Video Promo: I Didn't See That Coming, an evening of short plays by Mark Harvey Levine, Oh Dragon Theatre Company, February 20 - 22, 2014

Video promo by Jim McKay (jmckayfilms@gmail.com):

Didn't See That Coming is a collection of ten short stories featuring ordinary people in not-so ordinary situations. All written by playwright, Mark Harvey Levine.

LIMITED RUN! FEB. 20TH, 21ST, & 22ND @ 8 p.m.!!
Directed by Phil Morin, Michael Floyd.
Location: Brave New Books - 1904 Guadalupe Suite B, Austin, Texas 78705

Starring: Tatiana Artis, Ryan Campbell, Lara Christie, Michael Davis, Shelby Graham, Chelsea Hockaday, Ben Howell, Alex Kiester, Tim McCarter, Crystal J. Ramirez and Bailey West.

TICKETS ON SALE SOON!

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The Flu Season by Will Eno, Oh Dragon Theatre Company at Grayduck Gallery, November 7 - 16, 2013

by Michael Meigs

 
Oh Dragon Theatre Company's choice of the Grayduck Gallery just off south First Street as the venue to stage Will Eno's The Flu Season is appropriate. The white walls, open space, and angled positioning of the seats for the audience create a stark setting for a stark play. In his odd little fable of anomie, set in a mental clinic, Will Eno tells a story that could squeeze our hearts if only he didn't keep relentlessly undercutting our reactions.

Ky Cleveland, Nicholaus Weindel (photo: Oh Dragon)

This institution is a holding space with the mission of assisting fragile souls to put their pieces back together. Newly admitted 'Man' (Nicholaus Weindel) is interviewed by the Doctor (Ky Cleveland) and newly admitted 'Woman' is brought on board by the Nurse (Victoria Jackson). Each caretaker is garrulous and self-absorbed; each admittee seems stunned. We learn a lot about the staff members, almost all of it irrelevant to the central question suggested by the structure: why are these two here at all?

Rounding out the cast are the Prologue (Kendra Pérez) and the Epilogue (Ben Howell) -- although neither exercises the announced function. They comment throughout the play. Pérez has a reassuringly pert demeanor that's balanced by Howell's arch, cynical responses. Playwright Eno uses 'Epilogue' in a deliberately 'meta' approach. Epilogue's voice seems to be that of the playwright, drawing attention to the conventions of the drama and insistently questioning the value of his own creation.

Kendra Perez (photo: Oh Dragon Theatre)

In a 2009 review of an earlier production of this script by Austin Community College, I acknowledged that I found it 'aggravating,' Southern dialect for 'deliberately provocative,' but I admired the language and the images Eno used in this deliberately mundane setting.

Both in its title and in the cycle of its action, The Flu Season suggests the eternal predictability of human existence. Strangers meet, bond, become intimate, quarrel, separate, die; seen from the outside, those intensely personal stories are reduced to clinical histories. We watch two couples here. The young wounded grasp feebly for feeling and their placid elders bumble about and bond in routine and mediocrity. In fact, there's a third couple: Prologue and Epilogue stand at conventional literary remove from the story, disputing one another's declarations without directly addressing one another, like a couple long married with never a meeting of the minds.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com

2013-2014 season, Oh Dragon Theatre Company

Oh Dragon Theatre Company is excited to announce their 2013 – 2014 season! This season will feature the Austin premieres of two plays. Our main focus was to introduce new directors and plays to the Austin theatre community. We hope you’ll join us for what we think we’ll be an amazing year in live theatre.

The Flu Season

by Will Eno

Directed by Carl Gonzales

A love story goes bad (really bad), a play gets written in painful fits and starts, snow falls, it turns to slush. Maybe spring arrives. This is a play to remind us why sunsets make us sad, how nostalgia is like fog and why we live our lives as though we are in mourning for them.

Thursdays through Saturdays, November 7th – 16th.

grayDuck gallery, 608 Monroe Street Austin, Texas

*Austin Premiere*

DIDN’T SEE THAT COMING– An evening of my plays

by Mark Harvey Levine

Directed by Phil Morin, Michael Floyd, and Jessica Helmke

.

A journey through ten short stories featuring ordinary people in not-so-ordinary situations.

February 2014 (Dates & Location TBA)

*Austin Premiere*

Tango Through The Revolution

by Adam Esquenazi Douglas

Directed by Katherine Wilkinson

In a small city in Cuba, on the night of their honeymoon, newlyweds Violeta and Moises Esquenazi begin their married life at the moment Castro is poised to take over the country. As the revolution shifts from a minor movement to a new, brutal way of life, this once simple couple is forced to reevaluate what morality and decency means in a world compromised by broken promises and fading music.

July/August 2014 (Dates & Location TBA)

For more information about Oh Dragon Theatre Company and our season, please visit our Facebook page www.facebook.com/OhDragonTheatreCompany

Auditions for The Flu Season by Will Eno, Oh Dragon Theatre Company, July 18, 2013

Oh Dragon Theatre Company auditions for Will Eno's The Flu Season, Austin, July 18th, 2013 from 6:30 pm to 10:0 0pm at The Space , 915 Manchaca Road, Austin, TX 78745.

Please send your audition request to ohdragontheatrecompany@gmail.com. *Please prepare a one minute monologue and be prepared to do cold readings from the script.
Characters: Prologue (Male or Female); Epilogue (Male or Female); Man (Male); Woman (Female); Doctor (Male); Nurse (Female)
Oh Dragon Theatre Company is pleased to announce auditions for the first show of their second season, The Flu Season by Will Eno. Directed by Carl Gonzales with assistant director Irene White, the show will debut in October 2013. A full season announcement will be made in August 2013.
Winner of the 2004 Oppenheimer Award for best New York debut by an American playwright. "A love story goes bad (really bad), a play gets written in painful fits and starts, snow falls, it turns to slush. Maybe spring arrives. This is a play to remind us why sunsets make us sad, how nostalgia is like fog and why we live our lives as though we are in mourning for them. THE FLU SEASON is stingingly funny and really rather beautiful. Will Eno is an original, a maverick wordsmith whose weird, wry dramas gurgle with the grim humor and pain of life. Eno specializes in the connections of the unconnected, the apologetic murmurings of the disengaged, those who have suppressed their humanity to survive. It is vicious stuff, written in a language so deceptively innocent, so full of platitudes, that you don't realize it has cut you deep until you feel the warm seep of bloody despair." —Guardian (UK).

TRUE WEST by Sam Shepard, Oh Dragon Theatre Company, April 25 - May 5, 2013

Oh Dragon Theatre Company, Austin, Texas





presents


True West

by Sam Shepard
directed by Carl Gonzales

at Magic Barn Fantastic, 2507 Willow Street. Austin, Tx 78702


04/25 @8pm, 04/26 @8pm , 04/27 @8pm, 04/28 @3pm, 05/02 @8pm, 05/03 @8pm, 05/04 @8pm, & 05/05 @ 3pm.

Tickets - $15
 For reservations, please email ohdragontheatrecompany@gmail.com. 


True West examines the relationship between Austin, a screenwriter, and his older brother Lee. It is set in the kitchen of their mother's home. Austin is housesitting while their mother is in Alaska, and there he is confronted by his brother, who proceeds to bully his way into staying at the house and using Austin's car. In addition, the screenplay which Austin is pitching to his connection in Hollywood somehow gets taken over by the pushy con-man tactics of Lee, and the brothers find themselves forced to cooperate in the creation of a story that will make or break both their lives. In the process, the conflict between the brothers creates a heated situation in which their roles as successful family man and nomadic drifter are somehow reversed, and each man finds himself admitting that he had somehow always wished he were in the other's shoes.


Starring: Austin Amelio, Juston Street, Michael Davis, & Jacqueline Lies.




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