Hedda Gabler (for export), Palindrome Theatre at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, July 28-30,

by Michael Meigs

Austin's youngish Palindrome Theatre is on its way to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, to perform their new, 90-minute non-stop Hedda Gabler every afternoon from August 5 to 29, except for Wednesdays. Outside those office hours the six-member cast and associates will be free to immerse themselves in the largest international arts event around, now in its 74th year. Last year, for example, Edinburgh offered 2,453 different shows staging 40,254 performances by 21,148 performers in 259 venues.

That's a theatre artist's dream, but it doesn't come cheap. Artistic directors Nigel O'Hearn and Kate Eminger have raised all but about $3000 of the costs, including travel, staging costs and artists' compensation. The company is making a last push this weekend in Austin, staging the export version at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre Thursday - Saturday, July 28 - 30. You can purchase your $25 fundraiser ticket on-line at their website.

Palindrome staged O'Hearn's first reworking of Ibsen's piece in February and March at the Blue Theatre and received positive reviews from ALTcom and others. The ALT review provides links to pieces by Robert Faires of the Austin Chronicle and by Ryan E. Johnson at examiner.com. Preparing to write this article, I discovered that Palindrome had put together a two-minute video promo featuring a key scene and several "pull quotes," including my own comment, "Robin Grace Thompson gives us a Hedda who is burning with psychic energy. She is deliberate and wicked." (Click to view the video at Vimeo.com.)

Attending a rehearsal of the export version of Hedda Gabler last week, I found a piece recrafted both by O'Hearn and by the ensemble, retaining the strong central core of Thompson as Hedda and Chase Crossno as Thea, the runaway wife who follows Hedda's former lover. Jacqueline Harper plays the servant Berthe, a role considerably strengthened. Nathan Osborn, who played the dissolute, desperate Einar Lövberg, has now assumed the role of George Tesman, Hedda's husband of six months.

Click to read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Hedda Gabler, adapted by Nigel O'Hearn, Palindrome Theatre Company at the Blue Theatre, February 18 - March 13

Hedda Gabler puzzled and annoyed audiences across Europe when it was first staged in 1890 and 1891 -- pretty much the same reaction Ibsen had elicited with most of his later plays. He was 61 when he wrote this one, exasperated with the bourgeois public that went to the theatre and purchased copies of his plays.

The last lines of the play are spoken by Judge Brack, that worldly sybarite who took Hedda's husband George and her would-be lover off to an all-night stag party, then comfortably assured Hedda he was looking forward to a cozy triangle, with her at the apex. In the crashing finale after Hedda kills herself with a pistol shot to the head, Brack expostulates, "But good God! People don't do such things!"

If that's a spoiler for you, accept my apologies. The secret has been out for a long time, however, and the real question of this play is not whether Hedda is going to use that pistol, but why she's going to do it. The first audiences for the work, in Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Cristiana, the capital of Norway, had stronger reactions than Judge Brack.

Attitudes changed gradually, however. Hedda, along with Nora from A Doll's House, were eventually viewed with more sympathy, particularly as women strove against the paternalism prevalent throughout Western society.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Hedda Gabler, Palindrome Theatre, February 18 - March 13

Received directly:

HENRIK IBSEN’S

HEDDA GABLER

New adaptation by Palindrome Theatre’s Resident Playwright Nigel O’Hearn

Feb. 18^th-Mar. 13^th, Thursday-Saturday 8 pm, Sundays 5 pm

The Blue Theater, 916 Springdale (click for map)

Ticket Price: $20 general admission, $12 -25/65+

512-939-6829 - www.palindrometheatre.com

To open our second season, Palindrome offers the internationally acclaimed Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler in a new adaptation by Palindrome's resident playwright, Nigel O'Hearn. Directed by Kate Eminger and featuring Robin Grace Thompson, Chase Crossno, Aaron Alexander, Nathan Osburn, Rommel Sulit, Rachel McGinnis, and Jackie Harper, this world premiere will run for four weeks only.

Upcoming: Baal by Bertolt Brecht, Paper Chairs at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, November 11 - 28

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Paper Chairs excitedly announces its sophomore production

Baal

by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Peter Tegel from the 1922 edition

directed by Dustin Wills.

Ba·al [bey-uhl, beyl]

1. any of numerous local deities among the ancient Semitic peoples, typifying the productive forces of nature and worshiped with much sensuality.

2. (sometimes lowercase) a false god.

The slightly intoxicated, morally bankrupt patrons of “The Night Cloud” are putting on a play about their idol, Baal. Baal is a mysterious figure said to have roamed the forests, inns and bars leaving nothing but poetry, destruction and a hefty bar tab in his wake. The perfect – though some may disagree – idol for a band of hooligans in a seedy cabaret.

Bertolt Brecht’s first play, Baal, drags its audience deep into a body of youthful desires and complete moral abandon. Written in 1918, when Brecht was 20 years old – before the Epic Theatre and the overtly political work for which he is lauded – Baal unfolds in fragments; like a piecemeal of the nearly forgotten events of a drunken evening. It tells the story of our poet-musician and title character, Baal, fleeing the civilized world to live the extreme life somewhere in the forest finding plenty of people and pursuits to indulge his insatiable appetite for experience. The themes coursing through this text are especially pressing today: emerging adulthood, substance abuse, nature’s destruction, homosexuality, and exploration of the body. This performance of Baal also features original score and 8 songs written to Brecht’s verse performed live by the bar patrons and composed and directed by boozers Andy Tindall and Rob Greenfield. We also invite 12 audience members to buy priority seats at tables on stage – free refreshments included!

Featuring bar patrons Joey Hood (2010 Critic’s Table Best Actor), Robert Pierson, Jacob Trussell, Noel Gaulin, Michael Amendola (2010 Critic’s Table Best Supporting Actor), Rob Greenfield, Kelli Bland, Adriene Mishler, Elizabeth Doss, Kimberly Adams, Chase Crossno, Sonnet Blanton, and Gabriel Luna (2010 Critic’s Table Best Actor) in the title role, Baal. The Night Cloud Cabaret is designed by Lisa Laratta (2010 Critic’s Table Best Scenic Design), the costumes by bar regular Benjamin Taylor Ridgeway, and the lovely Natalie George hanging lights from the trees.

Baal runs Wednesdays – Sundays from November 11 to November 28 nightly at 8:00 p.m. (three weekends in total) at The Salvage Vanguard Theater (2803 Manor Rd.; Austin, Texas 78722). Tickets: Pay-What-You-Want Wednesdays and Thursdays; Fridays-Sundays - $15.00 general seating, $30.00 table seating. Advanced Purchase ticket pricing ($15 each) will be available through our website as of October 18, 2010 (www.paperchairs.com). There will be no performance Thanksgiving, November 25.

Paper Chairs creates sensorially dynamic theatre combining fractured subjectivity, music, unconventional audience situation, surrealism, provocative design and labor-intensive mechanics. We favor challenging texts that allow for a fusion of various performance styles, music genres, and historical periods to excite modern sensibilities and educate by suggesting past and present cultural connections. The work is outrageous, well-researched, and a little bit dangerous.

Machinal by Sophie Treadwell, Paper Chairs at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, May 28 - June 13

This production of Machinal by Sophie Treadwell, currently playing at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, is a memorable staging of a 1928 shocker -- which in 21st century terms means that it is endearingly two dimensional.

Back in the 1920's,most American theatre art was unexciting, conventional or cast in moral platitudes. At the same time, newspaper reporting of crimes were sensationalistic and very big business. In a time when both radio and cinema were still new,big city newspapers' accounts of accounts of murders and of murder trials sold a lot of papers.

Those days have been memorialized in cinema and in theatre since then. For example, Chicago journalist Maurine Dallas Watkins scored a big hit in the theatre with a thinly fictionalized account of the 1924 exploits of two murderesses, both of whom were acquitted. That 1926 play ran for 171 performances and was the basis for Kander and Ebb's 1975 musical Chicago, featuring the oh-so-innocent but oh-so-guilty Roxy Hart -- a musical revived successfully in New York in 1990 and made into an Academy- award-winning film in 2002.

Journalist SophieTreadwell scored a similar succès de scandale with Machinal, a poetic, expressionistic imagining based on the crime and execution at Sing Sing prison of Ruth Snyder. Treadwell had covered the 1927 murder trial. The state execution of Snyder in January, 1928 was a huge sensation, both because this was New York's first execution of a woman since 1899 and because the New York Daily News published the next day a photo of the execution, taken with a hidden camera strapped to the ankle of one of its journalists.

Machinal opened in New York in fall, 1928, featuring the relatively unknown actor Clark Gable in the pivotal role of a relaxed seducer whose casual attitude (Quien sabe? Who knows what might happen?) eventually opened the way for the Young Woman to undertake murderous action.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Selkie Project: Gestation, Divergence Vocal Theatre at UT Creative Research Laboratory, January 23

UPDATE: Backgrounder by Katherine Catmull for the Austin Chronicle, January 21

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Divergence Vocal Theater,
Houston's "renegade indie opera company,"
presents

Selkie Project: gestation

A mythical half-seal, half-human creature bobs her beckoning head: seduction to dive below the waves...

Divergence Vocal Theater collaborates to create a cross-disciplinary installation environment for multimedia, performance, opera and new music-theater: The Selkie Project: gestation.

Voice, text, sound design by Misha Penton; multimedia, lighting/theatrical design by Megan M. Reilly.
Performance: music of James Norman, Elliot Cooper Cole, Benjamin Britten and Charles Gounod.
Project Artistic Direction: Misha Penton & Megan M. Reilly.

The Selkie Project: gestation is part of the curated exhibition of experimental works, Ideas of Mountains, at The Creative Research Laboratory at University of Texas at Austin.

Performers: Misha Penton, mezzo soprano; Maimy Fong, piano; Steffanie Ngo-Hatchie, Chase Crossno actors; Caroline Sutton Clark, dancer/choreography.

Selkie Project: gestation performance: Saturday, January 23rd, 7 p.m.
Exhibition Dates: January 23 - February 6, 2010
Creative Research Laboratory
2832 East Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. Austin, Texas 78702 (MAP)
Free of charge.

For more information: www.divergencevocaltheater.org