. As for theater, the first thing to go in a regime of bottom-line efficiency are the plays.

Read more at the New York Times on-line. . . .

Arts Reporting: Survey Identifies 10 Most Important American Dramas, Denver Post,

Received on-line: an in-depth survey carried out by the Denver Post, flagged by the February 14 edition of the free on-line daily




and annotated by ALT:

An excerpt from the article by John Moore, Denver Post theatre critic:

The 10 Most Important American plays -- Theatre must speak for its own time, but will time be kind to the plays being written today?

. . . [W]hen it comes to American plays, greatness can be as elusive as their favorite subject: that fickle American dream.

So which plays rise to the top over time? The Denver Post asked a long list of theater professionals nationwide to give an opinion. Their cumulative take: U.S. writers have produced only two plays in nearly 50 years that belong beside the very best, Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" and August Wilson's "Fences."

Our informal survey asked 177 playwrights, directors, actors, professors, agents, producers, students, bloggers, critics and theatergoers to rank the 10 most important American plays ever written.

The top 10 largely reflect a world of booze and brawls, of the disintegrating American family and the gross inequity of the American dream.

And the average age of those plays is 52.

Fittingly, the most historic American play is the one most often described as Greek in scope and tragedy: Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" — a working-class "Oedipus Rex."

Kushner's apocalyptic "Angels" was next, hailed by The New York Times for creating "an astonishing theatrical landscape, both intimate and epic," making it "the most thrilling American play in years." It's followed by "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Long Day's Journey into Night."

Kushner calls "Salesman," "Streetcar" and "Journey" "the unquestionable big three" of American playwriting.

About the Austin annotations, with links:

Long Day's Journey into Night was performed as an Actors' Equity Code Project, May 27 - June 7, 2009 directed by Dr. Lucien Douglas for an ad-hoc group that called itself "Ar Rud" (Gaelic: "Our Thing"). Click for ALT review of May 31, 2009.

Anderson High School did Our Town November 12-15, 2009. Wilder's classic will be performed by the University of Texas in April in a traditional staging and by the Zach Theatre in April-May in a more modern staging, probably influenced by the recent successful revival in New York City. Both companies are offering a discount, available with password, to encourage audiences to see the two versions.

Tex-Arts in Lakeway offers The Glass Menagerie February 26 - March 14, directed by Michael Costello and featuring Babs George and Jude Hickey.

City Theatre will stage A Raisin in the Sun February 25 - March 21, directed by Lisa Jordan, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the play.

City Theatre staged August Wilson's Fences February 26 - March 22, 2009, directed by Lisa Jordan and featuring Robert Pellette, Jr. Click for ALT review of March 1, 2009 ; click for ALT profile, "The Incantations of August Wilson and 'Fences.'" (February 25, 2009)

Read more about the survey at the Denver Post on-line. . . .