Austin Playhouse Holiday Card for The Game's Afoot by Ken Ludwig, December 13 - January 13, 2013

December 13 - January 13

Our 2012-2013 Season opens with a brand new comic murder-mystery by Ken Ludwig! It is December 1936 and Broadway star William Gillette, admired the world over for his leading role in the play Sherlock Holmes, has invited his fellow cast-members to his Connecticut castle for a weekend of revelry. But when one of the guests is stabbed to death, the festivities in this isolated house of tricks and mirrors quickly turn dangerous. Then it’s up to Gillette himself, as he assumes the persona of his beloved Holmes, to track down the killer before the next victim appears. The danger and hilarity are non-stop in this glittering whodunit set during the Christmas holidays. 
 

Starring Joey Banks, Mary Agen Cox, Boni Hester, Huck Huckaby, Molly Karrasch, Jason Newman, Lara Toner, and Cyndi Williams.

Upcoming: The Becomings, Popworks at the Golden Apple, June 27 - 29

Popworks is excited to present a workshop production of

THE BECOMINGS

with

Cyndi Williams, Jeffery Mills, Adriene Mishler, Rosalyn Mandola, Jennymarie Jemison, Kelli Bland and Robert Pierson as The Bear

Step Inside The Golden Apple: JUNE 27th-JUNE 29th, 8PM
LATE NIGHT JUNE 29TH, 10PM
*limited seating*
RESERVE YOUR TICKETS HERE! Free advance tickets via Brown Paper Tickets.

ARRIVE EARLY TO CLAIM YOUR TICKET.
TICKETS THAT ARE NOT CLAIMED BY 7:45 WILL BE SOLD TO PRESENT PARTIES ON THE WAIT LIST.
TICKETS $8 at the door
CASH OR CHECK ONLY PLEASE

* * free parking in lot! * *

"Do you feel bad for a mom who turns into a monster and is destroyed? It seems like fate to me, and fate's got no pity. But man, you gotta feel bad for those kids. Because Matricide is pure Curse-Starter, for sure.

Maybe though tonight, things might change. There's a ritual for that. But it's gotta be just right. "

Trapped under a terrible curse, a deeply troubled family and minor showbiz clan withers away. Convinced their long dead mother is haunting them, they are paralyzed with fear, ashamed of her death, and stuck at their last gig, The Golden Apple. But a secret coiled as tight as theirs is bound to spring. An outsider crashes thru their careful silence and the spring is tripped. The truth can open a door, but it can also kill a man. What remains after the falsehoods - tiny and tragic - come crumbling? And what happened that fateful night to send the family reeling?


From some of the people that brought you THE ASSUMPTION comes the story of a troubled and ridiculous family. Part greek tragedy, part 60's girl group musical, part Grey Gardens, THE BECOMINGS is the next venture for the fledgling collaborative experiment that is POPWORKS. This stellar company of performers shares the stage with a live-band with Justin "The Judge" Bankston (formerly of Winslow) playing original music from Sally Crewe, The Bandana Splits, Sonnet Blanton, Alejandro Rose-Garcia of Shakey Graves, and house band, Fast Moustache.

Direction Sonnet Blanton
Music Direction & Arrangement Justin Bankston and Alejandro Rose-Garcia
Production Management Sam Webber
Words: Blanton, Mills, Williams
Movement: Adriene Mishler

"People who have survived the cruel fate of tragedy do not make sweet stories well. They come across all funny. Hollow. Crooked. Like a smile hides the dark words you struggle to keep trapped behind your teeth. Our stories - Our story holds so much dark. But there is power in the dark. There is unsuspected depth."

poster design by Gabe Vaughn

A Room with a View, Austin Playhouse, March 23 - April 22

by Michael Meigs

A Room with a View at Austin Playhouse in Lara Toner's graceful adaptation of Forster's novel is serene fun. An ungracious critic -- say, someone who regularly posted grumbling letters to the Times of London -- might ask why the Playhouse bothered to concoct a presentation of the style regularly served up by the BBC on PBS's Masterpiece Theatre, but that imaginary critic would miss the point entirely. Another curmudgeonly observation might be that Mssrs Merchant and Ivory did the definitive cinema version back in 1985, certainly still available from video sources. One might even be able to stream it from Netflix.

The story itself is not the issue, for Forster's witty and sympathetic if somewhat patronizing portrayal of Lucy Honeychurch and those around her features amusing characters caught up in the most basic dramatic dilemma of all: who best deserves to make our sweet heroine happy? Most of us know exactly how it's going to turn out, and we willingly participate in the re-creation and recreation of that make-believe.

No, the response to that hypothetical critic is simple. It's symbolized by the contrast between your comfortable sofa or desk chair at home and the seat in the theatre. At home you may choose to sit alone or even in company to witness A Room with a View, passively absorbing a crafted vision identical in all respects for everyone who sees it. Or you may go to the theatre instead, where each comfortable seat with a view offers a subtly different experience and features actors who live and breathe and share the space with you. Last week I wrote of Zach's Laramie Project and the power of familiar faces. In Toner's staging of A Room with a View, actors well known to theatre-goers quite transform themselves from citizens of 2012 Austin to self-aware representatives of the educated English middle class of 1908, experiencing the threatening joys of Florence and then returning to bourgeois life in London.

That's the advantage of working with a repertory company, however loose. David Stahl is a jovial, good-hearted Anglican clergyman; Tom Parker is an abrupt, truth-speaking businessman; Rebecca Robinson serves as the spinster cousin charged with chaperoning young Lucy; Cyndi Williams is a colorful busybody woman novelist in the first act and the heroine's strait-laced mother in the second.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Heddatron, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, February 11 - March 5

Central Texas is about to be knee-deep in Heddas. Dustin Wills and friends down at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre start that unplanned festival with this "back to the future" version. The promising, term-limited Palindrome Theatre opens a "world premiere" (!) adaptation by Nigel O'Hearn at the Blue Theate, beginning next week. And then in May Tony Ciaravino will do another, presumably more classic, with the Classic Theatre in San Antonio.

SVT's jangly, mystifying absurdist staging of Heddatron runs riot with Ibsen's play. To tell the truth, you don't need to be familiar with the original in order to appreciate this funhouse madness. Precocious young Ava Johns plays a smug-beyond-her-years sixth grader giving a book report on the play.

A sixth grader assigned to read Ibsen's subtle portrait of the destructive, self-destuctive young Norwegian bride? That should give you a hint and a warning.to fasten your seatbelts for a theatre ride that outdoes Honey, I Shrunk The Kids for weirdness, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly for menace, and The Iron Giant for cybernetics. The script riffs explicitly on the first two. And on Ibsen -- both on Hedda Gabler and the mutton-chopped, sometimes oblivious incarnation of the Norwegian writer himself.

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

Upcoming: Heddatron, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, February 10 - March 5

Found on-line:

Salvage Vanguard Theatre presents

Heddatron

by Elizabeth Meriwether
directed by Dustin Wills
Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 E Manor Rd
February 10 - March 5, Thursday- Saturday at 8 p.m., Sundays at 6 p.m.
(Thursdays Pay-What-You-Can at the door)
Tickets at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/145755

www.salvagevanguard.org

Like any well-made play, this one starts with a booming voice from the sky - though this booming voice arrives in the form of a hardcover copy of Hedda Gabler torpedoing into the lap of a terribly bored Michigan housewife. Suddenly, Jane Gordon finds herself captured by robots and whisked off to the Ecuadorian rainforest to perform the titular role in a robo-version of Henrik Ibsen’s famous drama. Jane’s ten-year-old daughter, Nugget, with the aid of her milquetoast father, an eager documentary filmmaker and her small arms dealing uncle must rescue her mother from the mechanical grip of her robot captors - whether she wants to be saved or not. Heddatron takes us on a hi(tech)storical journey through our trigger happy-TV-4G-machine-obsessed world to ask that great question, “What does it mean to be human?” Salvage Vanguard Theatre, with the help of the University of Texas’ tech-savvy IEEE Robotics & Automation Society, is ecstatic to offer a look at what happens when “real” robots and ever realer humans battle it out on the stage in the Austin premiere of Elizabeth Meriwether’s genre-defying head-trip Heddatron.

Feauturing: Amy Downing, Robert Pierson, Cyndi Williams, Jennymarie Jemison, Jude Hickey, Scott Daigle, Jarrett King, Matt Hislope, Kyle Lagunas, and Ava Johns
Design by: Lisa Laratta, Natalie George, Jessica Gilzow, Buzz Moran, and Lee Webster

Ongoing: Three Viewings by Jeffrey Hatcher, Austin Playhouse Larry L. King Theatre, October 15 - 30

UPDATE: Review by Cate Blouke for the Statesman's Austin360 "Seeing Things" blog, October 21

Received directly:

presents

Three Viewings

by Jeffrey Hatcher

directed by Ben Wolfe

October 15 - 30 at the Larry L. King Theatre
Penn Field Building C, 3601 South Congress

Tickets: $20, $15 for main stage subscribers and guests, $10 for students
Box office: (512) 476-0084

Call 476-0084 or visit https://austin-playhouse.ticketleap.net/ for tickets!

Austin Playhouse continues its 11^thThree Viewings in its alternative space, the Larry L. King Theater, for this year’s Halloween season. Rich characters, surprising twists, and a darkly comic tone connect three tales set in a small town funeral parlor.

Austin Playhouse has been drawn to Hatcher’s work since its production of the classic ghost story The Turn of the Screw last October. This season Austin Playhouse delves back into Hatcher presenting Three Viewings.

Three Viewings is told through a trio of monologues, in which characters engage directly with the audience. Set at three different funerals, the play brings together the stories of three characters and reveals the intricacies of their lives. Although the characters have no real interactions with each other, their stories are woven seamlessly together, combining three short-plays into one complete production.

When produced by Connecticut’s “Theater Works,” the New York Times described the play as a “gripping production” of an “exceedingly successful notion to play upon three unrelated deaths as a means of unmasking three separate lives.”

During the play you will meet Emil, a mild-mannered undertaker secretly in love with a real estate agent who attends all his funerals. His unspoken passion for her leads him to commit crimes while planning a way to confess his true feelings. Next introduced is Mac, a drifter who makers her living stealing jewelry from corpses returns home after her wealthy grandmother dies and leaves her nothing, in an attempt to regain her inheritance. Finally we hear the story of Virginia, the widow of a wheeler-dealer contractor who discovers that her husband’s shady business deals have left her in debt to the banks, her family and the mob.

Hatcher was nominated for the Edgar Award for his adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He has written many other plays including an adaptation of Miss Nelson is Missing! and darker plays such as Murderers, and Murder by Poe.

THE THREE VIEWINGS CAST

Hans Venable as “Emil”

Cyndi Williams as “Virginia”

Jenny Gravenstein as “Mac”

Images by Christopher Loveless: Three Viewings, Austin Playhouse Larry L. King Theatre, October 15 - 31

Images by Christopher Loveless of solo performers Hans Venable, Jenny Gravenstein and Cyndi Williams in Three Viewings:

presents

Three Viewings

by Jeffrey Hatcher

directed by Ben Wolfe

October 15 - 30 at the Larry L. King Theatre
Penn Field Building C, 3601 South Congress

Tickets: $20, $15 for main stage subscribers and guests, $10 for students
Box office: (512) 476-0084 or visit https://austin-playhouse.ticketleap.net/ for tickets!

Pictured: Jenny Gravenstein

Click to view five additional images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Picasso at the Lapin Agile, Austin Playhouse, March 27 - May 2

Kimberly Barrow as the enamored Suzanne comes to the "Lapin Agile" -- the "Nimble Rabbit" -- bar-bistro, looking for Pablo Picasso, the man who enraptured her by drawing a dove on the back of her hand and then having his way with her. She learns, eventually, that maybe the second time is not as good as the first.

I can share that feeling. I reviewed Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile last year as done by the Sam Bass Community Theatre in Round Rock. Theirs was, I reported, "a charming production of a quirky play by America's quirky funnyman Steve Martin." My review tracked through the plot and had a tone of satisfied amusement.

On viewing this Austin Playhouse staging, the thrill was gone, It seemed to me that Steve Martin, like his character Picasso, was seeking too hard to amaze.

Martin sets us in a Paris bistro in 1904, when the young Albert Einstein worked as a clerk in the patent office and the young Pablo Picasso, hungry and unknown, was seeking artistic expression, money, fame and women. His premise is that their encounter at the "Nimble Rabbit" bistro-bar was a defining moment for the twentieth century.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin, Austin Playhouse, March 26 - May 2

Click for ALT review, April 22

UPDATE: Review by Olin Meadows for AustinOnStage.com, April 12

UPDATE: Review by Ryan E. Johnson at examiner.com, April 8

Received directly:

Austin Playhouse presents

Picasso at the Lapin Agile
by Steve Martin

March 26 - May 2, 2010
Austin Playhouse, 3601 S. Congress, Bldg. C
Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 5 p.m .
Prices: $26 Thursdays, Fridays, $28 Saturdays, Sundays
$35 Opening Night, March 26, 2010
All student tickets are half-price
Tickets/Information at (512) 476-0084

It’s 1904 in Paris and a young Albert Einstein is working on a very famous theory. At the same time, a young Pablo Picasso is almost ready to “leave Blue behind.” At the Lapin Agile, a cabaret bar in Montmartre, Paris,frequented by artists, anarchists, and dreamers, these two young visionaries meet and engage in a lively debate on the creative process and the true nature of genius.

Picasso at the Lapin Agile was written in 1993 by famed comedian and actor Steve Martin. It is set on October 8, 1904, a time when Einstein and Picasso were both on the verge of executing a tremendous act of genius. Einstein will publish his theory of relativity in 1905 and Picasso will paint 'Les Demoiselles d’Avignon' in 1907.

Martin has written, "Focusing on Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and Picasso’s master painting 'Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,' the play attempts to explain, in a light-hearted way, the similarity of the creative process involved in great leaps of imagination in art and science."

Picasso at the Lapin Agile is a playful, witty, incredibly funny look at how artists, scientists, and other inventors bound past society’s norms to enhance and advance humanity’s understanding of itself. Bringing the play to life is an incredible ensemble including Ben Wolfe as Picasso, Robert Matney as Einstein, Huck Huckaby as Freddy, Cyndi Williams as Germaine, Tom Parker as Gaston, David Stahl as Sagot, Kimberly Barrow as Suzanne and The Countess, Barry Miller as Schmendiman, and Jason Newman as The Singer.

The play is directed by Austin Playhouse Associate Artistic Director Lara Toner (Age of Arousal, The Turn of the Screw), with set design by Jessica Colley-Mitchell (Misalliance, A Flea in Her Ear), costume design by Buffy Manners (Misalliance, Les Liaisons Dangereuses) and lighting design by Don Day (Misalliance, Frost/Nixon).

In This House (Everything Is You), Salvage Vanguard & Tutto Theatre for FronteraFest at the Eponymous Garden, Januar 21-24

No, despite the enigmatic lines of the teaser, this is not a ghost story. It is collaborative imagination of memories tied to the faded upright eloquence of that two-story bed and breakfast residence in lower East Austin now known as the Eponymous Garden.

"Eponymous" because the Garden takes its name from the street, Garden Street, and perhaps -- it would seem appropriate -- from that neighborhood in Austin. It's just east of I-35 and a couple of blocks south of César Chávez Street. To find it, you drive east on Chávez and after you cross under the Interstate, at the next traffic light take a right onto Waller Street. The neighborhood has lots of small clapboard houses, of the sort that would have been homes for tradesmen and artisans back in the 'teens of the previous century.

The garden is not very much in evidence in January, but the pictures on the website suggest that the house is engulfed in blossom once better weather arrives. In its weathered pink-and-white elegance, 1202 Garden Street carries a strong flavor of earlier prosperity.

In This House is a collaborative work for which fourteen artists are credited in the single photocopied page of the playbill. Jenny Larson of the Salvage Vanguard and Dustin Wills of Tutto Theatre directed. Others are writers, writer/actors, and actors, both grown ones and child actors.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: In This House (Everything Is You), Salvage Vanguard at Eponymous Garden, January 21-24

UPDATE: Click for ALT review, January 22



Found on-line:

In This House (Everything Is You)

presented by Salvage Vanguard Theater and Eponymous Garden for FronteraFest 2010's "Bring Your Own Venue"

Eponymous Gardens, 1202 Garden St.
January 21-24 at 8 p.m., January 23 & 24 at 5 p.m.
Tickets are $15. Seating is limited to 20 people per performance. Tickets available here.

We are thinking of a lost child. We are thinking of the past poking up into the present and giving you a chill. We are thinking about the present reaching back into the past, and giving it a loving hug.

A workshop production written by Sharon Bridgeforth, Daniel Alexander Jones, Monika Bustamante, and Cyndi Williams. This ghost story is an examination of love, loss, and family.

Co-directed by Dustin Wills and Jenny Larson. Featuring performers Florinda Bryant, Wesley Bryant, Adriene Mishler, Jude Hickey, and Cyndi Williams.

Dug Up, Larry L. King Theatre at Austin Playhouse, October 10 - November 2

This show will fill the bill if you are looking for spooky entertainment for this Halloween season.

Director Laura Toner and Austin playwright Cyndi Williams tell us,
“Dug Up was inspired by the stories of post-Katrina New Orleans, her personal experience driving through the Louisiana bayou, the idea of Tennessee Williams writing a ghost story, and stories from her own childhood. Dug Up exists though in its own world, slightly out of time and reality. The stories and lies that the characters tell in this world are mostly based on true stories. . . .”

The action takes place in the courtyard of a moldering, foundering house somewhere in swamp country, where an outbuilding was converted sometime in the past, not too successfully, into tourist lodgings. Protagonist Dewitt (Jude Hickey) interacts with his sister Lissa (Jessie Tilton) and a negligée-clad long-stay tourist Marci (Liz Fisher), who may have murdered her husband. Mix in a storm that may or may not be a hurricane, various clean-picked skeletons of small animals, and a larger bone that looks disturbingly like a human femur.


You could go in any of several directions with elements like these, especially when it becomes evident that DeWitt is a naïve, perhaps simple-minded orphan who obsesses over dead pets to the extent that he digs them up and talks to them. The situation sounds perilously campy. Deepest dankest Louisiana, a clutching of dead bones, a looming storm, and slutty females with accents. The show could almost have begun with the phrase, “It was a dark and stormy night.“

Playwright Williams, to her credit, chose to raise the mark considerably above that. Her characters speak a special, highlighted language and deliver long speeches set with glistening poetical images as sharp as broken glass. There is a mystery that we intuit, then grasp, and finally understand.

This type of discourse requires a special indulgence from the audience, a redoubled suspension of belief, because we are initially tempted to reject that eloquence from apparently stereotypical characters. This is all the more true because Williams often makes them monomaniacal monologuers, whether or not they are onstage together.

Both acts open with Lissa speaking directly to the audience; DeWitt apostrophizes the dug-up skeleton of his beloved little doggy “Flossy.” When finally enticed out of her room, Marci re-tells DeWitt’s doggy story and delivers in emphatic monologue her own highly emotional story of early marriage, debauchery and a murderous struggle.

Williams and the cast earn that indulgence. Once past the intermission, we understand why Lissa is given license to address us directly, while DeWitt is hollering out a lot of his remarks to the always unseen “Audy’s sister” in the house.

We remain a bit uncertain whether we can accept the sudden emotional about-face of the initially antagonistic Marci, but I think the playwright simply failed to prepare that inflection for the beautiful, fierce Liz Fisher.

Jude Hickey as DeWitt and Jessie Tilton as Lissa worked with Williams over the past two years on this project, and it shows.

Hickey, in particular, invests an absurd character – potentially no more than a verbose simpleton degenerate – with grace, feeling and insight.

With his closing monologue, delivered on his knees as the waters close in, Jude Hickey floats before us a series of images of afterlife, exaltation, confusion, bewildered futile humanity and the deep warm wet earth, transcendent enough in his telling to serve as a prayer for all of us.

Pre-opening interview with playwright Cyndi Williams by Hannah Kenah, published in the Austin Chronicle, October 10

Ryan E. Johnson's review on Austin.com

Travis Bedard's blog comments on Dug Up, October 24

Avimaan Syam's review in the Austin Chronicle, October 30