Upcoming: Cardigan by Trey Deason, added performances at UT, February 5 and 6

Received directly:

Purple Crayon Theatre presents

Cardigan

by Trey Deason

reprised from FronteraFest 2011

Saturday, Feb 5th and Sunday, Feb 6th at 8PM
Rm 2.112, The Winship Theater
UT Campus, corner of 23rd and San Jacinto
Suggested Donation: $10 (no one turned away!)

Edgar Cardigan is a world-renowned author and university professor: beloved by his students, courted by publishers, desired by women. Or he's a pathological liar compensating for life's disappointments by indulging in a world of fiction. As he assails his students with the story of his fateful date with Mary, a waitress with acting aspirations, the line between truth and fiction becomes blurred beyond distinction.

Click for ALT review, January 30

Cardigan by Trey Deason, Purple Crayon Theatre at FF Long Fringe, January 20 - 29

Maybe a playwright shouldn't act in his own play. Unless, of course, he's one of those comedy yuksters who speaks directly to the audience and makes smartass observations about his own life exeriences and surroundings.

Trey Deason, the playwright, plays the lead character in Cardigan, a piece expanded from a well-received 2010 Short Fringe offering. His assumption of that identity may be disconcerting to those who have run into him in so-called real life.

Deason is reticent, polite and quiet almost to a fault, at least with those whom he doesn't know well. As Edgar Cardigan, writer, arriving to lecture to us for a class in creative writing, he's emphatic, dismissive, vulgar and as hopped-up as if he were on speed. One is tempted to suppose that this is a portrait of Deason's Evil Twin, a sort of exercise in personal psychodrama. The writer is writing about a writer who is quickly revealed as a compulsive fabricator, and most of what follows is demonstration both of misogyny and misanthropy.

Perhaps director Rudy Ramirez shouldn't have allowed Cardigan to have have snarled so quickly and viciously at Angelia Davis, the actress planted in the audience to play the student. Perhaps Deason should have done breathing exercises so that his character would be less twitchy at the start. Or perhaps just have entrusted the role to another actor.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .