Upcoming: Beneath the Yellow Wallpaper, staged reading at Neill-Cochran House Museum, January 15

Found online:

presents

Beneath the Yellow Wallpaper:

Writers, Workers, & Freud Discover the Self,

staged reading with Pamela Christian & Ev Lunning, Jr.

January 15, 2012, 2 p.m.

Neill-Cochran House Museum, 2310 W. San Gabriel Street, 78705 (click for map)

The 1890s saw a shift in the way we see ourselves. Freud did his seminal work during this decade, publishing Studies on Hysteria (1895) and The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), and Charlotte Perkins Gillman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), a beautifully crafted novel that critiqued the 19^th-century approach to the treatment of mental illness, along with Women and Economics (1898). Workers examined their individual situations and joined collectively to protest their conditions. The ‘90s’ transition from Victorian styles to modernity permeated literature, painting, music, politics. To explore the fin de siècle Equity actors Pamela Christian and Ev Lunning, Jr. make their second Modern Times appearance with their popular staged duet. Dr. Christian, Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of Voice and Speech for Performance in U.T.’s Department of Theatre and Dance, was recently voted Austin’s best actress for her role as Elizabeth I in Mary Stuart. Mr. Lunning, a veteran film actor and voiceover performer, is artistic director of the acclaimed Mary Moody Northen Theatre at St. Edwards University. Explore with them the new introspection that set the stage for the 20^th century.

Upcoming: Don Juan in Hell by George Bernard Shaw, staged reading by Austin Shakespeare, Rollins Theatre, February 27

Received directly:

-- presents --

a staged reading of

Don Juan in Hell

by George Bernard Shaw

one night only: Sunday, February 27 at 7:30 p.m.

Rollins Theatre of The Long Center for the Performing Arts

Tickets available at thelongcenter.frontgatesolutions.com (512) 474-5664

or nowplayingaustin.com/DonJuaninHell (512-474-8497)

All tickets $15

Don Juan in Hell is a staged reading of Bernard Shaw's witty "Parliament in Hell" on the progress -- or lack thereof -- of humankind. Harvey Guion appears as the suave Devil, Shelby Davenport as the rambunctious Don Juan, Babs George as the fabulously quizzical Doña Ana and Ev Lunning, Jr. as the comic commendatore father of Don Juan. The audience is invited to join the fun in a post performance discussion.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward's University, November 11 - 21

I knew that this was going to be intense. I had invited friends to see it with me, and we had seats in the middle of the front row, south side of the "theatre in the square" at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre. After Michelle Polgar had dedicated the opening night's performance to the memory of Oscar Brockett, that grand old man of Austin theatre, the lights began to fade and I had a feeling similar to that you get when you light the fuse on a fistful of firecrackers and throw them down.

My usual view is that a cinema version of the text is irrelevant to the stage performance, but here I have to admit that in any staging of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the ghost of Richard Burton and the presence of Elizabeth Taylor roil fitfully about the set. The movie rating code had just been instituted when Mike Nichols' film was released in 1966. The MPAA had relented after a couple of minor revisions of the dialogue and gave it a "suggested for mature audiences" rating. In my town meant that you had to be 18 years of age to get in, unless accompanied by a parent. My father, a secret movie buff, insisted that I see it and he stood behind me as my 17-year-old self bought my ticket.

Thirteen Academy award nominations, including for Nichols as director and all four in the cast, with five wins, including Taylor as the monstrous Martha and Sandy Dennis as an unforgettably inebriated bubble-blowing little wife. So how can a contemporary theatrical production stand up to that?

The answer in Austin is simple but three-fold: by playing to an audience predominantly of college students who do not know the film; by enlisting Babs George for the role of Martha and Ev Lunning Jr. for the role of George; and with Christie Moore's tight direction in Leilah Stewart's starkly effective, almost claustrophobic set.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, Breaking String Theatre at the Blue Theatre, October 5 - 21

What is this quiet exhilaration I feel in the presence of Chekhov? Especially when the piece is as well played as this one?

For opening night at the Blue Theatre many of the seats were taken by young persons who might well have been undergraduates. Directly opposite me, across the three-quarter thrust of the playing space, one or two had spiral notebooks and pencils in hand.

I cannot recall if the vision of this end-of-the-19th-century Russian physician and author moved me so much at their age. Perhaps I was impressed principally by the exotic setting; the great but impoverished families of the Russian countryside were certainly alien to me. I probably liked the foolishness of some of the characters and admired Chekhov's women, who are simultaneously fragile and enduring.

But at university age I probably had a good deal of the unselfconscious arrogance that Mme Ranyevskaya so simply reproaches of Peter Trofimov, the eternal student who six years earlier was tutor to her son Grisha, before the boy drowned in the river:

"What truth? You can see what's true or untrue, but I seem to have lost my sight, I see nothing. You solve the most serious problems so confidently, but tell me, dear boy, isn't that because you're young -- not old enough for any of your problems to have caused you real suffering? You face the future so bravely, but then you can't imagine anything terrible happening, can you? And isn't that because you're still too young to see what life's really like?"

Now, several decades later, I am amused, perhaps a bit dismayed, to find myself resembling more closely Mme Ranyevskaya's brother Leonid Gaev, played by Ev Lunning, Jr. He's an idle but well-meaning billiards enthusiast easily tempted to pontificate over the trivial, including, for example, the hundred-year anniversary of the cabinet in the nursery. At least Leonid Gaev has the good sense to feel abashed when his nieces beg him, "Oh, do please, stop, Uncle!"

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .