THE SECRET GARDEN, Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward's University, June 13 - 30, 2013

(St. Edward's University, 3001 South Congress Avenue)

presents

The Secret Garden

Music by Lucy Simon, Book and Lyrics by Marsha Norman
Based on the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Directed by Robert Westenberg

June 13 – 30, 2013

Thursdays – Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m.

Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St Edward’s University, 3001 South Congress Avenue, Austin, TX 78704   Map: http://www.stedwards.edu/map/maincampus

Tickets: $25 Adults Advance ($20 Students, Seniors, SEU Community); $25 at the door
Available through the MMNT Box Office, 512.448.8484 -- Available online at http://www.stedwards.edu/theatre    Box Office Hours are M-F 1-5 p.m.

STUDENT DISCOUNT NIGHTS: Friday, June 14 and Thursday, June 20: Student tickets $8 with ID.

Mary Moody Northen Theatre, the award-winning producing arm of the St. Edward’s University professional theatre training program, concludes its 40^th anniversary season with The Secret Garden, music by Lucy Simon, book and lyrics by Marsha Norman, based on the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett and directed by Broadway veteran Robert Westenberg, running June 13 - 30, 2013. This coming of age story based on the classic children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett is filled with suspense, magic and wonder. 11-year-old Mary, orphaned by a cholera outbreak, is sent from India to Scotland to live with her reclusive widower uncle. Lost in their grief and surrounded by visions and voices from the past, Mary and the rest of the family struggle to regain their footing. The young girl’s discovery of a secret garden, coupled with her dedication to revive the magical space, leads to rebirth and renewal for all. This Tony-award winning musical will set your heartstrings aflutter. Featuring Equity guests Greg Holt, Cara Johnson, Ev Lunning Jr. and David Long.
A must-see for any of us that have retained the sense of magic and wonder from childhood. - TalkingBroadway



About Robert Westenberg
After a lengthy performing career that included work on Broadway and Off-Broadway, in regional theatres, national tours, television and film, Mr. Westenberg is now concentrating on teaching and directing. He is perhaps best remembered for his roles in the original Broadway casts of Into the Woods as the Wolf and Prince, for which he received a Tony nomination and Drama Desk Award, Secret Garden as Neville Craven, and Sunday in the Park with George, where he replaced Mandy Patinkin in the title role. He also performed the role of Javert in the Broadway production of Les Miserables. Other Broadway credits include leading roles in 1776, Company, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, A Christmas Carol and Zorba, for which he received a Theatre World Award. His national tour credits include Zorba, Funny Girl, and The Full Monty. His film and television credits are The Ice Storm, Before and After, The Stars Fell on Henrietta, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Swift Justice, Central Park West, and Law and Order: SVU. He recently performed the roles of Mr. Darling and Captain Hook opposite Cathy Rigby’s Peter Pan in Branson, Missouri. Mr. Westenberg is a graduate of the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco and teaches at Drury University where he serves as Chair of the Theatre Department.


About Mary Moody Northen Theatre

Mary Moody Northen Theatre operates on a professional model and stands at the center of the St. Edward’s University Theatre Training Program. Through the Mary Moody Northen Theatre, students work alongside professional actors, directors and designers, explore all facets of theatrical production and earn points towards membership in Actor’s Equity Association, the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States. MMNT operates under an AEA U/RTA contract and is a member of Theatre Communications Group. For more information, contact the theatre program at 512-448-8487 or visit us online at www.stedwards.edu/theatre.


About St. Edward's University

St. Edward’s is a private, liberal arts Catholic university in the Holy Cross Tradition with more than 5,300 students. Located in Austin, Texas, with a network of partner universities around the world, St. Edward’s is a diverse community that offers undergraduate and graduate programs designed to inspire students with a global perspective. St. Edward's University has been recognized for ten consecutive years as one of "America's Best Colleges" by U.S. News & World Report, and ranks in the top 20 of Best Regional Universities in the Western Region. St. Edward’s has also been recognized by Forbes and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

HEARTBREAK HOUSE by George Bernard Shaw, Southwestern University, April 25 - 28, 2013

(Southwestern University, 1001 E. University Blvd, Georgetown)


 Calendar | Box Office | Friends | Contact Us

Tickets Still Available! Apr. 25 – 28, 2013 8pm | Thurs., Fri. & Sat 3pm | Sun. Jones Theater By George Bernard Shaw Directed by Ev Lunning, Jr. Purchase Tickets A comedy about love, money and the end of the world. Heartbreak House is a soap opera of the 1900’s, where no one is who they seem and everyone gets their heart broken. During a weekend party at the eccentric Captain Shotover’s estate, Ellie causes a commotion with her decision to marry for money rather than love. As the Captain’s daughter Hesione protests, a lively debate about money, morality, idealism, and realism ensues among Hesione’s playboy husband, snobbish sister, and Ellie’s fiance, a wealthy industrialist. “brilliant comedy”–The New York Times Southwestern University, Sarofim School of Fine Arts 1001 E. University Avenue, Georgetown, TX 78626 | (512) 863-1504 (Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

The Attic Space by Nigel O'Hearn, Palindrome Theatre at the Salvage Vanguard, December 14 - 22

by Michael Meigs


Nigel, this is stupid stuff. There, now I've said it.


You and your friends of Palindrome have made arresting, sometimes astounding art in the three years that you promised yourselves for the experiment after your graduation from the theatre program at St. Ed's. 


You have shown yourself to be an impressive actor and promoter of our dear, beloved and commercially moribund art of live theatre, gathering award nominations and recognition along the way.


You made contacts with some Austin's best in the field, many of them teachers -- Ev Lunning, with whom you worked in the Ar Rude Actors's Equity project of McNeil's A Long Day's Journey into Night directed by Lucien Douglas, and Babs George in that fine Cherry Orchard by Breaking String where appropriately enough you portrayed the eternally yearning and optimistic student Trofimov. 


You were a memorable drifter challenging a stolidly bourgeois Jude Hickey in Albee's At Home at the Zoo, with Robin Grace Thompson as his wife. You crafted a pungent Hedda Gabler last year by reworking someone's literalist pony translation from the original, staged it with Robin successfully here and at the Edinburgh Fringe, and caught the eye of the flattered Norwegians.


Before approaching its three-year expiration date, Palindrome's artists and sometime provocateurs have furnished Austin with fine stagings of classics. I wish I could have seen them all. I missed Babs with Harvey Guion in Arthur Miller's All My Sons last summer, Dario Fo's Accidental Death of An Anarchist, and Sarah Ruhl's Melancholy Play. I did see, and will long remember, Beckett's End Days with Jarrett King, Gabriel Luna and Helyn Rain Messenger.


You've been gracious and forthcoming throughout all of this. I still have a twinge of bad conscience about not recognizing you immediately two years ago when you greeted me in the lobby at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre at the opening night for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, where Babs was Martha and Ev was George. I was glad to get a close-up rehearsal view of the revised Hedda before the departure for Edinburgh last year, and I was flattered to be invited along with other theatre scriveners to last weekend's advance staging for the press of your work The Attic Space, with Babs and Ev. It was a remarkable and unexpected opportunity to mingle briefly before the show with Elizabeth Cobbe of the Austin Chronicle, Jillian Owens and Cate Blouke of the Statesman and newcomer Jeff Davis of www.austin.broadwayworld.com.


The Attic Space seems grossly derivative to me. You've brought your two characters Harold and Harriet together in George Marsolek's claustrophobic and dimly lit attic space that contains the stored detritus of their lives. The dialogue is a similar in style to that of Beckett, full of ellipses and references to shared but unrevealed events and relationships. Harriet is high strung but disconnected; Harold is restrained, patient and long-suffering. She insists on staying in the attic amongst the boxes, trunks and discarded furniture. She's searching for something but doesn't know what that is. Harold urges her to come back downstairs. The dialogue suggests that they feel the suppressed terror of advanced age even though these two actors are plainly in their flourishing middle age.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: The Attic Space by Nigel O'Hearn, Palindrome Theatre at the Salvage Vanguard, December 14 - 22

Palindrome’s Final Production: 7 performances only of

the Premiere of  

The Attic Space

Starring Babs George and Ev Lunning Jr. 

December 14 - December 22 at 8 p.m., Sunday at 6 p.m.,
Donate-what-you-can show Wed 19th
Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Rd. 78722 (click for map)

Ticket Price: $10 subsidized ticket price*
Length: 80 min.

Reservation Website: www.palindrometheatre.com ; Reservation Line: 512-736-5191

Three years ago, when opening their inaugural season with Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Palindrome Theatre promised it would expire in December 2012. Seven productions, one international festival, and a heap of critical praise (mostly) later, Palindrome is set to do just that after their premiere production of The Attic Space, by Resident Playwright, Artistic Director, and native Austinite Nigel O’Hearn.

Known for their intimate, often provocative, traditionally-influenced aesthetic, Palindrome is building on the classical foundation and intricate theatricality of their past work to present a new play that is at once in keeping with the literary influence of Beckett and Miller while striving for bold, experimental presentation (including meta-puppetry realized by Caroline Reck, Artistic Director of Glass Half Full Theatre, and designed by Tara Cooper).

Directed by O’Hearn, starring Babs George and Ev Lunning Jr. (both courtesy of Actors Equity), and featuring early Palindrome collaborator Helyn Rain Messenger, The Attic Space is an exploration of the capriciousness of memory, the complexity of companionship and the fear of uncertainty that accompanies the recurring life-long search for definite self-evidence; set in the place in our home which we visit the least, yet store all the things we can’t bear to go on without.

*In effort to help educate the Austin public on the cost and cultural impact of professional theatre, and though it costs much more than $10 a ticket to produce a professional play, Palindrome operates under the principle that while the theatre is not free, it should be experienced as a freedom- we do everything in our power to bring our productions to the Austin public at no cost or small cost without devaluing the theatrical event.

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Upcoming: Man and Superman by G.B. Shaw, Austin Shakespeare at the Rollins Theatre, February 17 - March 6

Found on-line:

presents

George Bernard Shaw's

Man and Superman

February 17 - March 6, Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 p.m. & Sundays at 3 p.m.
The Rollins Theatre at The Long Center, Riverside Drive at South First Street

(click for map)

Tickets are on sale now at http://thelongcenter.frontgatesolutions.com or call 512-474-5664.

Austin Shakespeare presents a delightful comedy of topsy-turvy romantic pursuit, George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, a timely look at the perennial clash between the past and the future, the reactionary and the progressive, and questions of what the proper roles of men and women really are.

Man and Superman stars Kimbery Adams, Jill Blackwood*, Janelle Buchanan*, Michael Dalmon, Shelby Davenport*, Jenny Gravenstein, Philip Kreyche, Ev Lunning Jr.*, Barry Pineo, and Mark Stewart (* Member of Actor's Equity Association).

As a special addition, there will be a staged reading of Shaw's Don Juan in Hell with Babs George* and Harvey Guion at the Rollins at 7:30PM, Sunday February 27.

Upcoming: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Mary Moody Northern Theatre, St. Edward's University, November 11 - 21

Received directly:

Edward Albee's

WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF

slams onto the Mary Moody Northen Theatre stage

Directed by Christina J. Moore

November 11 - 21

Thursdays–Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m.

Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward’s University, 3001 South Congress Avenue

Campus map: http://www.stedwards.edu/map/

TICKETS: Reserved seating, available through the MMNT box office at 448-8484.

Advance $15 ($12 students, seniors, St. Edward’s community); All tickets $18 at the door.

Box office is open 1-5 p.m. Monday–Friday and 1 hour prior to curtain.

SPECIAL STUDENT NIGHT: Thursday, November 18 at 7:30 p.m. -- All student tickets half price with ID

Mary Moody Northen Theatre, the award-winning producing arm of the St. Edward’s University Theatre Program, presents Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the lauded American drama by Edward Albee, running November 11 - 21, 2010.

Albee’s powerful 1962 tale of love, politics and marriage slams onto the stage in a dynamic acting tour-de-force. Middle-aged academic George and his wife Martha invite a new professor and his wife over for a nightcap. The night of intellectual fun and games descends into marital warfare as the older couple employs the younger as pawns in their tense psychological battle. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? remains as pertinent, thrilling and, ultimately, devastating today as when it catapulted Albee to fame. Featuring Equity guests Babs George and Ev Lunning, Jr.

Recommended for mature audiences.

“[A] timeless play…unforgettable power.” (Ben Brantley, NY Times)

About St. Edward's University Founded by the Congregation of Holy Cross, St. Edward's University is named among the top five "Up-and-Coming Universities" in the Western Region by its academic peers in a 2011 U.S. News & World Report survey. For eight consecutive years St. Edward's has been recognized as one of "America's Best Colleges" by U.S. News & World Report and this year by Forbes and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. St. Edward's is a private, Catholic, liberal arts university of more than 5,200 students located in Austin, Texas. For more information on St. Edward’s University, visit www.stedwards.edu.

Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen, Mary Moody Northern Theatre, St. Edward's University, February 12 - 21

You might get lost in the tidy space of St. Ed's Mary Moody Northern Theatre if you haven't done your homework before you get to the theatre. Peer Gynt is not your dependable old social realism from Ibsen. This story is a wild ride of fable, myth and allegory that takes you across the world and through an entire prankish life, written by a young dramatist who had escaped bleak Norway for the dazzling sunscapes of Italy.

The attractive printed program given to you has a full page on the august poet and translator Robert Bly, but no synopsis of the action, other than a list of the locales of the 34 scenes, ranging from "the farm" to Morocco to Cairo and back to the mountains of Norway. For more than that, see the ALT profile of the drama, "The Wild Striving of Peer Gynt," published here on February 8.

Peer Gynt, both the play and the character played by Jacob Trussell, moves at speed, between a canter and a gallop throughout.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Profile: The Wild Striving of Peer Gynt, Mary Moody Northern Theatre, St. Edward's University, February 11 - 21

Peer Gynt is one of those great, impossible works of literature. It's a masterwork of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, one that is totally different from the new 19th century realistic dramas of social concern for which he became famous. This is the playwright who later gave us A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts, An Enemy of the People and Hedda Gabler.

Well before that, after a penurious career as a creative director and producer at Norwegian state theatres in Bergen and in Cristiana (Oslo), in 1864 while in his mid-thirties this self-taught artist left Norway with his wife and child for self-exile in sunny Italy. He continued to write. A five-act verse play Brand succeeded in Stockholm in 1866. The following year Ibsen had his five-act verse play Peer Gynt published in Copenhagen.

Almost ten years passed before the piece appeared on stage, in the Norwegian capital. And no wonder -- Ibsen himself wrote without a thought for the constraints of conventional staging, which he knew well. Peer Gynt is an exalted narrative of Peer's whole life, leaping in space and time. He seduces and runs off with the intended bride of a rival, then abandons her. Act II places the cheeky young Peer in a troll world, contemplating marriage to the daughter of the troll who rules the mountain (the scene for which composer Edvard Grieg wrote the comic but menacing incidental music "In The Hall of the Mountain King"). The action moves from upcountry Norway to Morocco to the Saharan wastes to a lunatic asylum in Egypt to a storm-wracked sailing ship and, finally, back to rural Norway. Upon his return Peer encounters his former neighbors, the devil in the shape of a parson, and the grim reaper in the guise of a button maker.

Because of the unrestrained length of the piece, a conventional static reading from a lectern would take more than six hours. In rhymed couplets. In Norwegian.

The first American production of this epic was in 1907. I had the good fortune to see a 1998 production by the Washington DC Shakespeare Theatre. In the early 1980's the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis did a five-hour version; in 2008 they again produced Peer Gynt, using a new stage-version translation by Minnesota poet Robert Bly, starring Shakespeare veteran Mark Rylance. Bly had the Minnesota Norwegian whimsy to mimic Ibsen by crafting about half of his text in rhyming verse, especially for comic scenes such as the dialogue in which the King of the Trolls seeks to convince Peer to stay in his kingdom. Bly cut and tailored the action so that the play ran about three hours.

St. Ed's assistant professor of theatre Ev Lunning, Jr., is using Bly's translation and has cut it further. He cast St. Ed's senior Jacob Trussell as Peer. You've had plenty of opportunities over the last couple of years to see Trussell. He was nominated for the B. Iden Payne awards each of the last two years for musical theatre leads in Sweeney Todd and Bat-Boy, The Musical. Last season at St. Ed's Mary Moody Northern Theatre he was in Cloud 9, Cyrano de Bergerac and Pajama Game. He appeared in The Fantasticks for Austin Playhouse and Leave It To Beverley for the DA! Theatre Collective.

Continuing its long tradition of casting Equity actors alongside its students, St. Ed's has Sheila Gordon in the key role of Peer's mother and Ben Wolfe in a variety of roles, including that of the big puppet-headed Troll King.

Peer Gynt is a remarkable work. Ibsen's source was a collection of Norwegian folktales with the opening legends of Peer's conquering a magic flying stag and striving against an unseen monster known as the Bøyg. Add to those Paul Bunyan exaggerations the fact that Peer's a bouncing, bounding braggart and flirt, obliged to abandon his true love Solveig because of his entanglements with the trolls. The story has elements of a Bildungsroman (a tale of growing up), a resemblance to the picaresque novel (a rascal's adventures), and withering portrayals of 19th century mercantilism and capitalism. Peer wants to become the Emperor of the World.

All in all, and throughout, Peer is on a search to find his Self: "One must be oneself; for oneself and one’s own/one must do one’s best, both in great and in small things./If the luck goes against you, at least you’ve the honour/of a life carried through in accordance with principle."

Yet for all his inventiveness and egotism he has no concept of that Self. In the Egyptian lunatic asylum, confronted by a desperate madman who imagines himself to be a Pen, Peer calls himself "a blank sheet of paper." In the fifth and final act as Peer is facing imminent death he peels an onion, imagining it to represent himself -- peeling away his many roles and adventures, eventually to find nothing in the middle. Because Death threatens to melt down Peer's soul with other imperfectly realized lives, Peer seeks frantically for some witness, any witness, to assert that his life was not entirely futile.

This is a huge, demanding text. Last Monday, the final full run through at the Mary Moody Northern Theatre before tech sessions ran smoothly and swiftly, giving promise of a dramatic, gripping evening of theatre. Jacob Trussell was self assured, emphatic and energetic in all of Peer's many permutations.

This is Peer's life story, from adolescence to near the grave, and Trussell's appearance and makeup will reflect that. The 2008 Guthrie version, according to the 48-year-old Mark Rylance while playing Peer, was a survey of Gynt's life retro and avant from the perspective of middle age. The St Ed's production, inevitably, because of the university setting and the predominantly young cast, will imply a young man's look forward into that feckless adventurer's life.

Trussell with his rough good looks and devotion to the thespian calling is mounting that legendary stag, about to ride forward into his future. Director Ev Lunning, Jr., both an academic and a seasoned member of Actor's Equity, represents for me a Peer who's somewhere along about the end of Act III in his own five-act Gyntian adventure. That combination, along with Gordon, Wolfe, Lainey Murphy as Peer's beloved but abandoned Solveig, Nathan Brockett and other talented company members, promises a full and challenging evening of classic theatre.

EXTRAS

American Theatre magazine interview of Mark Rylance about the Guthrie's 2008 Peer Gynt, Feb. 2008 (.pdf)

Upcoming: Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen, Mary Moody Northern Theatre, St. Edward's University, February 11 - 21

Received directly:

In its 37th season,
the Mary Moody Northern Theatre
at St Edward's University presents

Peer Gynt

by Henrik Ibsen
directed by Ev Lunning, Jr.
February 11 - 21
Thursday–Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m.

Out of the gentle genius of Henrik Ibsen comes a stunning theatrical travelogue exploring one man’s journey of self-discovery from impetuous boyhood to penitent old age.

A fantastical voyage filled with puppetry, music and wonder in the tradition of the great Norwegian fairy tales, Peer Gynt races, stumbles, fights, meanders and crashes, alternately, around the world and back again in this new translation by Minnesota poet laureate Robert Bly. Featuring Equity guest artists Sheila M. Gordon and Ben Wolfe.

Mary Moody Northern Theatre
St. Edward’s University, 3001 South Congress Avenue, Austin
Click to view campus map

Tickets available through the MMNT box office at 448-8484.
Reserved Seating. Advance sales: general admission $15 ($12 students, seniors, St. Edward’s community) All tickets $18 at the door.
Box office is open 1-5 p.m. Monday–Friday and 1 hour prior to curtain.
SPECIAL STUDENT NIGHT: Friday, Feb. 12 at 7:30 p.m., all student tickets $6 with ID

[image adapted from the website of the Norwegian Embassy in Hanoi]

About St. Edward's University
Founded by the Congregation of Holy Cross, St. Edward's University is named among the top five "Up-and-Coming Universities" in the Western Region by its academic peers in a 2010 U.S. News & World Report survey. For seven consecutive years St. Edward's has been recognized as one of "America's Best Colleges" by U.S. News & World Report and this year by Forbes and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. St. Edward's is a private, Catholic, liberal arts university of nearly 5,300 students located in Austin, Texas. For more information on St. Edward’s University, visit www.stedwards.edu.

Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill, Ar Rude at the Off Center, May 27 - June 7

Eugene O'Neill did not want you to see this astonishing, bleak and deeply moving drama. When he died in a Boston hotel room in 1953, he had left it locked up in the vaults of his publisher Random House with instructions that it was not to be opened for 25 years after his death, and that it was never to be performed.

Instead, his third wife Carlotta Monterrey, who had fought with him and protected him and nursed him since 1928, inherited the rights. She deeded it to Yale University with the stipulation that proceeds be used to build a drama library and to award scholarships for drama.

Long Day's Journey Into Night was first produced at the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre in February, 1956. The venue was apt. O'Neill's realistic, sometimes naturalistic drama shared much with the theatrical traditions of Strindberg and Ibsen. In 1936 the Nobel Committee had awarded O'Neill the Nobel Prize for literature, the only Nobel given to an American dramatist. The Broadway premiere at the Helen Hayes Theatre in November, 1956, received Tony awards for Best Play and Best Actor in a Play, as well as the New York Drama Critics' Circle awards for Best Play.

O'Neill wrote 19 one-act plays between 1914 and 1919, drawing extensively on his experiences as a seafarer, and over his career, a total of 32 full-length plays. His work was instrumental in converting the carefree, largely brainless American stage into a medium for serious literature. These were powerful stories, usually on dark subjects. Many drew on Greek mythology. Only one, Ah, Wilderness!, was a comedy, a fantasy version of the years of his youth in New London, Connecticut, as the bookish son of a successful actor.

Long Day's Journey into Night takes exactly that setting. The characters are his parents, his brother, himself and an indolent maid. Their last name is changed to Tyrone, but not to protect any innocents. The action of this one long day in the summer of 1911 includes the moment of confirmation that the younger brother Edmund, the surrogate for O'Neill, has tuberculosis ("consumption") and shows us his mother Mary, lonely and desperate as she gives in to her addiction to morphine.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com. . . .

Upcoming: Long Day's Journey Into Night, Ar Rud at the Off Center, May 28 - June 7

UPDATE: Click for ALT review of May 31




Received by e-mail:




Eugene O'Neil's
Long Day's Journey Into Night
Directed by Dr. Lucien Douglas
May 28 - June 7

Tickets: FREE.....(donations Greatly Appreciated)

“A play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood,” Long Day’s Journey into Night is the masterpiece of Nobel laureate Eugene O’Neill, the playwright who revolutionized American theater in the first half of the 20th century.

Love and jealousy, recrimination and forgiveness, the agony of the artist in capitalist America—illuminated in the Tyrone family as they come to terms with a son’s debilitating illness and a mother’s tragic addiction.

The Ar Rud production of Long Day’s Journey into Night is a labor of love offered to the Austin community in honor of Eugene O’Neill and in celebration of theater’s healing power.

Thursday - Saturday 7:30 PM
Sundays at 3 PM
Opening: Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 7:30pm
Final performance: Sunday, June 7, 2009 at 3:00pm
The Off Center, 2211 Hildalgo St., Austin, TX

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com. . . .

The Three Sisters, Chekhov, Mary Moody Northern Theatre, November 13 - 23

St Edward’s Mary Moody Northern Theatre with its current production of The Three Sisters of Chekhov has again realized a fine synergy by adding two professional actors to an admirable cast of undergraduates.

The quality and success of university productions in the Austin area is almost depressing – so much talent and energy! This is a great boon for those of us who take the time to explore it, but it seems strange to have all that star power flaring hot out there and yet largely unrecognized.

The three Prozorov sisters and their brother Andrei reside in a distant Russian province but cherish memories of life in Moscow with their late father, a brigadier general. Their yearning for escape from the stifling provinces is much discussed, and a common interpretation of the play is that the entire movement is the effort to get to Moscow, a half-imagined magic circle of sophistication and light.

This lyric production is anchored by Marc Pouhé as a talkative middle-aged lieutenant colonel, saddled with an unbalanced termagant wife but wistfully in love with the only married sister, Masha, and by Ev Lunning, Jr., as the 60ish bibulous military doctor Chebutykin, regretful, ill-educated and gone to seed but deeply attached to the Prozorovs.

Cribbing from my own recent comments about the Nina Variations: “Chekhov’s plays always give us a large cast of characters. Family members, friends, local officials, servants and others spend much of their time in desultory talk with and about one another. The trivial mixes with the transcendent. There is a slow overall movement through his plays, but just as in real life, the present moment is the most important. And the present moment is often filled with longing, with banter, with philosophizing, with small absurdities.”

Or, better, quoting the author himself as cited by Robert Brustein, “Let the things that happen onstage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal at table, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up."

Act I of The Three Sisters gives us the celebration for the youngest sister, Irina, on her saint’s day, much of which takes place about a central table. Lt. Col. Vershinin (Pouhé) makes his first call; the vulgar local girl Natasha attends as well and captures the attention of the brother, Andrei. Act II, 18 months later, shows us Natasha, now married to Andrei, inexorably extending her influence over the household, as the same group of military officers young and old gathers to socialize and to court the sisters; Natasha puts an end to the evening by prohibiting the scheduled visit of Mardi Gras musicians.

Act III, two years further along, is set late during a summer night as all are dealing with the aftermath of a catastrophic fire in the village. And Act IV, that autumn, gives us the definitive reassignment of the artillery brigade, Irina’s decision to marry, and an offstage quarrel and duel.

Throughout the play the vulgar Natasha extends her influence and expropriates the sisters; the sisters seek work, affection and pleasure that is never completed; and Dr. Chebutykin hums, grumbles, resumes his drinking, and mutters again and again, “It’s all one. . . .” Moscow and the dream of escape fade into impossibility.

In the midst of disaster, in the closing lines Olga tries to reassure her sisters: ”Oh, dear sisters, our life is not over yet. We shall live! The music is so gay, so joyous, it seems as if just a little more and we shall know why we live, why we suffer. . . If only we knew, if only we knew!”

Sounds like a downer, doesn’t it? But no, it isn’t at all – Chekhov draws each of the characters vividly and director Sheila Gordon keeps her actors bouncing off one another, taking the greatest possible advantage of the remarkable, large “theatre in a square” that is the Mary Moody Northern Theatre. At one point the dinner party at stage center goes into silent, animated slow motion as the thoughtful and sincere first lieutenant Baron Tuzenbach (Nathan Osburn) relentlessly courts Irina, who keeps backing away from him.

The pace of the first two acts is intense and in fact almost too fast – for example, as Irina, Steffanie Ngo-Hatchie is charming and expressive but moves and speaks with the accelerated metabolism of a bird trying to escape from a cage. Act II and the first half of the production conclude with an unscripted, choreographed house invasion by the Mardi Gras musicians, who swirl around Irina and sweep her away.

It would not be fair to pick favorites, since this is such an ensemble piece and each character and actor achieves at least one intensely memorable scene. Guest artists Pouhé and Lunning are sympathetic and give fully realized portraits of decent men in impossible situations. Masha (Dorothy Ann Bond), the unhappily married sister who falls for Lt. Col. Vershinin, is sharp tongued, trapped and eloquent. Her brief, intense farewell to him shows both hearts breaking.

Olga (Julia Trinidad), who gives way to the inevitability of becoming a school teacher, has to listen to her brother’s rambling confession and complaints late at night after the fire in Act III. Her silent reaction to him, sitting stock still, speaks a world of emotion and meaning, far more than his blathering.

The eccentric, snarky Captain Solyony (Nathan Brockett) is in turns generous, offensive, pitiable, and threatening. . . . Et j’en passe, as the French say – there’s too much for me to recount. This Three Sisters is a memorable evening, one with characters and actors who will stay with you.

Hannah Kenah's strongly positive review in the Austin Chronicle, November 19

Leila Bela's review on Austinist.com