True West by Sam Shepard, Weird Rodeo at the Off Center, January 9 - 25, 2014

(image: Weird Rodeo)

 




 

by Dr. David Glen Robinson


The question one could ask is why a brand-new theatre company would challenge a play as complex and difficult as Sam Shepard’s True West for its premier production. And the question contains the answer—because it is a challenge, and all who see it can measure the company’s skill in their upward progress climbing the monument. That's the first reason to shout “Bravo!” at this show, one of the few.

Weird Rodeo wisely short-circuits some of the difficulties by assembling a highly talented cast and crew. The first stand-out is David Boss as Lee. He is superbly costumed and styled by Lindsay McKenna for his role, and he's an actor who has shown us he can easily learn and spout thousands of lines while physically stomping through any number of flaming sets. His role clearly drives the dialogues and action of the play, and Boss is easily capable of doing this in True West. But here is a note for director Jerry Fugit: Boss and all the actors need clear pause points for reactions and heightened intensity. Boss can fire daggers and poniards from his eyes, but he needs a few more opportunities in this play to do so. It’s not all machine-gun mouth and phone cords. The weaponry metaphors are apt.

Bob Jones as the movie producer Saul Kimmer matches his subtlety to Boss’s power. Lee addresses Saul with the predatory look of a coyote eyeing a rabbit. But Saul’s instincts are those of a rattlesnake, not a rabbit, and he correctly sees the brothers Austin (Chris Hejl) and Lee for who and what they are. Saul slithers through the story with complete control, a fact we notice only later. Bob Jones does excellent work, making his reactions and taking his silences as needed to flesh out his character.

The story of True West is well known: after years of separation family members come back together with the intensity of hypergolic solid rocket fuel, a trope perhaps invented by Sam Shepard. The biblical Prodigal Son parable it ain’t. The father is absent, said by Saul to be “destitute” which the entire audience takes to mean “insane.” Dad fled to the Desert, and here we see the first layerings of meaning on Shepard’s conception of Desert. The meanings Shepard gives it are largely chthonic, steeped in desolation and darkness. Mom (Bobbie Oliver) is in the Far North touring Alaska, a desert of another sort. The criminal but romantic seeker Lee sees the Desert as a refuge from authority and control, while Austin, educated and tame, fears it. Between scenes coyote voices on the soundtrack howl songs of death.

The Desert underlies the more surficial titular theme of the West. And here's where Weird Rodeo succeeds in the task it set for itself. We see clearly the distinction between brother Austin’s real West (freeways, palm trees and golf courses) and Lee’s unstated but described True West. All is made plain by Lee’s verbal homage to Kirk Douglas as the last cowboy on earth in the movie Lonely Are the Brave. Lee would have given his life to have worked in that film in any capacity, but Austin, the Ivy League screenwriter, has never seen the movie. The production ultimately accomplishes its theatrical and literary goals by making the West distinctions clear and dealing with their implications.

Read more at CTXLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Venus in Fur by David Ives, Austin Playhouse, January 3 - 25, 2014 (Review No.1)

 







by Dr. David Glen Robinson

 Venus in Fur by David Ives is a new, highly regarded American play making the rounds of theatres in Texas and across the nation. It's currently playing at Austin Playhouse, Austin’s singular shopping mall theatre, through January 25^th. Austin Playhouse is calling it an off-season play and discounting its ticket price for its initial run. Theatre-goers won’t want to miss this one.

The setting is a rented rehearsal studio in Manhattan, where a young playwright named Thomas (Gray G. Haddock) is holding auditions for a self-production of his new play. It's based on Leopold Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novel Venus in Furs, the Bible and Sears Catalog of fetish masochism. Auditions have not gone well. Every scheduled actor has come and gone, and none were any good.

Then the door opens and for a few seconds nobody enters. A woman steps in with a duffel bag of costumes and says she is there to audition. Her name is Vanda (Molly Karrasch); what a coincidence, so is that of the female character in Thomas’ play. Impossible, Thomas says; he would have noticed if that same name were on the audition list . Vanda says her agent failed to call him; she’s ready to read. She pulls out the full script from her duffel instead of the few sections of text called audition sides normally made available to auditioners. Thomas asks how she got the entire script; it hasn’t been released yet. She says she doesn’t know. She says she glanced through the script on the subway coming over, but when she starts reading, she doesn’t bother to look at the script. She recites the lines of the play perfectly, in character.

In these first minutes of the play, playwright Ives is more than telegraphing the audience that absolutely nothing in this rehearsal studio is as it seems. We’ve been warned. Thomas mistrusts Vanda. Vanda mistrusts Thomas. The audience mistrusts Ives. Ives mistrusts Sacher-Masoch. And a great night of theatre is had by all.

Gray G. Haddock, Molly Karrasch (photo: Christopher Loveless)

The action of the play addresses, plainly and directly, the shifts in dominance between men and women. Layers of plot and nuance are added on from the very beginning like diaphanous veils floating down to drape the set and actors. The script addresses the contest between actors and directors, men and women, upper and lower classes, masters and slaves. Bondage fetishism is explored only as a high-stakes game born of all these contests and mined for its metaphoric value in illuminating them. This is Ives’ tribute to the excess and art of Sacher-Masoch. Never forget the exquisite pain.

The alternation of the polarity of dominance accelerates throughout the play, reversing subtly or boldly but always satisfyingly and with plausibility. The characters step back and forth between the rehearsal hall and the play within the play. Eventually these changes describe a very clear vector that brings us to understand why Thomas the playwright had to write the play and accept the seismic changes wrought in him by it, with assistance -- control -- by Vanda. 

Read more at Central Texas Live Theatre

Missionary Position — Pleasure Journeys for the Intrepid Lady Explorer, Glass Half Full Theatre, Dec. 12 - 14, 2013

 (www.glasshalffulltheatre.com)

by Dr. David Glen Robinson

The Missionary Position: Pleasure Journeys for the Intrepid Lady Explorer is a droll and satisfying show just completing its initial one-weekend run at Salvage Vanguard Theatre in east Austin. It's likely to return, and the public should keep it in mind as a performance worthy of  their ticket-buying dollars. 

The show was a period piece on lady explorers in late Victorian times. Caroline Reck and Cami Alys of Glass Half Full Theatre portrayed our intrepid lady explorers of the title, reporting to us the findings from their worldwide travels.



The setting  was a Chautauqua-type lecture hall, arranged in the weight room of a (no doubt) males-only health club, complete with punching bags hanging and swinging, ready for use. The audience was assumed to consist only of ladies, who had paid to receive insight from the intrepid travelers. Male audience members winked and played along. The performers skillfully created their comic world with the willing participation of the audience, amply compensated with gut-busting laughs.



It is no spoiler to reveal that the lecture concerned a line of menstrual garments designed with the benefit of the worldwide ethnological journeys of the stalwart ladies. They were trying, with spotty success, to fund their voyages by hawking these liberating devices to their audiences.



Late in the show it occurred to at least one casual observer that no obvious puppets or black-garbed puppeteers appeared in the show, despite their advance billing.  One of the punching bags wore a toy top hat, however, and our explorers demonstrated ladies’ self defense techniques on the punching bag with their bumbershoots. This highly abstracted male figure, representing a hostile attacker, swung crazily about under the jabs of the umbrellas, while the audience willingly chanted the attack points: eyes-bollocks-feet, approximately. The chanting audience completed the anatomy of the puppet as it enacted its part as a sinister character.



I didn’t really “get it” until much later; I whiffed in the event, and many in the audience probably also struck out. Still, the concept that the puppet is constructed and animated in the mind by the voices of the audience is sublime.  Though the attempt might have been only partially successful this time around, I await with anticipation the next go-round and further surprises of puppetry this group may spring on us. In promotional material Connor Hopkins of Trouble Puppet Theatre was given credit for puppetry in this show.



The charms of the ladies were immense, and the performance was multilayered, authentic, and anything but a simple laugh fest. Period elements were fairly stern: references to the White Man’s Burden, widows' rights to inherit property, and traveling without male escort all received breathless applause from the ladies of 1901. There was no mention of the right to vote, which lay in the future. (In the United States, women’s suffrage was gained with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, but the social movement for women’s voting rights began in the 1850s. Source: Wikipedia). Despite this comedic take on late Victorian times, the production avoided the common pitfall of patronizing historical views from the standpoint of 21st century moderns. This show was funny as well as thoughtful and mature -- certainly a rare combination.



Glass Half Full Theatre is deft and innovative even when performing a period comedy. The company provides full value, playing with (not against) the audience, and also reveals its innovative spirit and high creativity as it does so. This is a company to follow. Their program reports their next show will be a restaging of their Once There Were Six Seasons, to play at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, May 20 through June 7, 2014. 

The Undoing of Nonet, Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, December 5 - 7 , 2013

by Dr. David Glen Robinson

(image via www.kdhdance.com)

The Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company (KDHDC) is said by many to be the best modern dance company in Austin, and it also receives notable positive mentions statewide. Part of this reputation is built on the company’s athletically powerful performances and embrace of abstract communication, a hallmark of all modern dance inherited from Martha Graham. And while much of modern, or contemporary, dance in the 21^st century has moved more toward narrative story dances or drifted into performance art, Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Co. remains rooted in abstraction for its core inspirations. The contrast between this form of performing art and narrative, discursive plays is the very reason I recommend this show to the theatre-going public. Here is something the theatre fan doesn’t often see and may find unexpectedly enjoyable.

The commitment to the abstract does not at all suggest that KDHDC performances lack affect or fail to address human feeling. Their current show, The Undoing of Nonet, is a case in point. It's a meditation, or riff, on the power of abstraction to enlighten, inspire and redirect thought and feeling.

The first encounter with The Undoing of Nonet is with its title. It suggests a story of the misfortunes of a female named Nonet. But is anything as it seems? A nonet is an ensemble of nine, one more than an octet. And whether person or thing, what is undoing or coming apart here?

The first few minutes of the dance refuse to resolve the matter. An ensemble of nine dancers steps onstage as the lights fade up. Their costumes lack uniformity; instead, they show great variety. One dancer in particular is garbed in a floor-length dress and old-fashioned flowered bonnet. She is very much a character. Nonet?

(image via www.kdhdance.com)

The ensemble forms a line, and multiple canons ripple through the group. The line moves upstage and downstage, breaks apart, aligns on the diagonal, and suddenly the character dancer is gone. Nonet is undone. The balance of the hour-length performance is left to a group of eight dancers who perform in various combinations, entering and exiting as needed to accomplish their work.

The first half of the performance is immensely physical, the dancers demonstrating the KHDC trademark athleticism. They perform multiple lifts, carries, and inversions, mastering every level from the floor to the lighting grid (more about the lighting design later). The first half has a vertiginous and lightning-quick dynamic. Its powerful qualities are built partially on the live music accompaniment by line upon line percussion (no, they don’t capitalize their name), an ensemble of three percussionists. In the show, each plays mixed sets of percussion instruments. They begin with an explosion of sound, followed by complex rhythms streaming across the stage, keeping pace with the dancers.

Spectacular partnering marks the strong section of the piece. Shari Brown and Alyson Dolan are well matched, slender as whips and with the same cabled strength. They move together and exchange lifts, then engage in seemingly effortless carries that create starlike shapes with spoking arms and legs. Just when I told myself I wanted to see more, they stopped. Later in the show, the two dancers surprised me again by performing another partnering sequence, albeit one with different gestures.

Steven Pruitt's lighting design serves the purposes of the dance but stands additionally as an artistic work in its own right. Standard flood lighting bulbs hanging from flexible cords point straight down. The instruments are arranged in a square of from 80 to 100 bulbs. They form a plane above the stage, one that has the illusory effect of lowering the ceiling of the dance space. Dancers can and do reach up to jostle the bulbs from time to time, and these actions activate and randomize the illumination on the stage. That's not all -- designer Pruitt can alter the luminosity of each bulb to create a multitude of lighting sets. This design interacts strongly with the performers.

I have seen one similar design in the past year, that of Steven Shirey for Breaking String Theater’s production of Timothy Braun’s Three, or the Sound of the Great Existential Nothingness. I’m wondering if such interactive lighting designs may be an emerging trend. If so, you read it here first. Be that as it may, Pruitt’s design drapes layers of light and shadow across the dancers, like multiple layers of tulle or lace over a figure, and then shifts the layers through time and across space. This work is certainly worthy of a B. Iden Payne award nomination.

The second half of the performance is more emotional. The dancers slow a bit. Their partnering and group work become more sinuous. Their faces become more expressive. When they look at each other, they see things. What things? In the welter of abstraction they have built around us, that is difficult to say. I am the kind of audience member who, when flooded with abstract images, forms his own impressions out of the mass. This is a valid response and one welcomed by any creative artist. Art very much should motivate us and point out new pathways. The Undoing of Nonet launches us in new directions of mind and heart.

Line upon line percussion shifted to xylophone strike plates set across cords and wooden panels. This gave the strike plates a softer and flatter quality when struck. The dance wound down softly, as well. One after another, performers exited, not to return, after increasingly lyrical passages that all seemed to be long, lingering farewells. The movement all ended with Shari Brown melting to the stage to form an exquisite shape of encircling arms that seem to hold and bid the departed to tarry and yet remain with us in the fading light.

And to be too meta by half, The Undoing of Nonet is the farewell dance of longtime company member Roxanne Gage. Roxie leaves to “retirement,” she says, after a national career centered in Texas. In addition to lengthy and highly regarded stints with top rank repertory companies such as Sharir Dance Company and, of course, KDHDC, Roxie claims academy teaching in every dance form, including cheer. She may leave the stage, but she surely remains on the scene.

People sometimes say to me that they don’t “get” a dance, or what it is that the choreographer is trying to say. It's generally less important to “get” the performance, although specific important messages may be conveyed, than it is to make something of it meaningful to oneself. That engagement is the evidence that a performance has resonated with its audience.

For that reason I recommend The Undoing of Nonet to all, and especially to the theatre-going public. People who buy tickets to live performances are already open to the unfettered enjoyments of this show. People new to live performance have in The Undoing of Nonet an excellent opportunity to begin a most artistic and pleasurable journey.

Hurry to The Undoing of Nonet. It runs only one weekend, Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday, December 7, at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. Find it at Salvage Vanguard Theatre on Manor Road in east Austin, 2803 Manor Rd (click for map). Tickets are $17 general admission, $12 for students and seniors, available via the KDHDC website.

There Is A Happiness That Morning Is by Mickle Maher, Capital Theatre at Hyde Park Theatre, October 24 - November 23, 2013

by Dr. David Glen Robinson

This production of Mickle Maher’s There is a Happiness That Morning Is generated considerable marketing material on its fictional premise: two teachers of William Blake’s poetry at a crumbling east coast liberal arts college became so overwhelmed by it all that they had throwdown carnal knowledge of each other on the leafy day-lit campus. Their students witnessed their intimacy, as did the president of the college, and everyone else. The president and trustees want them to apologize and resign.

Well, playwright Maher knows well that the past is prologue, and as the play starts, one of the participants, Bernard (Jason Phelps), explains that that was all yesterday, and this is the happiness of the next morning. Thus the play is essentially aftermath. 

Yes, Bernard is clearly demented from teaching Blake for fifteen years (the only class the college ever allowed him to teach), and all he wants is to apologize, resign, and go on living his life of joy with his beloved and gorgeous Ellen (Katherine Catmull), who has been his mate for about twenty years. 

Ellen is made of sterner stuff. She refers to the college president in gutter language, and does the same with all others who humiliated her in the very triumph of her love. These two characters speak in verse, delivering Maher’s poetry about Blake’s poetry and their issues with the college. The contrasts in their affective states create the comedy in the play and heighten the consequences of their deeds.

Plays written almost entirely in verse glamorize almost any subject and thematic material. When that material is love, loss, and hope, the play takes on a rare, sustaining beauty uncommon in modern plays. This play has that beauty in abundance, and the exquisite abilities of Jason Phelps and Catherine Catmull in speaking and acting in verse ensure its success. It is true that casting in modern plays is the single strongest variable in a play’s success, and it is true for There is a Happiness That Morning Is.

Jason Phelps, Katherine Catmull (photo: Bret Brookshire)

The design fields hold up their end of the bargain. The set design by Mark Pickell, who also directed, uses the unusual shape and size of the Hyde Park audience space to realize the concept of a lecture hall in a down-at-heel liberal arts college. Simple and good; the audience becomes the students in the classes of the two shamed professors.

Nothing is perfect, and There is a Happiness That Morning Is has a major lulu. The third character in the play is entirely uncredited. This is a deliberate omission to create a thoroughly unnecessary surprise (there are other surprises and plot twists in abundance in this play). The device of the surprise character is acceptable for cameo roles or walk-on actions, but not for substantial work, significant time on stage, and contributions to the story, as in this case. A union state probably would not allow the practice.

The above is not particularly a spoiler, nor is it intended to be. The Capitol T Theatre production of There Is a Happiness That Morning Is comes highly recommended for all adult audiences. The play treats the themes of love, desperation, and uncertainty so poetically well that when the modestly attired professors first cross the stage to each other and quietly embrace, one senses how something enormous this play is.

Others have sensed this enormity and the Hyde Park Theatre in central Austin has held the play over until November 23rd. Reservations are strongly recommended.

by Michael Meigs, November 12

Review by Cate Blouke, Statesman, Oct 28

Review by Jeff Davis, Broadway World, Nov 3

Review by Elizabeth Cobbe, Austin Chronicle, Nov 7

Review by Spike Gillespie, Nov 9

EXTRA

Click to view the program for Capital T's There Is A Happiness That Morning Is by Mickle Maher

Innocent When You Dream by Zeb L. West, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, October 25 and 26, 2013

by Dr. David Glen Robinson

Innocent When You Dream just shrieks festival piece—simple set design, simple-looking props, simply costumed performer sleeping and dreaming on-stage as the house opens. All these things have to be in place and removed quickly in a sequence of similar performance pieces performed in one evening. Then all of it has to be crated up and shipped to the next festival. After the curtain call, Zeb West, the creator and performer of Innocent When You Dream thanked his Kickstarter contributors for supporting the piece’s travels so far.

But that was later. When the performance lights went up at the beginning of the performance, there was a waking man telling us we’re all in the belly of the whale together with him, and his name is Jonah. OK, now we knew this was a piece about insanity, confirmed by Jonah’s incessant talk of the crackers that he lived on that all got soggy so he can’t share any with the audience.

Where could anyone go with this insane premise? Mr. West/Jonah showed deftness in taking us with him with his sweetness, friendliness, and a lot of encouraging talk directly to the audience. The audience was with him from the git-go. He showed a certain boldness as well, spinning engaging material out of the two probably mossiest, most hidebound but eternally fascinating works of literature found lying about inside whales, Don Quixote and Moby Dick. West merged their stories into a lament for all lives and relationships gone wrong. Yes, this show was about love and loss.

Trouble Puppet’s creations always have the quality of imagination in their fabrication, color, and concept. The human touch gives them life. And puppeteers, good ones, know the character they want to give each puppet. All of Zeb West’s puppets were hand puppets, their characters keyed distinctively by West’s character voices. Their stories meshed into a satisfying whole, and the stage was inhabited by a number of fascinating characters, without any use of ventriloquism.

Trouble Puppet Theatre Company member West has taken a slightly different tack with Innocent When You Dream, His one-man show, but he retains their commitment to innovative puppetry, heightening the band's reputation for skillful and efficient production. The audience was happy to render its standing ovation in appreciation. The show ran only one weekend, October 25 and 26 at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre studio space. My only wish for this worthy show would be for a longer run and a printed program to give due credit to the producing staff, designers, and the 98 supporters who kicked in $4240 -- 125% of Zeb's goal -- through his Kickstarter page to make possible his production and summer 2013 tour across Canada and the United States.

The Head by Connor Hopkins, Trouble Puppet Theatre Company at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, September 26 - October 12, 2013

by Dr. David Glen Robinson

(Photo: Chris Owens)

A miniature mechanical man emerges from a cloud of steam. A ruffled orange and yellow bird squawks obscenities and defecates in the eyepieces of a telescope. A lizard-like thing in wrought iron knee boots flies around the room mounting inanimate objects until someone threatens to get the hose.

These are all images in The Head, the latest production of puppet master Connor Hopkins’ Trouble Puppet Theatre Company, set inside a human being’s mind. The model of the mind represented by the set and the puppet characters inhabiting it could be anybody’s head, hence Everyman’s. TBut the creativity expressed by all of the blinking, smoking, rolling, heaving dream machines and fantastic puppet characters operating them offers an artistic model of Connor Hopkins’ mind and no other.

This is the latest full-length Trouble Puppet show since last May’s The Cruel Circus, and, if possible, it’s a step up in quality from that show. The puppeteers have refined their characters more, giving them sharper movements and character voices. Gone are the nearly uniform puppet hoppity-marches. Now, the inner demons leap out of the steaming vat of Everyman's limbic system, strutting in hip-hop dance steps. Plot expediencies have been weeded out, and the story action is crisp and purposeful. Altogether, the color and darkness and movement create such a medium of fantasy that one is pulled out of one’s own imaginative universe into that of The Head. The seductive appeal is definitely to the inner child, even though the entertainment is strictly for adults. We view this parade of images from our own limbic systems.

(Photo: Chris Owens)

The story is a day in the life of U-Name-It. A person gets up, goes to work, struggles to stay out of a bar and away from a cigarette, and tries to deal with a somewhat casual relationship. Now, where did he leave that neurotransmitter support medication?

Just as in day-to-day life, the audience learns of the person’s inner struggles gradually, over a period of time. The Mechanic works on all of this from the mind’s control room in the head. He also deals with the inner demons that pop out of the limbic system, resorting to negotiation, violence, or trickery. The inner demons are his old adversaries, and we always have the feeling of a story in progress when The Mechanic struggles for control with them. Some of this head stuff is predictable, some of it is wildly surprising. Whatever, we know it's for high stakes because we see it around us in everyday reality.

The quotation attributed to Helen Keller comes to mind: “Life is an exciting adventure or it is nothing at all.“ Trouble Puppet is committed to the adventure. Perhaps all the excitement is why the look of the show seems accented with a kind of delicacy. Transforming beauty is found in the least likely places.

See The Head and share your favorite images with friends. Although I seldom make cross-medium references, with this show I recommend the “How-to” article on the making of puppets for The Head in the current Austin Chronicle edition (Vol. 33 No.6, Oct 4, 2013; p. 34), “Creature Construction” by Elizabeth Cobbe. The article gives an extra dimension to one’s appreciation of a standout Trouble Puppet production.

Review by Cate Blouke for the Statesman's Austin360 Seeing Things blog, October 1

Review by Jeff Davis at www.austin.broadwayworld.com, October 1

Feature by Sofia Sokolove at austin.culturemap.com, including slideshow, October 3

The Head rby Connor Hopkins uns until October 12, 2013 at Salvage Vanguard Theatre , 2803 Manor Rd. in east Austin. It runs 1 hr 20 minutes with no intermission; tickets are $10-$20, available through

CLICK for TICKETS

Fat Pig by Neil LaBute, Theatre en Bloc at the Off Center, October 3 - 20, 2013

by Dr. David Glen Robinson
and Michael Meigs

Theatre en Bloc produced this Neil Labute play, directed by Derek Kolluri, at the Off Center in east Austin. The two-word title, Fat Pig, is one of the most succinct and apt descriptions of the premise and theme of a play ever.

The play is about bodies and human beings’ reactions to difference. In exposition, Charles P. Stites in the secondary role of Carter spoke the insightful passages, about how we don’t trust differences of any kind, including especially those of overweight. He offered this to enlighen and comfort the profound discomfort of his friend Tom (Ryan Hamilton) at being in love with an overweight woman (Helen, played by Zena Marie Vaughn).

When one exposes a shred of difference, one stands out from the herd, and the herd turns on one with a vengeance. This play could serve as an archival index of advanced derogatory terms for overweight people, starting with “whale” and “tank” and growing worse from there. Mild terms like “fat” and “plump” were not included. Helen, as one so exposed, sought protective coloration in her job as a librarian, or “printed word technician.”

Playwright Labute, having explored this premise colorfully, seemingly wrote himself into a corner when it came to resolving some of its issues and ending the play. Carter’s recommendation to the discomfited Tom was this: you’re only young once, go out and live like it. Like what? Carter’s point seems to be don’t waste your youth dating fat girls.

Those who know and appreciate Stites particularly enjoyed the irony of his characteristically assertive performance. In real life -- or at least in the Facebook semblance of it -- he's a great admirer of Rubens beauties, euphemistically referred to as 'plus sizes.'

Labute doesn’t elaborate much on life goals. Carter drinks in bars and seeks one-nighters with more appropriately shaped women, a behavior pattern that's hardly a road map for people trying to navigate their youth. His self-satisfied arrogance is contradicted forcefully in the play by Jeannie (Jenny Lavery). Jeannie, at the age of 28, laments the youth lout pattern and wonders angrily if all men are like that --by which she means lying, drinking, triflers. Jeannie’s sad, frustrating experiences with men are a source of anger for her, and that rage erupts into the one scene of stage violence in the play, well executed, on which everything pivots. We take Jeannie’s point clearly. But with that Labute is finished offering us kernels of insight.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Red by John Logan, Penfold Theatre at Trinity Street, September 12 - 29, 2013

by Dr. David Glen Robinson


Red is a tragedy, make no mistake, but it is one in love with life, and most especially with the color red. As with the very best plays, Red tells everything plainly to the audience. The promotional material for the play is full of piquant quotations from the script, by way of Mark Rothko, the central character. My favorite, not in any of the cut-lines is: “There is tragedy in every brushstroke.”

Ryan Crowder, Steven Pounder (photo: Kimberley Mead)

And so the tragedy played itself out, revolving around the modernist abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko and set in his warehouse-y lower Manhattan studio. The time of the play was the peak of Rothko’s career, when he was painting his commission for murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram building in Manhattan. 

 At the time, it was the most valuable art commission ever, paying $35,000. The commissioner was the architect Philip Johnson through his patron, international modernist architect Mies van der Rohe, perhaps the reigning art god of the twentieth century, who changed history more profoundly even than Picasso. 

 These were heady times, indeed, a few years past Jackson Pollock’s death (which Rothko insisted was suicide) at a point at which a few thinkers like Rothko saw Pop Art coming to replace all the abstract expressionists and knew it would be a painful death.

Penfold Theatre’s production of Red is a major score; they have captured the Austin premiere of this John Logan play, a Tony award winner, first staged in London in 2009. Penfold treats the play very well, staging it on the thrust stage of the Trinity Street Theatre, on the fourth floor of the First Baptist Church, 901 Trinity St., downtown. Steven Pounders plays Rothko, and Ryan Crowder, producing artistic director of Penfold, plays Ken, Rothko’s newly hired studio assistant. Rothko was known for his acerbic statements about the art world, and many of those comments have found their way into Logan’s script. Rothko was no Oscar Wilde for biting irony and sarcasm, but in his rage he came close.

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

Profile by participating artist Dr. David Glen Robinson: Art Show/Model Show, Paper Chairs at the Off-Shoot, August 29 - September 14, 2013

(www.paperchairs.com)

by Dr. David Glen Robinson


A Participating Artist's Impressions

The artists stood at easels or sat at drawing tables in the well of the theatre, downstage center, or more aptly, house center. The stage was multilevel, rising before us and offering sightlines better than in most figurative art workshops. The lighting on the models was also much better than in any workshop. My choice of oil on canvas as the medium ensured no relaxation on my part. I sweated and labored continually, and my brushes and charcoals hummed throughout the show; I panted through the entire five-minute break the artists were given in the middle of the performance. But my earnest efforts had actually begun before the show, with hauling four loads of art equipment and supplies from my pickup into the theatre. And I thought I had a minimal setup! Lesson: Oil painting never allows a minimal setup.

I was a guest artist for one evening performance of Paper Chairs’ Art Show/Model Show at the Offshoot Theatre in East Austin, where creativity seemsy always to find new and brilliant expression. This show simulated in its setting an art class or workshop, where artists actually strive for, well, something in the realm of figurative art. The workshop setting gave rise to the need for working artists in the show, and so I signed up. But it was the art models/actors who controlled the action and gave all the lines and spoke all the texts in the show. The only artists who spoke were those who did so in projected video interviews on a screen above the stage.

(photo from Paper Chairs)

The art models, you may surmise, showed some attitude, i.e., ‘tude, and with good reason. Artists and art models exist in an archetypical relationship. They have left their traces on Paleolithic cave walls and in every succeeding stage of world art since that time, with the possible exceptions of Hebraic and Islamic art. In all those eras, expression and communication were the province of the artists, while the fully exposed models remained silent, ultimately and ironically invisible in terms of their identities, female or male. The model merely provided a useful form for the visual telling of allegories and mythic adventures. The exception of portrait art proves the rule: there, the dominance of the artist fell away when painting a fully empowered and clothed king, queen or aristocrat as portrait subject, not model. The portrait titles are the names of those depicted.

The models who created Art Show/Model Show raged against all of that. They spoke and the artists remained silent. Art instruction videos contextualized their world, and then the models offered commentary on it all, never more hilariously than when model Kelli Bland walked among the artists in faux art teacher mode giving ironic, almost snide, instructions in how to draw body parts, mostly by making impersonal and insensitive comments about “the model.” (“You can’t see that bone on that model, but it is there under all her fat.”) All models have heard such brutally clinical and basically rude comments in the course of their modeling careers.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Three, or the Sound of the Great Existential Nothingness by Timothy Braun, Breaking String Theatre at the Off Center, July 26 - August 17, 2013

by Dr. David Glen Robinson


Brother Andre’s cell ringtone is Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire, and that’s everything, right up front, for Three, or, The Sound of the Great Existential Nothingness by Timothy Braun. Each and every character on stage goes down, down, down in a burning ring of fire, seemingly without redemption.

Breaking String Theater produces the play at the Off Center, possibly the east side’s most prestigious venue. In marketing material, the play is described as a modern reworking of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. After having seen the show, I’m glad I decided to drink the play neat. Put down your Chekhov and go to the show.

Andre and his three sisters have been settled in an unbelievably small and provincial town distinguished by its nothingness. The town is located by the characters by spinning a globe and jamming their fingers onto it at random. Nothing could say every-nowhere better than that. The siblings’ doctor father did this to his four children when the town pleaded for a general practitioner. The doctor took the job and then died, leaving the children to attain adulthood and stumble through the wreckage of their lives, featuring advanced alcoholism, profligacy and gambling addiction. The play makes no mention of their mother.

The action takes place on the 21st birthday of the youngest daughter, Irina, and although Brother Andre bribes several of the townspeople to come to the weekend-long bash, only two show up, but these two are straight out of the family’s past. They are The Captain, played by Chris Gibson, and Officer in Training, played by David Higgins. Under the solvent of alcohol, the layers of denial slowly wash away, and the characters and their histories lie exposed and raw. We all have a little somethin’ to hide; but these people have to deal with icebergs, strip mines, nuclear waste dumps, and Cambodian minefields of the inner landscape-- with fracking in progress.

Director Schmidt leads us deftly through the carnage with an excellent cast. Cami Alys is notable as Masha, threatening, black-garbed; a Miss Attitude who, when not running with her scissors, holsters them prominently in her boot. She also scissors pictures out of library books as her sole prerogative as the town’s English teacher. Later, Andre says she is getting worse. We believe it. Ms Alys performs with supreme physicality, matched in the cast only by the gracile Gricelda Silva as Irina.

Jeff Mills as Andre and Dawn Youngs as Olga play with greater restraint than the others, as their characters require. With Andre this is due to a profound emotional weakness that leads him to trifle with the town punch and gamble with everything from the dog to the deed to the ranch. He talks smartass, even as a frame bending narrator, but his heart is in nothing but ennui. Mills’s accomplishment in erforming with this low intensity for all but a few minutes of the play is a credit to his skills. Olga, as the oldest sister, is bound by conventionality and the imperative to do the right thing. Youngs plays her with glimpses of Olga’s bottled rage and shows her physicality in games of jump-rope late in the play. This sequence, along with the party scene, adds creative dimension and relieves the audience after an hour of sturm and drang.

Click to read more of David Glen Robinson's review at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Circus Girl by Rocky Hopson, Hat Tree Theatricals at the Museum of Human Achievement, June 6 - 16, 2013

by Dr. David Glen Robinson


Circus Girl, written by Rocky Hopson, is a coming-of-age play like few others. Set in the 1890s in the Midwest and Rocky Mountains, the play proceeds initially like the adventures of one of many “Little Nells” of the dime novels of that time. If those stories had finished with any of the realism and hard times of that age depicted in this play, very few “Little Nells” would have survived to tell the tale. 'Circus Girl' is the name given to a very young orphan by her circus family; the circus travels, but then settles in Kansas City when the owner buys a theatre for a home base. All dreams are shattered when the Panic of 1893 causes a riotous run on America’s banks. The bank forecloses on the circus’s theatre loan; the performers and owner lose everything, and Circus Girl is cast loose in depressed America with absolutely nothing.
The first point of appreciation of the play is the beauty that's presented on stage against the background of decay. The costumes are at times truly sumptuous and approach period accuracy, at least as far as I could evaluate. The sweetness of many of the characters also provided a sometimes-relieving contrast with the corruption surrounding them. Impressive, too, were the patterns of overwrought oratorical gestures presented in the monologues. These gestural systems were taught formally in that era.
Dawn Youngs was notable for her adept use of this style in her role as a suffrage reformer and traveling lecturer. Old photographs of the era were projected; particularly enjoyable were the many pictures of the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Early films of circus acts were a treat shown as a pre-show; they were, of course, a couple of decades out-of-period, but who cares.

Setting in the American Midwest of the 1890s and later was a fascinating choice by playwright Rocky Hopson. The period is called the Gilded Age for its optimism and immense growth economically, politically and socially. It was also the nadir of monopolistic capitalism. 

The Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which we take for granted today, had been enacted in 1890, and its reforms were just taking hold by the time of the Panic of 1893, that giant jolt to the system, as Circus Girl starts. Labor unions were organizing and starting their struggles; Upton Sinclair’s pivotal reform novel The Jungle would not be published until 1906. The gold and silver mines in the Rockies were playing out.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com. . . .

Adam Sultan by Steve Moore and Zeb L. West, Physical Plant Theare, March 28 - April 13, 2013

(poster design: Jennymarie Jemison)

by Dr. David Glen Robinson


For the committed theatergoer, this was a long-awaited premiere. The blended live-action and puppet play previewed at the 2012 Fusebox Festival. The preview tantalized audiences with its potential for taking many different directions.


The premiere at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre on March 28 satisfied our aroused curiosity with a long sequence of wise story choices. They took us through some surprising ways yet never strayed from its emotional heart. Sure, it was about death, and innovative puppetry sustained all its moods and action; at the same time the production remained light, humor-filled and entertaining. 
 A demanding ticket buyer couldn’t ask for much more.


The play follows the character of Adam Sultan, played by the artist Adam Sultan, through to the far distant future of A.D. 2052 (not quite forty years from now). 

 Aged and infirm, Sultan sees and feels the loss of his artist friends all around him. Seemingly despairing, he collects mementos of their lives and seals those objects into glass jars. His bookshelf fills with the jars. Then one day a half-scale doppelganger puppet enters his apartment, drinks heavily and passes out. Sultan doesn’t know what to make of it; he never does know what to make of it. What’s sure is only that from this point forward puppets carry equal weight with human actors in conveying the story and its meanings.

(photo: Physical Plant Theatre)

The Physical Plant team of Steve Moore and Zeb L. West wrote and crafted the show. In addition to makiing unerring choices in a mature story revolving around death, they incorporated advanced concepts of new puppetry that took Adam Sultan to the edge of theatre and puppetry. 

Completely black-garbed puppeteers were visible onstage. In conventional theatre, anyone wearing black is a technician and therefore invisible in the sense of operating the play and not figuring in the scripted action; technicians are merely making it happen.


The Adam Sultan puppeteers pushed this envelope or bent this frame in several ways. First and most fundamentally, the puppeteers manipulated and changed the human actors throughout the play; they did so subtly and tellingly when they reshaped the postures and stances of the living to reflect advancing age, as for example in the touching moment when they placed wedding rings on the fingers of the lead characters. In addition, the puppeteers removed their black headgear to speak narrative voice-overs at a microphone stand at stage left. With this, the audience no longer held the puppeteers comfortably framed in invisibility as helpers for the story. Attention, audience: they might do other things, so be ready.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

The Interior Landscape of the Emotional Mind, Chaddick Dance Company at Ballet Austin, February 22 - March 3, 2013

by David Glen Robinson

It was a cold night in Austin, made worse by the biting wind that swirled around its towers and roared down its streets. Inside Ballet Austin studios, Cheryl Chaddick and company lay in wait for their audiences with a well-prepared dance show that eventually took us to the forefront of Austin and regional contemporary dance. The Interior Landscape of the Emotional Mind was presented as a site-specific dance, or site dance. 

How fitting that an appropriate environment for the performance is within the offices and rehearsal studios of an award-winning dance company, Ballet Austin. Perhaps this setting turned the corner on the site-specific concept -- with or without tongue in cheek, I don’t know.


Production in unconventional spaces presents exceptional challenges, but the audience got the metaphor from the beginning. The Chaddick company performed the dances of this integrated show in the hallways, balconies, rehearsal studios and alcoves of Ballet Austin, shifting the setting metaphorically into a many-chambered mind to show us facets of that often perplexing house within us all. We saw six such meditations on the house. 

It all worked because choreographer Chaddick remained true to the basics of choreography and theatrical production. She crafted dances with attention to shape, gesture, rhythmic steps, floor patterning and overall structure. All the separate performances here were well lit, with clearly audible soundtracks and sightlines. Do these production elements seem too trivial to mention? I assure you that other recent site-specific performances in Austin have shown very little consideration for these basics. They're anything but trivial.

Usher-guides led us to the spacious foyer and directed our attention to the second story balcony for Going In. Two plain white masks wrapped in red robes rose up and peered down at us through the railing. They perched at the head of the stairs, silent, impersonal and persistently ominous, their trailing red robes giving them monstrous size. Obviously, they had missed the bus when Where the Wild Things Are left town and had pawned their horns and earrings in order to eat. Soloist Katie Mae Hebert, unmasked and clad in black, danced gymnastically on, around and through the balcony railing. Her dance established a great contrast to the forbidding forms nearby; she ended it with her feet protruding through the railing bars, slowly relaxing to stillness. I wasn’t quite sure of the intended takeaway of this piece, and I wondered why such a powerful blast of fantastic imagery exploded on us at the beginning of the evening. But I was definitely along for the ride.


Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com. . . .

Vodka, Fucking and Television by Maksym Kurochkin, Breaking String Theatre, November 29 - December 15

by Dr. David Glen Robinson

This play, written in 2003, may reach an apex in the new generation of Russian plays. Breaking String Theater Company is getting used to this Russian art explosion, having produced a number of Russian plays in translation, and producing this extremely well written comedy with an exceptional ensemble of some of Austin’s most talented actors. Liz Fisher directs Vodka, Fucking and Television for Breaking String.

The only speed bump in the raceway to success for this sparkling vehicle is the obscenity in the title, which seems to have inhibited some of the more conventional marketing modes. No problem. Judging from the enthusiastic audience on opening night, word of mouth alone will counteract the dearth of posters in grocery stores.

The story behind VF+T is that of Russian theatrical creativity since the fall of the Soviet Union. The conduit for funneling the best new plays into English translations and on into the English-speaking world has been John Freedman, theatre writer for the Moscow Times. Graham Schmidt, Breaking String’s producing artistic director, describes Freedman as the rare man in the right place at the right time: he was visiting Moscow on a Fulbright to write his doctoral dissertation on Russian playwright Erdman when the Iron Curtain fell. Freedman moved to Russia, and the rest is ongoing cultural arts history. Freedman has been instrumental in bringing Maksym Kurochkin to the attention of the West. For more on this story, read Michael Meigs’ profile of VF+T and Liz Fisher for AustinLiveTheatre.com.

VF+T takes its title from the three vices that beset a 33-year-old writer and Red Army veteran variously referred to as Hero, Poet or Writer. His name is just as symbolic as are those of the other characters. He is Everyman (artist variant), portrayed by Noel Gaulin. In one of the most effective play openings that I have seen in the curtainless postmodern era, the house opens with Gaulin already onstage in pajamas and robe in the midst of his small but serviceable Moscow flat. The interior design is definitely post-Soviet Union; the room has central heating. 

Gaulin spins and contorts in apparent writer’s block, his grimacing face lit mostly by the laptop screen mocking him with its emptiness. The vices have a peculiar presence in the apartment, too: the flat-screen TV blares, and, pity Russia, its daytime TV is worse than ours (unfortunately, a good third of the audience misses the flat screen amusements because a table and pile of blankets block them). The kitchen sink if full of dirty dishes and used drinking glasses and bottles of vodka and wine are everywhere. The bed clothing and scattered blankets and comforters convey the tumbled look of recent sex, hinting perhaps at more to come.

Hero struggles and eventually declines into a a giant hallucinatory spasm. The personified vices materialize and swirl around him. The vices loudly claim triumph over the writer, backing him into every corner in the flat. Clutching for control, Hero declares that he will reclaim mastery if he can banish at least one of the vices from his life.

The rest of the play is a kind of reverse Judgment of Paris. Hero insists that each vice must make its best case for staying in his life, and he says he will expel the vice with the least compelling argument. Of course, aided by addictive denial, all the vices make great cases for themselves. The ensuing speeches are a showcase of Kurochkin’s writing skill, and they all jab and torture Hero’s weakening psyche.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Can Can, A 1940's Style Floor Show, The Exchange Artists at Palm Door, November 13 and 15

by Dr. David Glen Robinson

I picked my way through the new development and blocked streets of downtown Austin to find this new bar I’d never heard of, the Palm Door. After hiking blocks, I saw it—it was the building formerly occupied by City Grille, once the best seafood restaurant in Austin. The address is 401 Sabine Street, immediately across the street east of the convention center. I want everyone to find it more easily than I did because the Exchange Artists’ performance there is well worth it.

The show is Can Can: A 1940s Floor Show. It's a composite of 1940s musical theatre and movie song and dance routines, finished with Romulus Linney’s exquisite one-act play Can Can. The play is a history of two relationships right after VE day.
The evening of performance is the second in a series of plays in bars mounted by Exchange Artists, one of the most creative groups in the Austin theatre community. They recently staged The Man Who Planted Trees in Sparky Park in central Austin. Surely one of their most notable traits is their seemingly unflagging ability to produce laudable productions in non-traditional performance spaces. And they do it in very short turnaround time—in this case within two months.

The lead producer this time was Bridget Farr, and Katie Richter directed the show. There I was, sitting in a room that looked like an old 1940s barracks with its open ceiling, expecting light entertainment, and suddenly I received a knock-down, lights-out stage dance performance by triple-threat performers Michelle Keffer, Bridget Farr, Cassie Stewart and Will Brittain. They were led by the terrific Jonathan Itchon, a recent B. Iden Payne nominee. Sing (like the Andrews Sisters), dance, act—this group can do it all.

And guiding us through it all was Emcee Noel Gaulin, with his two-day turnaround from Paper Chairs’ Boom for Real (likewise Michelle Keffer). Gaulin’s surprise was a stand-up routine that was a knock-off of 70s comic Andy Kaufman. Gaulin gave us a very close approach to Kaufman, and it gave the audience that queasy, I-don’t-know-if-I-like-this feeling and several icky question marks in the mind about the performer’s mental health. Pay special attention to the punch line “I got vaccinated.”

If all this wasn’t enough, the Tapestry, Too dance troupe performed classic period tap dance numbers. They are the adult student company of Tapestry Dance. They gave us the virtuoso performance of continuing to perform well when the soundtrack music unexpectedly quit. They did well, but paid in performance stress for the inevitable quirks and kinks presented by a non-traditional venue.

Exchange Artists remains true to its huge creative energies, and everything it produces offers beautiful gifts to its audiences. Performers Bridget Farr, Michelle Keffer, Noel Gaulin and Jonathan Itchon seem to hone their talents continually, and they certainly deserve greater attention and higher paychecks. I’ve singled out these few, but all the performers lit up from within when they hit the stage. It is satisfying to see people following their bliss.

Promoting and building the performance communities in Austin is one of my commitments, as it is for AustinLiveTheatre.com. And Exchange Artists is one of about a half-dozen small companies I follow that are exceptionally deserving of growth and greater attention within the community. Much of their work is of short duration and in venues somewhat harder to find than the average theatre. But their ticket prices, for their greater effort in production and your greater effort in finding them, are no higher than anybody else’s. A percentage of their ticket revenue always goes to charity. For slightly more than the price of a movie ticket you can receive much more in art and entertainment. Exchange Artists—remember the name, seek them out; the rewards are huge.