THE WEDDING or THE REBELLION by Becca Plunkett, FronteraFest at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, January 25 - February 1, 2014

Written and Directed by Becca Plunkett. Scenic, Costume, & Properties Design by Leslie Turner. Original Music by Griffen McDonald. Stage-managed and Assistant-directed by Chris Weihert.
 
Saturday, January 25th at 12:00 p.m.
 Monday, January 27th at 9:15 p.m.
Friday, January 31st at 7:00 p.m.
Saturday, February 1st at 10:45 p.m.
Live Music. A hilarious Performance. Free Champagne.
Don't be a boochie barbarian, buy your tickets! Online tickets are $12. You can buy them from BUYPLAYTIX. Or you can be super hip and pay $10 for a cash pre-sale ticket. Just contact any of the above-mentioned, and we will get the tickets to you. Yes. Yes, we will.

THE WEDDING, OR THE REBELLION tells the story of an arranged marriage between a balding orthodontist and a shanghaied lesbian, orchestrated by the Botox-addicted mother of the bride-to-be. The day of the wedding is a happy, happy day, indeed!

STARRING:

Lee Corkran as MARIELLA (a pussy gopher struggling against the forces of her overbearing mother)

Lindsey Greer Sikes as CAROLINE (Mariella's overbearing mother. A Botox-addict obsessed with finding a husband for her daughter. She has arranged 9 failed marriages.)

Zac Carr as TODD (arranged husband number 10. A non-smoking, balding orthodontist. His winky is not large.)

AND

Kent Harral as PASTOR FRANK (also a non-smoker. A pastor. He enjoys parties and such.)

PURCHASING YOUR TICKETS IN ADVANCE ALWAYS REAPS REWARDS. LIKE:

A complimentary wedding brunch with champagne and breakfast tacos at the 1/25 matinee.

Complimentary champagne and wedding cake for performances on 1/27 and 1/31.

AND

Complimentary champagne and an invite to a late-night wedding reception and party after the show on 2/1. Hip.

Somewhere in Utopia (A Travesty), Out of Context Productions for FronteraFest at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, January 25 - February 4

by Michael Meigs

Face it: there's no use getting annoyed with the theatre of the absurd, no matter how confusing it may seen. Or even with the neo-theatre of the absurd such as this piece by Jared J. Stein, produced a good 50 years after the audacious thumbing-its-nose-at-the-bourgeois art style hit the European stages.

In Somewhere in Utopia Stein portrays a dystopia: two principal characters are fixed unthinkingly before a television screen as the audience files into the black box of the Salvage Vanguard Theatre. One slim, nervous androgynous white-skinned creature is wearing a black Harlequin-style mask; the other, a stolid, angry African-American glaring at the television, is wearing a white mask. There's a lengthy, subtle silent play between them as we wait for the action to begin. With almost no movement other than Bobby's apprehensive trembling and occasional changing of the channel and the sustained glare of Marcus, they are establishing a full story even before the house lights go down. I was fixed in my seat by the vibrating tension between them, made even more painful by the callow undergraduate talk in the seats behind me, a couple of rambling conversations about weekend activity and plans to study abroad. Couldn't those spectators see that there was a full-blown silent catastrophe occurring right in front of us?

Director Becca Plunkett leaves no character unturned. There are four in the piece and actors' sexes are transformed. Bobby and Marcus are certainly women but seem to be representing men locked in some sort of mutually destructive relationship; the narrator when s/he appears is a self-confident prancing and sneering actress carefully painted to have five o'clock shadow. The fourth, emerging from a heavy, mattress-sized vinyl bodybag, is Cassady, a fast-talking pseudo-American-Indian girl portrayed by a man with the lean figure of a runner,wearing a skirt and an impossible headdress.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

A Samuel Beckett Cabaret with Rick Roemer, Fourthworld Theatre Projects, FronteraFest , January 19 - 30

With no particular fanfare, Rick Roemer is offering you the chance to understand the stretch and diversity of the art of the professional actor. But just for a brief shining moment, so check your agenda.

Roemer appears in these stark pieces by Samuel Beckett this afternoon, Tuesday evening the 25th and Sunday afternoon the 30th. As the complement, you can appreciate his appearance as the haughty, comic Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest four evenings a week at the Austin Playhouse, until February 20.

His colleague at Southwestern University in Georgetown Jared J. Stein directs Roemer in these three short pieces by Beckett, collected under the ironic banner title of A Samuel Beckett Cabaret. For the FronteraFest 2011 Long Fringe the production is sponsored by "Fourthworld Theatre Projects" and an informal company assembled from theatre students at Southwestern, including Becca Plunkett, Edward Coles, Kinsey Keck, Matthew A. Harper and others.

Samuel Beckett's 1949 piece Waiting for Godot is the most familiar of his texts, with the 1956 Endgame probably in second place. Notable productions of those longer pieces appeared in the Austin area over the last year -- a cheerfully comic version of Godot at the Sam Bass Community Theatre in Round Rock , a Classic Theatre production of Godot that won three of San Antonio's ATAC Globe awards, and a memorable staging of Endgame by the Palindrome Theatre Company at the Larry L. King Theatre of Austin Playhouse.

Beckett wrote intermittently for the theatre for 25 years after Endgame. His pieces became briefer, more concentrated and more engimatic. Of the 29 shorter theatre pieces collected in the Grove Press edition , the last ones are the shortest and most dense. Catastrophe from 1982, dedicated to Czech writer and political resistance leader Vaclav Havel, is only four pages long. Ohio Impromptu, first produced at Ohio State University in 1981 is three and a half pages and features a character reading aloud to a silent listener. In this Beckett cabaret, those pieces bracket Krapp's Last Tape from 1958, in which Roemer, the solo performer, has lengthy silent intervals of pantomime, including an exquisite sequence with bananas -- worthy of the best of Buster Keaton -- and interacts with his own insufferable self of 30 years earlier via a tape recording.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: The Fifth Sun, Southwestern University, Georgetown, October 23 -25

Received directly:

at Sarofim School of Fine Arts,
Southwestern University, Georgetown

THE FIFTH SUN

by Kinsey Keck & Becca Plunkett
Directed by Becca Plunkett
Blackbox Theatre
Heather McGaughey Memorial Hall
October 23 - 24, 8 p.m., October 25, 3 p.m.

The spark for The Fifth Sun comes from the Aztec "Legend of the Five Suns". The legend states that each sun is a period of time wherein there is peace and life on earth. When a sun dies, the world is absorbed in chaos as the gods destroy the world in order to renew it. The Aztecs believed there are only five suns and that we live the era of the last sun.

What if the Aztecs were right? What if we are in the era of the last sun, and a new sun will not take its place? What if this chaos is not followed by renewed stability. The Fifth Sun presents four characters facing a world plagued with death and destruction, four characters that always hope for something better and wait for a new beginning.