Southwestern students had a joyful frolic with Rick Roemer's vigorous production of the smart-alecky musical Urinetown last week. This show won the 2002 Tony awards for best original score for a musical and for best book of a musical.
The show gives us a cheeky, animated cartoon story of a bleak, bleak future world when water has run out. The common folk are obliged to cross their legs and hold their own water until they can scrimp up the outrageous prices of admission to public toilets. Wicked, wicked Big Businessman Mr. Caldwell B. Cladwell in his pinstripe suit exercises the power of life and death as he reaps in the profits.
Authors Mark Hollman and Greg Kotis are cribbing bits from Bertolt Brecht, assigning cynical commentary about stage business and about the expectations of musical comedy to the imperturbably corrupt policeman Officer Lockstock (Matthew Harper, who has the smiling presence, sonority and shameless confidence of a real rascal). Lauren Knutti as his foil the indignant young idealist Little Sally represents all of the deluded who hope for a better day, and she is adorable at it.
Sam Shephard's Buried Child gives such a strange, phantasmagoric world that one's first impulse might be to play it for laughs. In Shephard's introduction to the printed edition he speaks of revising the text for the 1995 Steppenwolf theatre company in Chicago and of director Gary Sinese's "instinct to push the characters and situation in an almost burlesque territory, which suddenly seemed right."
At Southwestern University, director Jared J. Stein and his exemplary young ensemble of players create Shephard's horrible world without a trace of mockery. We are obliged to take seriously this collection of incomprehensibly distorted and injured individuals, and the result approaches the seriousness and purpose of classical tragedy.
This ample but claustrophobic farmhouse exists in an undefined locale, in a state of malaise. Ill, coughing, and stationary on the sofa is Dodge, a foul-tempered old man who swills whiskey on the sly; his wife Halie is at first unseen, heard from upstairs in a long, self-preoccupied nagging litany. Two grown sons eventually appear. Tilden, a raw stunned man in a glistening yellow rainslicker and mud-caked boots; and later, Bradley, a one-legged brute and coward who regularly sneaks into the house at night to give his sleeping father Dodge haircuts with the brutality of a sheep-shearer. Halie leaves in the first act to call on clergyman Father Dewis and in Act Three, the next day, returns with Dewis in tow, chatting with unseemly familiarity and bearing a bouquet of yellow roses. Click to read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .
