Upcoming: Reading of New Text for Hedda Gabler, Palindrome Theatre at Hyde Park Theatre, December 6

Received directly from

ONE NIGHT ONLY- PUBLIC READING of

HENRIK IBSEN’S HEDDA GABLER

New adaptation by Palindrome Theatre’s Resident Playwright Nigel O’Hearn

Monday Dec. 6, 8 p.m., Hyde Park Theatr, Guadalupe & 43rd St.

Free. Donations accepted

www.palindrometheatre.com

Please join us for a preview of the first play of our second season- Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler with a new adaptation by Palindrome's resident playwright, Nigel O'Hearn- world premiere opening February 2011 at The Blue Theater.

The reading will be of the first two acts of the new material which has never before been seen in public.

Reading features Robin Grace Thompson, Chase Crossno, Bernadette Nason, Nathan Osburn, Gabe Luna, Kim Adams, and Harvey Guion (with playwright reading stage directions and scowling).

Drinks to be served, discussion to be had. Approx 2 hrs.

[image adapted from image at www.wfu.edu]

Baal by Bertolt Brecht, Paper Chairs at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, November 11 - 28

Baal was Brecht's first play, written in 1918 at the age of twenty. He had avoided the draft by taking a medical course and he was called up to staff a venereal disease clinic only a month before the war ended, and much of that time he was studying theatre.

Brecht did not articulate his doctrine of theatrical alienation until 1935, but this text and the production of it by Dustin Wills and the Paper Chairs company suggest strongly that he was on his way in that direction from the very first of his career. Playwright and company achieve the Verfremdungseffekt by using plot devices and staging techniques that remind spectators that they are witnessing a theatrical enactment, not real life -- the intent is didactic, pressing viewers to question and to rouse themselves from the comfort of their passivity. It is a tidy justification for a presentational (not representational) stage technique. Many readers and theatre practitioners consider that Brecht's stories and characters gripped his audiences despite of the V-effekt instead of because of it.

I wanted to like this production because I appreciate Wills' exploration of early 20th century theatre and I enjoy the brash ensemble techniques he encourages. You enter the Salvage Vanguard to find a square central stage oriented in proscenium fashion, even though there's no proscenium. Instead, on either side, you see "backstage" dressing and costuming areas, with cast members boisterously preparing for the show. They wear baggy underclothes of tan-colored muslin, they pay little attention to the gathering spectators, they josh, they fret, they give the impression of a circus troupe preparing for one more day on the boards. Some will wander by to greet spectators; others do vocal or physical exercises. The energy is attractive and invigorating.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Baal by Bertolt Brecht, Paper Chairs at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, November 11 - 28

Received directly:

Paper Chairs excitedly announces its sophomore production

Baal

by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Peter Tegel from the 1922 edition

directed by Dustin Wills.

Ba·al [bey-uhl, beyl]

1. any of numerous local deities among the ancient Semitic peoples, typifying the productive forces of nature and worshiped with much sensuality.

2. (sometimes lowercase) a false god.

The slightly intoxicated, morally bankrupt patrons of “The Night Cloud” are putting on a play about their idol, Baal. Baal is a mysterious figure said to have roamed the forests, inns and bars leaving nothing but poetry, destruction and a hefty bar tab in his wake. The perfect – though some may disagree – idol for a band of hooligans in a seedy cabaret.

Bertolt Brecht’s first play, Baal, drags its audience deep into a body of youthful desires and complete moral abandon. Written in 1918, when Brecht was 20 years old – before the Epic Theatre and the overtly political work for which he is lauded – Baal unfolds in fragments; like a piecemeal of the nearly forgotten events of a drunken evening. It tells the story of our poet-musician and title character, Baal, fleeing the civilized world to live the extreme life somewhere in the forest finding plenty of people and pursuits to indulge his insatiable appetite for experience. The themes coursing through this text are especially pressing today: emerging adulthood, substance abuse, nature’s destruction, homosexuality, and exploration of the body. This performance of Baal also features original score and 8 songs written to Brecht’s verse performed live by the bar patrons and composed and directed by boozers Andy Tindall and Rob Greenfield. We also invite 12 audience members to buy priority seats at tables on stage – free refreshments included!

Featuring bar patrons Joey Hood (2010 Critic’s Table Best Actor), Robert Pierson, Jacob Trussell, Noel Gaulin, Michael Amendola (2010 Critic’s Table Best Supporting Actor), Rob Greenfield, Kelli Bland, Adriene Mishler, Elizabeth Doss, Kimberly Adams, Chase Crossno, Sonnet Blanton, and Gabriel Luna (2010 Critic’s Table Best Actor) in the title role, Baal. The Night Cloud Cabaret is designed by Lisa Laratta (2010 Critic’s Table Best Scenic Design), the costumes by bar regular Benjamin Taylor Ridgeway, and the lovely Natalie George hanging lights from the trees.

Baal runs Wednesdays – Sundays from November 11 to November 28 nightly at 8:00 p.m. (three weekends in total) at The Salvage Vanguard Theater (2803 Manor Rd.; Austin, Texas 78722). Tickets: Pay-What-You-Want Wednesdays and Thursdays; Fridays-Sundays - $15.00 general seating, $30.00 table seating. Advanced Purchase ticket pricing ($15 each) will be available through our website as of October 18, 2010 (www.paperchairs.com). There will be no performance Thanksgiving, November 25.

Paper Chairs creates sensorially dynamic theatre combining fractured subjectivity, music, unconventional audience situation, surrealism, provocative design and labor-intensive mechanics. We favor challenging texts that allow for a fusion of various performance styles, music genres, and historical periods to excite modern sensibilities and educate by suggesting past and present cultural connections. The work is outrageous, well-researched, and a little bit dangerous.

Machinal by Sophie Treadwell, Paper Chairs at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, May 28 - June 13

This production of Machinal by Sophie Treadwell, currently playing at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, is a memorable staging of a 1928 shocker -- which in 21st century terms means that it is endearingly two dimensional.

Back in the 1920's,most American theatre art was unexciting, conventional or cast in moral platitudes. At the same time, newspaper reporting of crimes were sensationalistic and very big business. In a time when both radio and cinema were still new,big city newspapers' accounts of accounts of murders and of murder trials sold a lot of papers.

Those days have been memorialized in cinema and in theatre since then. For example, Chicago journalist Maurine Dallas Watkins scored a big hit in the theatre with a thinly fictionalized account of the 1924 exploits of two murderesses, both of whom were acquitted. That 1926 play ran for 171 performances and was the basis for Kander and Ebb's 1975 musical Chicago, featuring the oh-so-innocent but oh-so-guilty Roxy Hart -- a musical revived successfully in New York in 1990 and made into an Academy- award-winning film in 2002.

Journalist SophieTreadwell scored a similar succès de scandale with Machinal, a poetic, expressionistic imagining based on the crime and execution at Sing Sing prison of Ruth Snyder. Treadwell had covered the 1927 murder trial. The state execution of Snyder in January, 1928 was a huge sensation, both because this was New York's first execution of a woman since 1899 and because the New York Daily News published the next day a photo of the execution, taken with a hidden camera strapped to the ankle of one of its journalists.

Machinal opened in New York in fall, 1928, featuring the relatively unknown actor Clark Gable in the pivotal role of a relaxed seducer whose casual attitude (Quien sabe? Who knows what might happen?) eventually opened the way for the Young Woman to undertake murderous action.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Endgame by Samuel Beckett, Palindrome Theatre at the Larry L. King Stage of Austin Playhouse, January 15 - 31

Palindrome Theatre takes you right out to the edge of the abyss with Samuel Beckett's Endgame: ninety minutes at the end of the world with four arresting characters who wrap up existence and the fitful light of human life.

Endgame is grim, yes, but it's blazingly comic at times, as well. In the shadows of this basement room the ancient Nell shares a memory with her foolish senescent husband Nagg. "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But . . . . Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more."

Those who believe in theatre, theatre as a gateway to meaning and theatre as a means of capturing the human dilemma, will need to see this piece. The subtlety and complexity of the text and the delivery will move them deeply.

Read more and see images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Images: Endgame by Samuel Beckett, Palindrome Theatre at the Austin Playhouse Larry L. King Stage, January 15 - 31

UPDATE: Click for ALT review, January 21

Received directly: production images by director Kate Eminger.

Palindrome Theatre's initial production is
Samuel Beckett's

Endgame

Directed by Kate Eminger
Featuring Gabriel Luna, Jarrett King, Maarouf Naboulsi, and Helyn Messenger

Palindrome Theatre will produce Endgame by Irish Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett for 13 performances only. Join in a celebration of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and his hilariously heartbreaking one-act regarding family, servitude, love, and inevitable decay.

January 15 - 31, Wednesdays–Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 5 p.m.
at the Larry L. King Theatre at Austin Playhouse, Penn Field, 3601 S. Congress (behind the watertower).
General admission, $20 -- students, $15. Call: 512-786-1939 for reservations.

See more images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Ongoing: Endgame by Samuel Beckett, Palindrome Theatre at Austin Playhouse's Larry L. King Theatre, January 15 - 31

UPDATE: Click for ALT review, January 21

Received directly:

Limited Engagement

Samuel Beckett's
ENDGAME

Palindrome Theatre’s Inaugural Production
Directed by Kate Eminger
Featuring Gabriel Luna, Jarrett King, Maarouf Naboulsi, and Helyn Messenger

Palindrome Theatre will produce Endgame by Irish Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett for 13 performances only. Join in a celebration of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and his hilariously heartbreaking one-act regarding family, servitude, love, and inevitable decay.

January 15 -3 1, Wednesdays–Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 5 p.m.
at the Larry L. King Theatre at Austin Playhouse, Penn Field, 3601 S. Congress.
General admission, $20 -- students, $15. Call: 512-786-1939 for reservations.

[ALT notes: The text of Endgame is available online at www. samuel-beckett.net; the image above, from the Irish Repertory Theatre, is taken from www.samuel-beckett.net.]

Orestes, Cambiare Productions at the Off Center, July 31 - August 15

Hidden Treasures from Afghanistan's National Museum are now on exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the last of several stops in a 15-month tour of the United States. I caught the exhibit in Washington DC last year, but you may have seen it this spring in Houston.

A haunting diorama of a barren Afghan plain shows how the unimaginable golden treasures were preserved in hidden subterranean vaults for thousands of years, even as the fabulous palaces of antiquity above them were torn down for re-use as construction material.

I had hoped that Will Hollis Snider's Orestes would offer us reworked antique treasures, but he provides instead an empty, echoing structure constructed from the pulled-down palaces of Greek myth.

The structure is not entirely barren. One clever touch is to convert the ravaging Erinyes or Furies from avenging spirits to fantasms of Orestes' mind, embodying the murdered -- his sister Iphigenia, sacrificed at Aulis by their father Agamemnon; Agamemnon himself, murdered by his wife, their mother Clytemnestra, upon his return from Troy; and Clytemnestra, whom Orestes has just killed, on instructions from the god Apollo.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Orestes, adapted & directed by Will Hollis Snider, Cambiare Productions at Dougherty Arts Center, July 30 - August 15

Click for ALT review, August 3



UPDATE: Insite magazine interview by Brian Paul Scipione of adapter/director Will Hollis Schneider, August 2009 edition

UPDATE: Robert Faires of the Austin Chronicle interviews adapter/director Will Hollis Schneider, July 30

UPDATE: Statesman's Jeanne Claire van Ryzin interviews adapter/director Will Hollis Schneider, July 30

UPDATE: KUT-FM's John Aielli interviews Orestes cast, July 14

Received directly:

Orestes

Austin’s Cambiare Productions is proud to present a darker, more intimate vision of Euripides' classic Orestes.

Adapted and directed by Austin Critics’ Table nominee Will Hollis Snider (Sonata Escondida, Intermission, Elektra, The Nina Variations), Orestes will be performed at the Off Center (2211-A Hidalgo, Austin) Thursday through Saturday, July 30th through August 15th at 8 PM.

Tickets are priced at $15, $12 for students, and will be available at the door. Thursdays will be pay-what-you-can nights. Reservations can be made at reservations@cambiareproductions.com or at (512) 524-3761.

Snider’s adaptation takes Euripides classic, strips away the presentational storytelling of three millennia ago and reinforces the story with other classic texts including Iphigenia at Aulis, Elektra, The Libation Bearers, Iphigenia Among the Taurians, Agamemnon, and The Eumenides.

The production places the title character squarely at the center of his own story. It is set days after Orestes’ murder of his own mother, Klytaimnestra, in retribution for the assassination of his father. The dark fevered hallways of Orestes' mind are explored as he seeks absolution and release from the curse of the House of Atreus.

Sprinting backwards through the events leading up to Klytaimnestra's bloody death, the production unravels before Orestes' eyes the deceit and duplicity of the last generation of the House of Atreus as the black and white of zealous revenge recedes to the greys of politics and treacherous love. Confronted with the truth, haunted by Furies and hunted by his own people, Orestes makes one last desperate stand against God and man.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Black Snow, Tutto Theatre at the Salvage Vanguard, June 26 - July 12

UPDATE: Review by Avimaan Syam in Austin Chronicle, July 9

UPDATE: Profile of Dustin Wills and Tutto Theatre's mid-July performances in Rome, by Nicola Ferlei Brown in "The Roman Forum," July 8

UPDATE: Review by Dan Solomon on austinist.com, July 8

UPDATE: Review by Javier Sanchez in the UT Daily Texan On-line, July 7

UPDATE: Review by Sean Fuentes at Austin Theatre Review, July 1

UPDATE: from interview of director Dustin Wills, published by UT June 13 at the alumni profiles section:

Q. What's next for you?

A. The show I'm working on right now is called Black Snow. It's adapted by Keith Reddin and it's based on a theatrical novel by Mikhail Bulgakov who was a writer at the Moscow Art Theatre during the Stanislavski era. I really liked it I think because this is going to be the first play I've ever directed that I didn't write or have a hand in writing or was able to work with a new writer to be able to rewrite. I cannot cut it, cannot change genders – so this feels more new to me than anything right now.

Black Snow, featuring: Gabriel Luna, Smaranda Ciceu (MFA in Acting candidate), Francisco Rodriguez (BA '05), Amy Downing, Maarouf Naboulsi, Ron Weisberg (BA '07), Verity Branco (MFA in Acting candidate), Diego Larrea–Puemape (BA '08), and Kyle Lagunas; with Scene Design by Lisa Laratta (MFA '08), Lighting Design by Megan M. Reilly (MFA '07), and Costume Design by Kim H. Ngo (BA '07), runs June 26 to July 12, at Salvage Vanguard Theater. Visit TUTTOtheatre.org for details.

Found on-line:

Black Snow
by Mikhail Bulgakov
Adapted by Keith Reddin
Directed by Dustin Wills

26 June – 12 July 2009
Thursday – Sundays 8:00 p.m.
[No Performance July 4th]
Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Road
At the Door: $15 (Starving Artist Rate: $12 Starving Theatre Company Rate: $20)
Thursdays are Pay-What-You-CAN Name Your Own Price w/ Donation of Non-Perishable Canned Food Item(s) to benefit Hope Food Pantry at Trinity United Methodist Church [Price without donation is $12]

Featuring Gabriel Luna,Smaranda Ciceu, Francisco Rodriguez, Amy Downing, Maarouf Naboulsi, Ron Weisburg, Verity Branco, Diego Larrea-Puemape, & Kyle Lagunas. Scene Design by Lisa Laratta, Lighting Design by Megan Reilly, and Costume Design by Kim H. Ngo.

Sergei Maxudov, a proofreader for the Shipping Gazette, has written an awful palimpsest of a novel, entitled Black Snow, and decides to hang himself on account, that is until a strange visitor pounds on his door and offers to publish it. This is Sergei’s introduction to the outrageous world of publishing and from there, to the downward spiral of adapting one’s work for the stage.

Nine actors portray 54 characters, the often absurd, sometimes vicious employees of the famed Moscow Art Theatre, each poised to cut, slice, rip, edit, mutilate, and otherwise butcher his script in this tour-de-force performed at breakneck speed. See for yourself how hard it really is to develop a new play as Mikhail Bulgakov’s Black Snow savages the theatrical world of post-revolutionary Russia.

Director Bio
Press Release
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