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

(poster design by JennyMarie Jemison)

by Brian Paul Scipione

What Philosophers Call It

A pause button: many wish for it and none achieve it.

Many of life’s moments skyrocket past us with meteor-like frenzy. Some we miss altogether, because we were simply too wrapped up in, well, what we consider to be life. Vonnegut fantasizes about something similar in Slaughterhouse Five: the ability to stretch time out like taffy, look at each and every important moment from our past, and understand how they brought us to the present. Because, honestly, we know all along as it’s happening. One thing does lead to another,r and while nothing was actually our fault, if we could do it all over again differently-- we probably would.

Three or the Sound of Existential Nothingness is not science fiction or a playful modern fantasy. It’s a modern adaption of Chekov’s masterpiece Three Sisters. The play portrays the titular trio plus one lover and one brother. No special effects or time travel involved; yet while watching the play, the spectator is whisked back and forth, through a thousand moments: many seem insignificant but all matter.

Allow me to explain, if I can (avoiding spoilers and misdirection, of course).

Jeff Mills (photo: Will Hollis Snider)

Within the first three minutes of the evening the fourth wall is shattered. No objection to that; many people know that playwright Timothy Braun is adapting 113-year-old material for a modern audience: why not take a casual approach to the format? Alas, this is only the least of the changes to this inter-dimensional story. 

The crux of the drama lies not in what Andres the brother (Jeff Mills) says directly to the audience as the de facto narrator. Rather, it consists of every little thing the characters don’t say. Here, the five players of Three truly explode the parameters of Ia Enstera’s theatre-in-the-round set-up.

Wait, let’s pause and rewind. . . .

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 . . . .

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

A photo spread by Will Hollis Snider with costumes by Jamie Urban for the

presentation of

Three, or the Sound of the Great Existential Nothingness

by Timothy Braun

directed by Graham Schmidt

July 26, 27 - August 1, 2, 3, 5 - August 8, 9, 10 - August 14, 15, 16, 17 

at The Off-Center, 2211-A Hidalgo Street, near E. 7th Street and Robert Martinez (behind Joe's Bakery) - click for map

In Timothy Braun's fantastical re-interpretation, five characters from Chekhov's 1901 masterpiece live highly circumscribed lives in a small town somewhere in present-day America. Breaking String presented an early draft at Hyde Park Theatre in December of 2012, and recruited an elite creative team comprising veterans of Austin's new works community, for a development process. The result is a highly playful and theatrical piece in which Mr. Braun explores themes central to Chekhov's work: loneliness, the yearning for a better life, and the struggle to connect.

Cami Alys, Dawn Youngs, Gricelda Silva, Jeff Mills (image: Will Hollis Snider)

Gricelda Silva (image: Will Hollis Snider)

David Higgins, Chris Gibson (photo: Will Hollis Snider)

Click to view additional images 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. . . .

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

Hat Tree Theatricals
presents

 

Circus Girl
by Rocky Hopson
June 6th - 16th, Thursdays-Sundays at 7:30
at The Museum of Human Achievement. (located across from The Blue Genie)
Thursdays are pay-what-you-wish and there will be ASL interpretation on Thursday, June 13th.

Purchase tickets here: http://thehattreetheatricals.com/

Circus Girl takes you on a journey through America during the 1890s—from Kansas City to Chicago to Denver. It is the story of Circus Girl, a young performer who has lived in the circus or vaudeville her entire life. She knows very little about the outside world, and suddenly has to fend for herself in rapidly changing and precarious surroundings.
Much like our present decade, the 1890s were a time of exciting innovation as well as economic crisis and uncertainty: New technologies like the recording of sound and film changed the way people perceived the world and themselves in it. The Chicago World's Fair took place in 1893 and was considered the biggest event in human history.
On the flip side of that was the Panic of 1893. The railroads had overbuilt and went bankrupt. The banks closed. The country was in chaos. —Amidst this upheaval Circus Girl is out of a job and left alone. She has to adjust to her new environment or be sucked into the harsh reality of a country in turmoil. Through the eyes of Circus Girl this challenging new play shows an epic struggle between fantasy and reality that also reflects the problems and turmoils we face in 2013.


Circus Girl is written and directed by Rocky Hopson, starring Kim Adams, Jen Brown, Dallas Tate, Zac Crofford, Dawn Youngs, Judd Farias, Kelly Hasandras and Michelle Keffer and designed by Monica Gibson, Jamie Urban, Ia Enstera, Steven Shirey, and Lee Webster.

The Hat Tree Theatricals is Rocky Hopson and Michelle Keffer.

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)