THE BROTHERS MERLIN, Loaded Gun Theory at the Off Center, May 17 - June 1, 2013

presents

The Brothers Merlin

The Off-Center, 2211-A Hidalgo Street, near E. 7th Street and Robert Martinez (behind Joe's Bakery) 

May 17th-18th, 23rd-25th, 29th-31st, Jun 1st at 8 pm





But tickets on-line via















Come meet the Brothers Merlin and their Magnificent Menagerie of Mysteries. Two brothers unearth a mysterious secret to immortality. This curse ultimately causes them to sacrifice what they love. But who is that handsome stranger? Is the dog trainer really Hitler's clone? And what's going on with those meddling kids?


Set in a carnival after the unleashing of an unspeakable ancient evil, The Brothers Merlin combines elements of comedy, magic and 1960s B-movie horror for a roller-coaster ride of weirdness.

May 17th-18th, 23rd-25th, 29th-31st, Jun 1st at 8:00pm

Cast and Crew

• Frank Benge Director
• Beth Trumpy Dramaturg
• Amy Lewis Writer
• Anna Larson Writer
• Bill Arnold Writer
• E.D. Harrelson Writer
• Ian King Writer
• Ian LeClair Writer
• Julie Winston-Thomas Writer
• Timothy Thomas Writer

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Upcoming: Apocalyptic by Loaded Gun Theory at FronteraFest, Hyde Park Theatre, February 10

Received directly:

presents

The Apocalypse Play:

Apocalyptic!

For the past 6 months Loaded Gun Theory has been collaborating on a new full length play. This Thursday at 8:00pm come out to Hyde Park Theatre and witness a 20 minute teaser as part of Frontera Fest Short Fringe. A woman who talks to teacups. A man at the end of his rope (literally). An acerbic therapist, a charismatic playboy of unknown origins and his ever present donkey friend. Come out and see the beginnings of this hilarious dark comedy written by E.D. Harrelson, Julie Winston-Thomas, Anna Larson, Amy Lewis, Timothy Thomas, Ian LeClair, and Bill Arnold.

Click to purchase tickets for the FronteraFest Short Fringe program of February 9

Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd St. at Guadalupe, 8 p.m. (click for map)

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Upcoming: The Graveside Service by Tim Thomas, FronteraFest at Hyde Park Theatre, February 5

Received directly:



Announcing


The Graveside Service

by Timothy Thomas

as part of FronteraFest's Short Fringe. This is your first chance to get a glimpse at what will become a new musical from Loaded Gun Theory. This show will sell out!

Friday February 5, 2010, 8 p.m. at the Hyde Park Theatre
Buy Tickets Now!

Loaded Gun Theory will reveal everything about KOOP Radio's Mr. Spradling and Mr. Harris and their roles in the deaths of certain musicians.

Lights! Longing! Music! Carnage!

Directed by Amy Lewis with Craig Kanne as Mr. Harris,Gene Storie as Mr. Spradling, Nikki Zook as Lillian Price, Bobbie Oliver as Mrs. Roger T. Price

New Images for Ongoing: The Skin of Our Teeth, Different Stages at the Vortex Repertory, November 13 - December 5

Images by Brett Brookshire, received directly.

AustinLiveTheatre recommends The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder, playing Thursdays - Sundays at the Vortex until December 5.

Shown: Andrew Matthews, Chloe Edmonson and Bobbie Oliver as the Antrobus family.

Click for ALT review.

View more images at
AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder, Different Stages at the Vortex, November 13 - December 5

Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth is 67 years old but it plays as if it had been written and workshopped last week by one of those Austin indie arts groups of which we are so proud.

It's wild stuff --a history of humankind as embodied by the Antrobus family, with a mad mix-up of times, epic figures, surreal settings and primal myths. Refract that story through the lens of a dramatic structure that the author and actors keep yanking out from under you, dress it up with Lowell Bartholomee's videos, and live with the fact that you never know what's going to happen next.

Wilder wasn't shy about announcing the epic proportions of this tragicomedy. The family's last name is "Antrobus" -- a label that shouts "human being" or "humankind," derived from the Greek άνθρωπος ("anthropos" -- as in, for example, "anthropology").

Your first act is located in an apparently modern New Jersey, except that it's not modern -- the Ice Age is encroaching.

Read more and view images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder, Different Stages at Vortex Repertory, November 13 - December 5

Received directly:

Different Stages presents
Thornton Wilder’s

The Skin of Our Teeth

November 13 – December 5, 2009
The Vortex, 2307 Manor Road (map)

Thursdays – Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m.
No Performance on Thanksgiving Day, November 26
Added performance Wednesday, December 2

Pick your Price: $15, $20, $25, $30

Different Stages opens its 2009–2010 season with Thornton Wilder’s comedy The Skin of Our Teeth. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this is the satiric story of the extraordinary Antrobus family down through the ages from the time of the war – any war. They have survived flood, fire, pestilence, the seven year locusts, the ice age, the pox and the double feature, a dozen wars and as many depressions. Ultimately bewitched, befuddled and becalmed, they are the stuff of which heroes and buffoons are made. Their survival is a wacky testament of faith in humanity.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Human Sketches by Trey Deason, Sam Bass Community Theatre, March 20 - April 4

This is a "world premiere," in public-relations-speak, and the folks at the Sam Bass Community Theatre once again show their inventiveness and their determination to be more than a simple source of weekend amusement for the suburbs of Austin.

SBCT isn't a large group and they don't have the ample venues or resources of some other out-of-Austin theatres. But they make up for that in pluckiness. Following close on their accomplished production of funnyman Steve Martin's quasi-absurdist piece Picasso at the Lapin Agile, they're now doing Human Sketches. The script was chosen from more than twenty original pieces submitted for SBCT's So You Think You're A Playwright? competition.

It's a winner in more ways than one. Author Trey Deason's two-act piece is well crafted, peopled with sharply drawn central characters and examines serious, interesting issues -- although perhaps not those you might expect from the M.C. Escher sketch used on the poster.

Read More . . . .

Picasso at the Lapin Agile, Sam Bass Community Theatre, January 30 - February 21

Round Rock's Sam Bass Community Theatre gives us a charming production of this quirky play by America's quirky funny man Steve Martin.

Here's the premise: since Pablo Picasso used to hang out at a bar-café in Paris called "The Nimble Rabbit," just suppose that one morning in 1904 Albert Einstein happened to meet him there. Einstein was a poorly paid patent examiner but by night he was working on his "Special Theory of Relativity." Two of the formative geniuses of the 20th century!! Art and Science, just about to flourish, ignorant of what awaited them! What a great concept!

Lots of zany humor here, verbal and conceptual paradox, anachronism gone amok -- we are loose in Steve Martin's head. John Gall, designing the cover for the paperback edition of the play, caught this precisely.



Martin delights in his unseen role in this play. From the opening scenes he plays mischievous tricks on the audience and the characters, breaking the stage illusion and bending time and space to suit his funnybone. Getting an astounded and delighted laugh from the audience for that bit of business, Martin secures their consent for some serene irrealities and not-possible meditations on genius and fame. This play is done in one act, quite possibly because any audience pauses for reflection might break that spell.

Bar-café owner Freddy (Grant Kail) and his waitress/main squeeze Germaine (Amy Lewis) are simple, hard-working folk, the tolerant hosts of a floating crowd of regulars such as the bibulous Gaston (Paul Arndt).

Into their premises that morning comes an unexpected eccentric, the young patent examiner Albert Einstein. Quite apart from Martin's initial prank about getting Einstein into the bar twice in looped space-time, Freddy and Germaine don't quite know what to make of the young man. Einstein says that he's waiting for the Countess, who has a rendez-vous with him in another establishment but since she's just as eccentric as he is, she's certain to go somewhere else, so why not here? That's the Martinesque nutty logic that bounces throughout this piece.

Enter Ellie Vixie, clad in brilliant red and wrapped in dreams of Pablo Picasso. In giddy transport she insists on telling the whole story of their impetuous, wild encounter, in anticipation of meeting him once more here at the Lapin Agile. She waves a penciled sketch on a napkin given her by the artist after their encounter.

The twentieth century! It's already 1904, and bar-owner Freddy can never quite get the date right, but playwright Martin sets his characters into contemplation of events to come. Here's some of his most divine nonsense, genuinely funny despite his wink-wink unseen presence behind the text. First Germaine the waitress and then Freddy make predictions. They are outrageously wrong ("Led by Germany, this will be known as the century of peace"). In fact, the predictions are so absurd that the piece would be better served if the actors slowed the pace here a bit, letting brain-cogs churn as they produce progressively more erroneous pronouncements.

Martin rolls in art dealer Sagot (Mary Southon, right) carrying a tiny Matisse, for meditations on art, genius and commerce, then brings Picasso (James Sadek, center) onstage in an explosion of ego, happy rant, and lust.

There's a lot of quizzically witty talk about art, including a thorough analysis of the merits of the inherited tableau of sheep in a field that is hanging behind the bar. Martin brings on a self-seeking would-be genius Schmendimann (Robert Sherman), who generally baffles everyone before disappearing.


When Picasso finally notices the lady in red, he goes after her like a bull in heat. To her dismay, he appears to have completely forgotten their first encounter. Sadek as Picasso adroitly re-seduces her with everyone looking on before he and Einstein get into chipper dialogue about genius that yields both nonsense and profundities.


And how do you resolve the plot with incongruities popping like popcorn? Martin doesn't need a magic wand. With a puff of mystery, he brings on an unnamed Visitor from the future in blue suede shoes (enter upstage, from toilets). The affable, aw-shucks Visitor declines the offer of alcohol.

He listens to the zippy dialogue; he finds everyone to be "really nice folks" and buddies briefly with alcoholic Gaston. Stephen Hendrix in this role provides a nice visual contrast with our turn-of-the-other-century friends. His lines, as words from the future, should cinch up the conclusion, but he plays them so low-key that other characters run over them.

For the finale, the ceiling lifts away to reveal unimaginable constellations, and our geniuses read their names in the stars.

Director Christina Gardner and her cast have successfully pulled off a very challenging theatre piece, once again emphasizing both the reach and the grasp of the Sam Bass Community Theatre. They've taken on Steve Martin's over-clever wit, mastered it, and made it very entertaining.

Favorites in the cast include Amy Lewis as the warm hearted but cynical Germaine, whose summary judgment on Picasso toward the end is a reluctant exoneration for him, and James Sadek as Picasso. Sadek's accent in this piece is probably not very accurate for the real Picasso, who was a Spaniard living in France, but after all, the real Picasso would have been speaking either French or Spanish (alternately, as Lady in Red Ellie Vixie recalls with a shiver of erotic memory).

Grant Kail as the practical Freddy, surrounded by geniuses, rises neatly to the occasion with the play's tag lines: ". . . in the twentieth century, no political movement will be as glorious as the movement of the line across the paper (points to Picasso), the note across the staff (indicates the Visitor), or the idea across the mind (indicates Einstein)."

Most of all, Ben Weaver sparkles in his role as Albert Einstein. Contained, naive and sincere, he has a Charlie Chaplin purity to him, a wholesome antidote to Martin's manic plotting.