Arts Reporting: Austin Playhouse's Relocation to Highland Mall

Published in the Statesman's Sunday edition of December 9, 2012:








 Whether in a Tent or in a Mall, for Austin Playhouse the Show Goes On

by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin December 9, 2012

(photo: Alberto Martinez via Austin Statesman)

What’s the old show business saying? Something about how no matter what happens, the show must go on?

More than any other theater group in town, Austin Playhouse might embody the spirit of that saying.

A year ago, the midsize nonprofit troupe announced that it was pitching a tent — literally — on a site at the Mueller development, where it planned to build a two-theater facility as part of the Mueller community’s town center.

The tent was a temporary venue while the community theater group worked through the permitting process for its planned 17,000-square-foot complex that would also have classrooms, offices and ground-floor space that will be sold to a bar or restaurant.

However, with permitting for the Mueller project still not finalized but construction under way on the building next to it, the troupe is setting up a second temporary home. And this time, the show’s at Highland Mall.

On Thursday, Austin Playhouse will raise the curtain on “The Game’s Afoot (Or Holmes for the Holidays),” a murder mystery drawing-room comedy set in Broadway theater world of the 1930s.

The theater’s real estate shuffle around town mirrors the shifting landscape of Austin development[ . . . . ]


Read more at the Austin Statesman on-line. . . .

The Turn of the Screw, Austin Playhouse, October 23 - November 8

Henry James' novella The Turn of the Screw takes you into a dark place. A brief chapter sets the scene. On Christmas Eve in an old house in the countryside a group of bourgeois friends have just listened to a ghost story. Their host, Douglas, offers them another, but they have to wait for a manuscript to be dispatched from his residence in London.

That text -- "in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand" -- came from his sister's governess, twenty years dead. Her words as imagined by James constitute the entirety of the rest of the novella.

The unnamed woman is the well-read but lonely daughter of an impoverished country clergyman. At an interview in Harley Street, central London, she agrees to care for two orphaned children at a distant estate called Bly. Her new employer, the gallant but inveterate bachelor who is their guardian and uncle, admonishes her that she is never, ever to contact him. Of course, she is immediately infatuated in that gallant gentleman.

So there we are, inside her head.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . .

My Child, My Alien Child, Zell Miller III at the Hyde Park Theatre, April 2 - 18

A review last year in the Austin Chronicle called Zell Miller III "an incendiary device waiting to go off." You can certainly see the flame in the man, but when he talks about becoming a father it burns with a completely different light.

Becoming a parent is a life-changing event and, again and again, a mind-blowing one. I remember clearly the first session of the birthing class, and the electric zap! that went through me when the instructor turned to us and said, "And now, dads. . . ."

So I was with him. I'd been there. I had wondered, who is this alien being, roaring with energy and curiosity, who has landed incredibly in our house?

Zell Miller isn't an alien but he for sure is a shape-shifter.

Read More at AustinLiveTheatre.com. . . .