Auditionsfor The Flick by Annie Baker are Saturday, November 2 at the Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd St. and Guadlaupe (click for map).
Looking for one African-American male, early twenties. Two males mid to late twenties, One female mid to late twenties. Show runs March 27, 2014 - April 26, 2014.
Email hydeparktheatre@gmail.com to set an appointment or for more information.
From a new on-line magazine aiming to cover all major metropolitan areas in Texas:
Playwrights Given a Big Voice on Texas Stages
by John Demers August 29, 2013
For lovers of Shakespeare and Molière, Ibsen and Chekhov, Miller and Williams, declaring our time a new Golden Age of the playwright might seem delusional, or at best, a flourish of hyperbole from some theater’s marketing department. But if you ask the artistic directors of some of the most respected ensembles in Texas, they’ll assure you such claims are hardly ridiculous.
“This is absolutely true,” offers Ken Webster of Hyde Park Theatre in Austin, one of the Texas companies that has enjoyed the greatest success staging new works by playwrights like Will Eno, Martin McDonagh and Annie Baker. “The proof is in the great work being put out by playwrights. The last eight years have been a glorious time for artistic directors in search of great new plays.”
Though no one announced the start of an official golden age eight years ago, the signs have certainly been there in front of audiences across the state, especially in Austin, Houston and Dallas. For one thing, printed show programs have granted more and more space to the man or woman who created the plays, in addition to the men and women directing or performing in them. For another, plays are increasingly marketed and seasons are increasingly built around new works by this or that playwright with a following in New York or Los Angeles, here in Texas, or of course, in all of the above.
“Golden Age of the playwright? Bring it on!” responds Houston’s Philip Lehl, a veteran actor with Broadway credits who, with his actor-wife Kim Tobin, has founded not one but two innovative stage troupes. “The theater is becoming one of the few places where audiences can have a communal experience. As TV and movie audiences splinter and head to the Internet, people wanting to gather around a fire with the tribe to hear stories that shape their lives, head back to the theater. The playwright, of course, benefits from this and becomes what he was at the beginning: the high priest – the great tribal storyteller.”
On any given evening, if you go looking for this “great tribal storyteller,” mathematics dictates that you’ll find him (or her!) more often on small stages, among the less-known, more militantly-thoughtful actors, rather than in the major houses as nothing is more likely to fill lots of seats than the safe, the established, the predictable. And that would hardly be the realm of most playwrights attracting attention these days.Today the deepest, darkest visions of human existence – delivered with a laugh as well as a groan – are making their way onto Texas stages: Not because everyone embraces the message of the play, but because more and more of us embrace the playwright.
In Austin, for instance, Hyde Park has produced three plays by McDonagh (The Pillowman in 2007, The Lonesome West in 2008 and A Behanding in Spokane in 2011), along with three by Annie Baker (Body Awareness and Circle Mirror Transformation in 2010, plus The Aliens in 2012). Eno, certainly a darling everywhere, has found a special place at Hyde Park, thanks to his Thom Pain (produced twice in 2007 and again in 2013), along with his Middletown in 2012. “We are the sort of Off-Broadway of Austin,” says Webster. “The fact that we have such a small seating capacity allows us to bring Austin audiences the work of new playwrights the audience might not be familiar with yet. We think it is important that Austin audiences have the opportunity to see these new works.” Read more at artsandculturetx.com . . . .
Proxy Theatre is excited to announce Season 3! Bloodlines: A series of plays concerning those tenuous lines that connect us; and the things that sever them.
Dates to be announced --
Mine by Laura Marks directed by Aaron Aguilar Hamlet by William Shakespeare directed by Samantha Granberg The Aliens by Annie Baker directed by Aaron Aguilar
The Aliens by young play writing genius Annie Baker is a dazzling, offbeat oratorio of inarticulate thought and emotion.
Out back of a Vermont coffee shop there's a dingy employee break area. K.J. and Jasper, guys from nowhere of consequence, have appropriated it as their own hang-out space, like a couple of raccoons nesting under a deck.
K.J. sits motionless much of the time, lost in vague thought, surfacing from time to time to renew contact. Jude Hickey makes him courteous, rounded as a sloth, interested when focused, entirely comfortable in this little world bounded by chain link fence, trash cans and weather-stained brick walls. Joey Hood as Jasper is edgy energy burning in silence at the warped and weather beaten wooden picnic table planted on an unforgiving surface of glittering gravel.
Discovering them there is Evan, the slack jawed, empty headed part-time employee of the coffee shop. He never tells them what he does, but his consternation at finding them out there makes it pretty clear that he's a bus boy, not a barista. Just about any comment addressed to Evan filters into his brain, totters on the brink of consciousness, rebounds and then settles, stimulating the inevitable response: "Uh -- cool."
Annie Baker, the finest young American playwright and author of the 2010 HPT hits Body Awareness and Circle Mirror Transformation, weaves an extraordinary evening from a simple tale of three young slackers talking behind a coffeehouse. The New York Times called it "Gentle and extraordinarily beautiful." This play shared the 2010 Obie Award with Circle Mirror Transformation. Our HPT production is directed by Ken Webster and stars Jon Cook, Jude Hickey, and Joey Hood.
Annie Baker's Body Awareness is a well crafted, attractive little comedy with lots of heart. I hadn't really expected that, for the Hyde Park style is more often sardonic, grimly humorous or menacing. After all, director Ken Webster had been using a publicity shot of the cast in which they looked as if they'd been arrested by the Austin Police Department at a wild party.
Because of a trip out of town, my first chance to attend was a Thursday night. That's usually a quiet night at any theatre here, but Body Awareness boarded like an airliner, accommodating wait-listed passengers. Word had gotten around.
The theatre's promo video sets the characters vividly, so I knew that Stephen Mercantel as Jared was an in-your-face young man frustrated with the world, not in small part because everyone insists that he has Asperger's syndrome -- an inability to empathize or adapt to social conventions, so that he's always asking difficult questions and making observations that come across as unfeeling or cruel. The video captures some of Baker's cleverest turns exploiting that social inability, when Jared is trying to get information about sex and sexuality from adults who are acutely uncomfortable with his questions.
But Baker's play doesn get stuck there, as a TV situation comedy might get stuck exploiting a single character trait or situation. Instead, she succeeds in giving Jared an unlikely appeal and depth. He's enchanted with words and their etymologies; he is reading the Oxford English Dictionary line by line in hopes that someday, despite his lack of formal education, he might become a lexicographer. His unkind, probing questions about human relations and sex arise not from indifferent observation but because he has a deep need to be liked and appreciated.
"Body Awareness" - a comedy by Annie Baker, starring Katherine Catmull, Stephen Mercantel, Emily Erington and Kenneth Wayne Bradley, directed by Ken Webster - at Hyde Park Theatre in Austin, TX.
The show runs April 8 - May 8, 2010 on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays (Thursdays are "pay-what-you-can").
Promotional trailer directed/shot/edited by Eric Graham for IC Pictures.
Tickets are $19 and $17 for students, seniors, and ACOT members on Fridays and Saturdays. Thursdays are pay-what-you-can. Hyde Park Theatre is located at 511 W. 43rd. Tickets can be charged online at www.hydeparktheatre.org, or by phone at 479-PLAY.
Featuring: Kenneth Wayne Bradley,Katherine Catmull,Emily Erington, Stephen Mercantel, Ken Webster
It's "Body Awareness Week" at a very-liberal-indeed liberal arts college in Shirley, Vermont, and tensions are coming to a head. Phyllis, one of the organizers, can't get people to stop calling it "Eating Disorders Week" ("if we could just correct that on all the posters, that would be great.") Her partner Joyce is trying to persuade her socially awkward son ("I'm actually 21. I'm old enough to have sex with an adult woman.") that he may have Asperger's Syndrome. Frank,the guest artist staying at their home, photographs nude women of all ages...all ages.
Auditions 
for The Flick by Annie Baker are Saturday, November 2 at the Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd St. and Guadlaupe (click for map).
