Tom Waits’ discordant, sardonic music is a perfect match for Sam Shepard’s Buried Child. The program doesn't credit anyone, but City's artistic director Andy Berkovsky tells me director Caleb Straus made the choice. Like Tom Waits, Shepard brings us into a world of discord and grotesque despair. He creates a distorted vision of the all American rural idyll.
Think you’ve had a tough time visiting the prospective in-laws? Forget it. Shepard topped your experience, all the way back in 1978, just as Waits was stumbling into alcoholic stardom.
Vince and Shelly take a road trip, heading through Illinois, the heart of America, on their way to New Mexico for an unannounced visit on Vince’s dad. Shelly puts up with Vince’s enthusiasms and anecdotes about this school, that playground and his other narcissistic memories, and then they pull into the drive of a ramshackle farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Into the middle of a very bad dream.
The City Theatre Company digs deep to present Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning drama
Buried Child
February 4 - 21 Thursdays – Saturdays at 8 p.m. Sundays at 5:30 p.m. No show on Saturday, February 6 The City Theatre is at 3823 Airport Blvd. – east corner of Airport Blvd. and 38 ½ Street, behind the Shell station. Reservations 512-524-2870 or info@citytheatreaustin.org Tickets $15 - $20. Guaranteed Front Row Reserved Seats $25. Students $12. Group discounts are available. Thursdays, all seats $10.
Sam Shepard's Buried Child is an American masterpiece by one of the most successful counter-culture playwrights of our generation. This darkly comic tale of a Midwestern family with a terrible secret achieved national recognition as an instant classic, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 and garnering outstanding critical acclaim.
Like many of Shepard's plays, Buried Child is characterized by a poetic sensibility and offbeat sense of humor, as well as startling imagery that conjures up the decline of the great American West. This production will run from February 4 – 21.
Charles Mee's quirky fable Big Love is a reworking of the Greek legend of the Danaids, drawing in part on the earliest extant fragment of Western drama, The Suppliants. It's a story of the war between men and women.
In that text Aeschylus presents about the first third of the story of the 50 daughters of Danaeus and the 50 sons of his twin brother Aegyptus, all of the youngsters being the great-great-grandchildren of the union of Zeus with Io, a mortal princess. The women reject their suitor cousins and flee with their father Danaeus to Argos, where they seek and receive sanctuary by vote of the Argive citizens. The ships of Aegyptus arrive, a herald and soldiers try to drag the women away from the Argive shrine to Zeus, and the King of Argos rebuffs them. The young women rejoice, the Aegyptians withdraw with threats, and the manuscript ends just as things are getting interesting.
In the legend, Danaeus eventually yields his daughters to the 50 young men, but he secretly instructs them to kill their new husbands on their wedding nights. All obey accept one, who has fallen in love with her man. She's brought to trial but successfully defended by Aphrodite, the goddess of love.
Although it's a fragment, Aeschylus's text is heady stuff. In Morshead's 19th century translation, for example, the chorus of young women laments,
I dare not, I dare not abide: my heart yearns, eager to fly; And dark is the cast of my thought; I shudder and tremble for fear. My father looked forth and beheld; I die of the sight that draws near. And for me be the strangling cord, the halter made ready by Fate, Before to my body draws nigh the man of my horror and hate. Before I will own him as lord, as handmaid to Hades I go!
Aeschylus was setting up conflicts involving forced matrimony, the guests' right to hospitality and asylum and the inviolability of sacred places -- with a strong emphasis on the honors and obligations of democracy.
Charles Mee proclaims himself a "reworker." His website makes available the texts of his own plays, including this one, for potential transformation and re-use. He explains the concept: "Please feel free to take the plays from this website and use them freely as a resource for your own work: that is to say, don't just make some cuts or rewrite a few passages or re-arrange them or put in a few texts that you like better, but pillage the plays as I have pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the internet, and build your own, entirely new, piece--and then, please, put your own name to the work that results. "
Found on-line at Texas State University, San Marcos:
Big Love
by Charles Mee Directed by Caleb Straus Oct. 6-10 at 7:30 p.m. and Oct. 11 at 2 p.m. $10 general, $7 students
When fifty women escape to Italy at the last minute of a forced wedding to fifty respective grooms, their grooms come looking for them. It appears the wedding is on, but the sisters will stop at absolutely nothing to be free to make up their own minds. Charles Mee's modern look at Aeschylus's Greek tragedy The Suppliant Women explores the dynamics of power in romantic relationships and is both a powerful drama about the battle of the sexes as well as "a physically and intellectually explosive comedy".
One of the challenges of Macbeth is that we all know the text. Not by heart but, thanks to the hard work of generations of English teachers, just about anyone who is sitting in the theatre when the lights go down will have the elements of the plot.
That's good, and familiar, and comforting. The downside of that familiarity is that the actors don't fear losing us. They have a text to deliver, and they make sure that they hit all of the words and action. Like slalom skiing. You make all the curves and hit all of the gates, and you make it to the finish line still on your feet.
Texas State's production of Macbeth this past week was vigorous, atmospheric and fun to watch. Preliminary music was eerie and appropriate, and stage movement was excellent.
Director Charles Ney gave us a surprise in the opening scene. Yelling, battling warriors rush onto the stage and have it out with much clashing and dying. When the dead are left and the quick are fled, the witches rise from among the corpses. As they chant, they dispose of the slaughtered, dumping them down a trapdoor at center stage. After the Weird Sisters disappear, one prostrate figure remains, and he is revealed to be the "bloody sergeant" who then unfolds to newly arrived King Duncan the tale of the battle.
