Three or the Sound of the Great Existential Nothingness by Timothy Braun, Breaking String Theatre at the Off Center, July 26 - August 17, 2013

(poster design by JennyMarie Jemison)

by Brian Paul Scipione

What Philosophers Call It

A pause button: many wish for it and none achieve it.

Many of life’s moments skyrocket past us with meteor-like frenzy. Some we miss altogether, because we were simply too wrapped up in, well, what we consider to be life. Vonnegut fantasizes about something similar in Slaughterhouse Five: the ability to stretch time out like taffy, look at each and every important moment from our past, and understand how they brought us to the present. Because, honestly, we know all along as it’s happening. One thing does lead to another,r and while nothing was actually our fault, if we could do it all over again differently-- we probably would.

Three or the Sound of Existential Nothingness is not science fiction or a playful modern fantasy. It’s a modern adaption of Chekov’s masterpiece Three Sisters. The play portrays the titular trio plus one lover and one brother. No special effects or time travel involved; yet while watching the play, the spectator is whisked back and forth, through a thousand moments: many seem insignificant but all matter.

Allow me to explain, if I can (avoiding spoilers and misdirection, of course).

Jeff Mills (photo: Will Hollis Snider)

Within the first three minutes of the evening the fourth wall is shattered. No objection to that; many people know that playwright Timothy Braun is adapting 113-year-old material for a modern audience: why not take a casual approach to the format? Alas, this is only the least of the changes to this inter-dimensional story. 

The crux of the drama lies not in what Andres the brother (Jeff Mills) says directly to the audience as the de facto narrator. Rather, it consists of every little thing the characters don’t say. Here, the five players of Three truly explode the parameters of Ia Enstera’s theatre-in-the-round set-up.

Wait, let’s pause and rewind. . . .

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com. . . . 

Three, or the Sound of the Great Existential Nothingness by Timothy Braun, Breaking String Theatre at the Off Center, July 26 - August 17, 2013

by Dr. David Glen Robinson


Brother Andre’s cell ringtone is Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire, and that’s everything, right up front, for Three, or, The Sound of the Great Existential Nothingness by Timothy Braun. Each and every character on stage goes down, down, down in a burning ring of fire, seemingly without redemption.

Breaking String Theater produces the play at the Off Center, possibly the east side’s most prestigious venue. In marketing material, the play is described as a modern reworking of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. After having seen the show, I’m glad I decided to drink the play neat. Put down your Chekhov and go to the show.

Andre and his three sisters have been settled in an unbelievably small and provincial town distinguished by its nothingness. The town is located by the characters by spinning a globe and jamming their fingers onto it at random. Nothing could say every-nowhere better than that. The siblings’ doctor father did this to his four children when the town pleaded for a general practitioner. The doctor took the job and then died, leaving the children to attain adulthood and stumble through the wreckage of their lives, featuring advanced alcoholism, profligacy and gambling addiction. The play makes no mention of their mother.

The action takes place on the 21st birthday of the youngest daughter, Irina, and although Brother Andre bribes several of the townspeople to come to the weekend-long bash, only two show up, but these two are straight out of the family’s past. They are The Captain, played by Chris Gibson, and Officer in Training, played by David Higgins. Under the solvent of alcohol, the layers of denial slowly wash away, and the characters and their histories lie exposed and raw. We all have a little somethin’ to hide; but these people have to deal with icebergs, strip mines, nuclear waste dumps, and Cambodian minefields of the inner landscape-- with fracking in progress.

Director Schmidt leads us deftly through the carnage with an excellent cast. Cami Alys is notable as Masha, threatening, black-garbed; a Miss Attitude who, when not running with her scissors, holsters them prominently in her boot. She also scissors pictures out of library books as her sole prerogative as the town’s English teacher. Later, Andre says she is getting worse. We believe it. Ms Alys performs with supreme physicality, matched in the cast only by the gracile Gricelda Silva as Irina.

Jeff Mills as Andre and Dawn Youngs as Olga play with greater restraint than the others, as their characters require. With Andre this is due to a profound emotional weakness that leads him to trifle with the town punch and gamble with everything from the dog to the deed to the ranch. He talks smartass, even as a frame bending narrator, but his heart is in nothing but ennui. Mills’s accomplishment in erforming with this low intensity for all but a few minutes of the play is a credit to his skills. Olga, as the oldest sister, is bound by conventionality and the imperative to do the right thing. Youngs plays her with glimpses of Olga’s bottled rage and shows her physicality in games of jump-rope late in the play. This sequence, along with the party scene, adds creative dimension and relieves the audience after an hour of sturm and drang.

Click to read more of David Glen Robinson's review at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Video Promo by Robert Moncrieff: Three, or the or the Sound of the Great Existential Nothingness by Timothy Braun, Breaking String Theatre at the Off Center, July 26 - August 17, 2013

Robert Moncrieff's second promo video for the

presentation of

Three, or the Sound of the Great Existential Nothingness

by Timothy Braun

directed by Graham Schmidt

July 26, 27 - August 1, 2, 3, 5 - August 8, 9, 10 - August 14, 15, 16, 17

at The Off-Center, 2211-A Hidalgo Street, near E. 7th Street and Robert Martinez (behind Joe's Bakery) - click for map

In Timothy Braun's fantastical re-interpretation, five characters from Chekhov's 1901 masterpiece live highly circumscribed lives in a small town somewhere in present-day America. Breaking String presented an early draft at Hyde Park Theatre in December of 2012, and recruited an elite creative team comprising veterans of Austin's new works community, for a development process. The result is a highly playful and theatrical piece in which Mr. Braun explores themes central to Chekhov's work: loneliness, the yearning for a better life, and the struggle to connect. 

Photos by Will Hollis Snider for Three, or the Sound of the Great Existential Nothingness by Timothy Braun, Breaking String Theatre at the Off Center, July 26 - August 17, 2013

A photo spread by Will Hollis Snider with costumes by Jamie Urban for the

presentation of

Three, or the Sound of the Great Existential Nothingness

by Timothy Braun

directed by Graham Schmidt

July 26, 27 - August 1, 2, 3, 5 - August 8, 9, 10 - August 14, 15, 16, 17 

at The Off-Center, 2211-A Hidalgo Street, near E. 7th Street and Robert Martinez (behind Joe's Bakery) - click for map

In Timothy Braun's fantastical re-interpretation, five characters from Chekhov's 1901 masterpiece live highly circumscribed lives in a small town somewhere in present-day America. Breaking String presented an early draft at Hyde Park Theatre in December of 2012, and recruited an elite creative team comprising veterans of Austin's new works community, for a development process. The result is a highly playful and theatrical piece in which Mr. Braun explores themes central to Chekhov's work: loneliness, the yearning for a better life, and the struggle to connect.

Cami Alys, Dawn Youngs, Gricelda Silva, Jeff Mills (image: Will Hollis Snider)

Gricelda Silva (image: Will Hollis Snider)

David Higgins, Chris Gibson (photo: Will Hollis Snider)

Click to view additional images at AustinLiveTheatre.com. . . .

THREE by Timothy Braun, Breaking String Theatre at the Off CTHREE, Timothy Braun, Breaking String Theatre, Graham Schmidt, Austin, Texas, Austin Live Theatreenter, July 26 - August 17, 2013

presents

Three, or the Sound of the Great Existential Nothingness
by Timothy Braun
directed by Graham Schmidt
July 26 - August 17, 2013 (dates and times TBA)
at The Off-Center, 2211-A Hidalgo Street, near E. 7th Street and Robert Martinez (behind Joe's Bakery) - click for map

As the final production in its 2012-2013 season, Breaking String Theater will stage Three, or the Sound of the Great Existential Nothingness by Timothy Braun, directed by Graham Schmidt.

Three posits a small family adrift in a far-flung provincial town, scouring highly circumscribed existences for meaning, and the modest joys that make day-to-day living bearable. Having borrowed themes and fragments from Chekhov's 1901 masterpiece, Three Sisters, Mr. Braun reshaped the play, achieving a magically realistic world in which the ensemble will explore Chekhov's themes and concerns, colliding them with the images and sounds of contemporary life as we live it, asking again where we are going as individuals and as a race, where to find "our Moscow," and why we feel ever more lonely even among those we know the best.

With Three, for the first time Breaking String will draw on its strengths as a company rooted in meticulously dramaturged Chekhovian productions, this time using that knowledge to fuel a new-play development process, loosely based on that employed for the highly successful Austin riff on Hamlet, - The Assumption.

We have partnered with Timothy Braun - an accomplished and innovative playwright who brings a commitment to contemporary forms and fresh perspectives to Breaking String, best demonstrated in his work as Editor of New and Social Media for Fusebox Festival - as well as a stellar ensemble comprising artists who will be instantly recognizable to frequent patrons of Austin's vibrant new-work and experimental performance community: Cami Alys (The Rude Mechs' I've Never Been So Happy, Intergalactic Nemesis), Jeff Mills (The Assumption), Dawn Youngs (Dionysium, The Schooling of Bento Bonchev by Maksym Kurochkin), Chris Gibson (Intergalactic Nemesis) and Gricelda Silva (Trouble Puppet Theatre Co.; Glass Half Full Theatre Co.; Flying by Olga Mukhina). The creative team is rounded out by all-star designers, including perennial standout scenic-lighting pair Ia Enstera and Steven Shirey, Glenda Barnes (costumes) and Buzz Moran (sound).

Mr. Braun wrote Three at a playwriting residency during the summer of 2012; in December, the play received a reading at Hyde Park Theatre, and after a brief development process, the play will receive its world premiere at The Off Center this summer.

For more information about Mr. Braun, please visit his website: timothybraun.com

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Opinion: Robert Matney on Hacking Theatre in a Networked World, Howlround.com

Hacking Theatre in a Networked World

by Robert Matney
April 15, 2013

Robert Matney

We come to the theater to satisfy a Luddite urge for something more visceral, more live and less mediated, more unpredictable than a two-dimensional screen provides. It is, then, no surprise that the theater selects for, and cultivates, in its practitioners a reticence to integrate new technology. Let's own up: collectively we are late adopters.

As theater artists, we have an obligation, I think, to remedy this, or we find ourselves sprinting (faster) toward our obsolescence and abdicating our duty to hold a “mirror to nature” in an increasingly technological culture. Let us hack theater for a networked world, using the Internet's numerical, geographical, and temporal scalability to interact with new audiences, insist on an ongoing and authentic relevance for our work, test new forms, and propagate new possibilities while preserving what is essential about our discipline. Let us trust that theater is resilient enough to make this leap as it has made many others, and that it will survive a modest but important re-programming. And of course, in the pursuit of this remedial integration, let us seek methods that integrate deeply into the art and the aesthetic, rather than yield to the easy seduction of bolt-on and gimmicky technical appendages.


Austin, a bubbling cauldron of new works for theater and a world-class center of hi-tech startups should be a focus of this work, and yet its marvelous potential as a capital of innovation for digital integration with performing art remains largely unrealized. There are virtually no dedicated performance spaces with a functional wired internet connection with proximity to the tech booth/performance space, and only one, to my knowledge, offering a connection greater than low-end residential speeds (>15 Mbps down & 1.5 Mbps up). 

So our work is cut out for us in making good on these extraordinary possibilities in Austin.
I've been collaborating with Beth Burns at Hidden Room Theatre, Graham Schmidt at Breaking String Theater, Ron Berry at Fusebox Festival, Paul Menzer and Matt Davies at Mary Baldwin College (Staunton, VA), and Philip Arnoult at the Center for International Theatre Development (CITD; Baltimore, MD) to work on disparate pieces of hi-tech integration into the work of theater on stage and off.

Our world is networked, and our theater need no longer be wholly defined by a proscenium arch, a black box, or any physical space (empty or otherwise).

For Mary Baldwin College, we are currently working with the Shakespeare and Performance faculty and graduate students to co-create actorscholar.com as an experimental platform for digital dramaturgy (or "digiturgy," a term recently introduced to me by Cassidy Browning during the Cohen New Works Festival). We seek here more than a simple web publishing site (with fair use and copyright sensitive access-control that attends to professional and academic contexts, of course), but also a means of integrating open APIs and freely available web-based data streams to open up new possibilities for dramaturgical content and analysis (such as the ability to easily plot a plays locations in an interactive map so artist and audience can pull the kind of data they desire about the play's location(s)).

With the CITD, Mr. Arnoult, Susan Stroupe, and I are preparing to digitize and live stream for real-time interaction many of the events of Beyond the Capitals II, an international exchange project funded by the Bilateral Presidential Commission: American Seasons in Russia, a program of the US Embassy in Moscow, and which will travel throughout Russia this May. Our goal is to ensure that all of the American participants in the Beyond The Capitals I project can take the journey with us, engage digitally, and interact with the artists we will be visiting in Russia.

At Fusebox, we are in the early stages of building an Art+Technology platform to feature and sustain exploratory work, education, and presentations that innovate in the area of art and technology integration. This year's festival features a number of exciting works, including Motion Bank and Ant Hampton's Cue China.


In the Hidden Room, we seek to solve a distinct art/technology challenge with each project. The first challenge we undertook was to patch together two disparate geographical locations into one contiguous aural and visual performance space. In You Wouldn't Know Her, She Lives In London (named so in Austin) / You Wouldn't Know Him, He Lives In Texas (named so in London), we teamed up with Mimi Poskitt and Look Left Look Right theater, and tethered a site-specific venue in Austin with the Roundhouse in London, with each venue containing a portion of the cast and a full in-location public audience. We picked up video in each location and cross-displayed it, "lining up" the people and equipment for mutual visibility for all participants. Additionally, we microphoned and cross-amplified the spaces such that if an Austinite opened a candy wrapper during the performance he could successfully annoy the audience in Austin and London. We then used a separate computer in London to encode the video conversation between the Austin and London locations, streaming the results to the web for a third, online audience. In all locations, a Twitter-hashtag- delimited text stream was presented, and all audiences were encouraged to interact with each other and the performers for shared textual visibility.

Hidden Room's next project was to tune our technical process to enable transcontinental rehearsal. With Rose Rage, we conducted our rehearsals with actors located in London, Cornwall, Virginia, and Austin. This process took us through 75% of the rehearsal period before all gathered in Austin to present a run of this six-hour production.
 
Click 'Read more' to continue or click HERE to go to the article at www.howlround.com

The Third New Russian Drama Festival and Two One-Acts by Yury Klavdiev, Breaking String Theatre Company, February 6 - 16

by Dr. David Glen Robinson


The third annual New Russian Drama Festival in Austin, organized and hosted by Breaking String Theatre Company and its artistic director, Graham Schmidt, offered a full weekend of theatre to Austin, with impressive guests, panel discussions, staged readings, a musical program and full stage presentations of two world-class one-act plays by the preeminent contemporary playwright Yury Klavdiev. My first and 
last impressions are that Austin is fortunate indeed simply to have access to such theatrical and artistic enrichment in the course a single weekend.

The core of the festival is the full staging of the Klavdiev works I Am the Machine Gunner and Martial Arts. They are well-matched and exemplary of new Russian drama. At one of the talkback sessions, an audience member asked translator John Freedman what characterized contemporary Russian drama. Freedman’s an intellectual, an observer, and a practitioner who could have offered a long-winded literary exposition, but his initial response was terse and to the point: “Violence.” Since the fall of the U.S.S.R. Russian playwrights have focused not on politics but on the dark side of capitalism and its new avenues for crime. Panel discussants detailed diametrically opposed political views of producing playwrights, usually by categorizing them as pro or con on President Putin’s policies.

I am the Machine Gunner led the evening’s program. Actor Joey Hood performed it as a solo, although the later panel discussion informed us that elsewhere it had been staged for two actors and even nine actors. In Austin it was Hood alone, shifting throughout the forty-minute performance between two characters: a contemporary street criminal and his grandfather, a combat veteran of World War II. I Am the Machine Gunner was more than just overwhelming.

Translator Freedman told us that among contemporary Russian playwrights, Klavdiev is foremost for taking an “in your face” approach. Blood, death and the f-word filled the air, nowhere more climactically than when Hood stood far downstage center and opened the mind of the machine gunner in a delirium of killing the leaves on the trees, shooting down the moon, filling the blue sky with black bullet holes and finally, finally ending the pain by destroying the earth.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

VIdeo by Robert Moncrief for Breaking String's 'I Am A Machine Gunner' and 'Martial Arts' by Yury Klavdiev, February 6 - 16

Video promo by Robert Moncrief posted by









for its production of

STRIKE: MARTIAL ARTS and I AM THE MACHINE GUNNER 

by Yury Klavdiev

directed by Graham Schmidt
 February 7 - 9 and 13 - 16, 2013

(note: includes a performance on Wednesday, February 13)

Click to purchase tickets via the Breaking String website

Salvage Vanguard Theatre, 2803 Manor Rd. - click for map

Live-Streaming of Strike, two one-acts by Yury Klavdiev, Breaking String Theatre Company on the #NewTV channel, February 9

From www.howlround.com, with a tip of the hat to Robert Matney:










Breaking String of Austin, Texas presents the New Russian Drama Festival, featuring:


Strike: Two plays by Yury Klavdiev
directed by Graham Schmidt 
as well as a post-show discussion: “Klavdiev Performances in Russia and the US”

livestreaming on the open-source #NEWPLAY TV channel
Saturday, February 9 at 6pm PST (San Francisco) / 8pm CST (Austin) / 9pm EST (New York)


Discussion Panel includes:

Pavel Shishin (Literary Director, 5th Theater, Omsk, Russia), John Freedman (playwright, translator, and theater critic for Moscow Times) Dave White (Artistic Director, Generous Company and Director of the WordBRIDGE Playwrights’ Laboratory) Maria Kroupnik (Independent Moscow-based producer) Graham Schmidt (Artistic Director, Breaking String Theater)

About Strike: Two Plays by Yury Klavdiev


Breaking String Theater extends its work in staging the best that contemporary Russian playwriting has to offer with Strike: Two Plays by Yury Klavdiev. Presented back-to-back, I am the Machine Gunner (trans. John Freedman) and Martial Arts (adapted by David White) launch audiences into Klavdiev’s world, inspired by his upbringing on the mean streets of a Russian industrial slum.

I am the Machine Gunner (translated by John Freedman) portrays a street tough meditating on his first gun battle, and recalling/becoming his grandfather, who fought in one of the bloodiest battles of World War II’s eastern front, The Moonzund Landing Operation. Starring Joey Hood, this one-act monologue walks the line between tenderness and brutality for which Klavdiev has achieved considerable renown throughout Russia.

Martial Arts (adapted by David White) The story of two young children on the mean streets of a post-Soviet industrial town, which is a shell and a wreck of its former self. But this is no normal story of fleeing circumstances; Klavdiev fits their struggle into Russia’s rich tradition of children’s fantasies, recasting dragons as drug-dealers and witches as crooked cops. Doing so, he makes accessible these almost-unbearable tales of children’s suffering. Another way to think of this story is that it’s as if Roald Dahl wrote Pulp Fiction.

Klavdiev’s plays have already premiered in the United States and enjoyed strong critical reception. As directed by Yury Urnov, Martial Arts stunned and delighted audiences at the Center for International Theatre Development’s New Russian Drama Conference in 2009, and I am the Machine Gunner, as directed by David White, had its premiere at the Baltimore Theatre Project, and toured to Chicago and San Diego, among other cities. A native of Togliatti, Russia, Klavdiev has elicited comparisons with Tarantino and Orestes, with plays that probe philosophical depths, with an almost cinematic feel.


#NEWPLAY TV is a peer-produced knowledge commons stewarded by HowlRound.com / Center for the Theater Commons. The channel is at newplaytv.info and is an international, shared-resource for live events and performances relevant to the new works’ theater field. Its mode of production is open-access and open source and its mission is to break geographic isolation, promote resource sharing, and to develop our knowledge commons collectively. Follow and use hashtag #newplay on Twitter to participate in a community of peers revolutionizing the flow of information and knowledge in our field. We’re fans of the Creative Commons License CC-BY. Co-produce with us by contacting @NewPlayTV on Twitter, emailing newplaytv (at) howlround.com or by calling Vijay Mathew at +(1) 917.686.3185.

Opportunity: Prop Crew Needed for Strike, Breaking String Theatre at Salvage Vanguard, February 4 - 16, 2013

Breaking String Theater is getting ready to put on STRIKE: Two Plays by Yury Klavdiev, at Salvage Vanguard Theater, and we're looking for two members to crew our show. If you or anyone you know would like to join us for this 7-performance run (for which we'd be able to offer $75 and two complimentary tickets), please contact me as soon as possible. Candidates would preferably have experience handling prop guns, and would be available at the following times:

• Mon 2/4, 6pm - 10pm
• Tues 2/5, 6pm - 10pm
• Wed 2/6, 6pm - 10pm
• Thurs 2/7, 7pm - 10pm
• Fri 2/8, 7pm - 10pm
• Sat 2/9, 7pm - 10pm
• Wed 2/13, 7pm - 10pm
• Thurs 2/14, 7pm - 10pm
• Fri 2/15, 7pm - 10pm
• Sat 2/16, 7pm - 10pm

If you can come close to making all these dates, then please do let me know. Thank you for spreading the word about this need, and if you're able to pitch in, thanks in advance for reaching out to me!

Best,

Graham Schmidt

twitter.com/graham_schmidt

facebook.com/breakingstring

c: 512-784-1465

New Russian Drama Festival, Breaking String Theatre at the Salvage Vanguard, February 9 and 10, 2013

presents














Our third annual New Russian Drama Festival, to take place at Salvage Vanguard Theater from February 8 - 10, promises an opportunity for particularly rich immersion in the best that Russian theater has to offer today. Celebrated Russian playwright Yury Klavdiev will join us for a 5-day Austin residency, where he will join visiting artists David White (A.D., Generous Company), John Freedman (Theater Correspondent, The Moscow Times), Pavel Shishin (A.D., 5th Theater, Omsk), and Maria Kroupnik (Independent Producer, Moscow) for a weekend of discussions around contemporary Russian theater, and Mr. Klavdiev's work. The main event for the festival will be Breaking String Artistic Director Graham Schmidt's staging of two Klavdiev plays, forming a single night of theater: Martial Arts (adapted by David White) and I am the Machine Gunner (translated by John Freedman).

Salvage Vanguard Theater
2803 Manor Road, Austin TX 78722

February 8 - 10, 2013

Festival Schedule

Staged readings and panel discussions are free and open to the public. Join us!

Thursday, February 7

• 8:00 PM: Strike: Two plays by Yury Klavdiev

Friday, February 8

• 8:00 PM: Strike: Two plays by Yury Klavdiev

• 10:00 PM: Talkback with adaptor David White, and translator John Freedman

Saturday, February 9

• 2:30pm - Staged Reading: Trash, by Mikhail Durnenkov, translated by John Freedman, directd by Beth Burns
• 4:30pm - Staged Reading: Political Play, by Lasha Bugadze, translated by John Freedman and Maya Mamaladze, directed by Bob Jones
• 6:30pm - On Contemporary Russian Theater: John Freedman, Masha Kroupnik, Pavel Shishin
• 8:00pm - Strike: Two plays by Yury Klavdiev

Sunday, February 10

• 6:00pm - Contemplating International Collaboration: Russia - US Models
• 8:00 PM: Golden Hornet Project: Prokofiev Miniatures

JOHN FREEDMAN has translated three dozen Russian plays which have been performed in the United States, Canada, England, Australia and South Africa, including five works by Maksym Kurochkin. His translation of Olga Mukhina's Flyingwas produced in 2011 at Breaking String Theater. He has published and/or edited nine books about Russian theater, and for two decades has been the theater critic of The Moscow Times. He was the Russia director of The New Russian Drama project at Towson University, 2007- 2010, and the director of the U.S.-government supported New American Plays for Russia program, 2010-2012. With the company and Jennifer Johnson he was co-author of the Double Edge Theatre performance The Firebird in 2010, and his play Dancing, Not Dead won the new play competition conducted by The Internationalists in 2011.

DAVID WHITE: Artistic Director of WordBRIDGE Playwrights Laboratory since 2007; faculty member in the Department of Theatre Arts, Towson University; and playwright-in-residence of Generous Company. Playwriting: Last Chance: Trash & Ninjas and Squirrels: Studio Theatre, Towson University (2012); Leaves of Hope: reading, Joplin, MO (2012); and Enough: reading, ArtFaq Café, Moscow, RU (2011). Translations (with Yury Urnov): Yury Klavdiev’s Martial Arts (US premiere - Towson University / CITD New Russian Drama Conference); and Pavel Pryzhko’s Panties (reading - WordBRIDGE 2011). Publication: Atom-Smashing Playwright A US Perspective on Yury Klavdiev, Contemporary Dramaturgy, Moscow, RU (2010). Directing: US premiere of Klavdiev's I am the Machine Gunner: Baltimore, Chicago, and San Diego (2010); and George Brant's Elephant's Graveyard: Towson University (2010). Current Project: The Beholder's Share, a devised piece of theatre examining connectiosn between art and neurobiology.

MARIA KROUPNIK A Moscow-based project manager, translator, and media specialist, cooperates with a number of Russian theatres, including Teatr.doc, J. Beuys Theatre, Theatre ‘Centre for Playwriting and Directing.’ Her translations/subtitle adaptations of Nina Belitskaya’s Pavik Is My God and Elena Gremina’s 1 Hour 18 Minutes were showcased at the Golden Mask Festival’s Russian Case in 2010 and 2011. In conjunction with Yale University, she translated Meg Miroshnik’s The Fairytale Life of the Russian Girls, which was featured as part of their “Workshop on Begovaya” project, performed in December 2011. Kroupnik has also worked in media and public affairs for the British Embassy in Moscow and the British Council in Moscow.

PAVEL SHISHIN Literary Director of the Fifth Theater. Omsk is considered by many to be a theatrical city surpassed in reputation only by Moscow, St. Petersburg and, perhaps, Yekaterinburg. The Fifth Theater, created 20 years ago, has contributed a great deal to that reputation. It is a house that champions new, cutting edge work, often supporting it with workshops and festivals. The Fifth Theater is the host of the biannual Young Theaters of Russia festival which brings many emerging artists to perform in Omsk. Pavel has been instrumental in running this festival, as well as several new drama workshops that have helped bring important new plays to the attention of Russian theater.

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Video by Robert Moncrief for Strike, a double bill by Yury Klavdiev, Breaking String Theatre Company at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, February 7 - 16, 2013

Robert Moncrief's video of Joey Hood, Molly Karrasch and Kaci Beeler of









talking about 

STRIKE:

MARTIAL ARTS and I AM THE MACHINE GUNNER

by Yury Klavdiev

presented February 7 - 16, 2013 at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, 2803 Manor Rd. (click for map) in conjunction with the third New Russian Drama Festival.

 

Click for additional information at AustinLiveTheatre.com

Upcoming: MARTIAL ARTS and I AM THE MACHINE GUNNER by Yury Klavdiev, Breaking String Theatre New Russian Drama Festival at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, February 8 - 10, 2013

presents

MARTIAL ARTS and I AM THE MACHINE GUNNER 

by Yury Klavdiev

February 8 - 10, 2013

Breaking String Theatre New Russian Drama Festival at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre

Our third annual New Russian Drama Festival, to take place at Salvage Vanguard Theater from February 8 - 10, promises an opportunity for particularly rich immersion in the best that Russian theater has to offer today. Celebrated Russian playwright Yury Klavdiev will join us for a 5-day Austin residency, where he will join visiting artists David White (A.D., Generous Company), John Freedman (Theater Correspondent, The Moscow Times), Pavel Shishin (A.D., 5th Theater, Omsk), and Maria Kroupnik (Independent Producer, Moscow) for a weekend of discussions around contemporary Russian theater, and Mr. Klavdiev's work.

The main event for the festival will be Breaking String Artistic Director Graham Schmidt's staging of two Klavdiev plays, forming a single night of theater: Martial Arts (adapted by David White) and I am the Machine Gunner (translated by John Freedman). 

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Profile: Breaking String's Vodka, Fucking and Television by Maxsym Kurochkin, November 29 - December 18

 

by Michael Meigs


It's a long way from Chekhov's elegiac The Seagull to Maksym Kurochkin's Vodka, Fucking and Television. If Graham Schmidt, artistic director of Breaking String Theatre, were teaching courses on modern Russian drama -- which he is not, having decided for the time being to do rather than to teach -- then Chekhov's first major play, staged in 1896, would probably be on the assigned reading list for the first or second week of the fall semester. Not until one of the concluding classes in the spring semester would VF+T appear, as a 2003 piece that helped shape the resurgence of the production of contemporary original drama in Russia.

If the grad students were lucky, they might get to meet Max Kurochkin, the playwright, either in person or via Skype, since over the past couple of years Schmidt has gotten himself involved in a big U.S.-Russia theatre cultural project financed by the U.S. State Department, one that reaches beyond the capitals and the big-money producers to a handful of theatre-rich regional hotspots including Austin.

There are a couple of other ways to draw lines  between the Chekhov and the Kurochkin works, and those also involve Austin.  Breaking String's The Seagull was staged in October 2007. Director Graham Schmidt had translated the play. After working with many of the same artists in two other Chekhov pieces, he turned the company's focus to what's happening now in Russia.

For me these pieces anchor a timeline, however provisionally.  That 2007 Seagull was one of the first theatre pieces that Karen and I attended after relocating to Austin five years ago. It provided our entry point to a creative culture that continues to astonish and to delight -- an experience that directly prompted the eventual establishment of AustinLiveTheatre.com. 

Austin actress Liz Fisher and her husband Robert Matney were both in that memorable Seagull and in subsequent Breaking String productions. Last year during the company's second annual New Russian Drama Festival, Fisher and friends got together to do a staged reading of VF+T, presented as lagniappe to the company's full staging of Kurochkin's The Education of Bento Bonchev. She later agreed to direct a fully staged production of Kurochkin's comic and decidedly odd little twenty-first-century morality play. It opens this week at the Hyde Park Theatre for a three-weekend run.


Click to read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . . 

Funding Appeal: Vodka, F***ing and Television by Maxsym Kurochkin, Breaking String Theatre

Breaking String's artistic director Graham Schmidt and director Liz Fisher appeal via Kickstarter for $4200, about a third of the budget for Vodka, F***ing and Television by Maxsym Korochkin, to be staged at the Hyde Park Theatre in Austin November 29 - December 15. Click the Kickstarter logo to go to the donations page for more information and to donate.

A writer struggles with his vices, in a twisted comedy by one of Russia's finest living playwrights, Maksym Kurochkin.

• Launched: Oct 24, 2012 Goal: $4200
• Funding ends: Nov 21, 2012

NEW RUSSIAN DRAMA!

Vodka, F***ing and Television by Maksym Kurochkin, directed by Liz Fisher, translated by John J. Hanlon is a hit play by one of Russia's greatest living playwrights, and it's being staged by Breaking String Theatre Co. in Austin, Texas. Facing a nervous breakdown, our hero - a struggling writer - resolves to quit the vices that are holding him back.

The twist?

In a move worthy of Tim Burton, Kurochkin propels actors and audience into a strange fantasy, and transforms the three vices - vodka, f***ing and television - into full-fledged characters. Each vice gets a chance to justify its presence in the hero's life, or get the boot. With a sexy script, mind-blowing design and performances from one hell of a creative team, this show promises to make a splash.


Click to read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Liz Fisher on Maxsym Kurochkin's Vodka, Fucking and Television, Breaking String Theatre blog

Liz Fisher's Vodka, Fucking and Television

by Graham Schmidt on the Breaking String blog, July 15

Liz Fisher (image: Will Hollis Snider)

 

I caught up with Liz Fisher a few days ago for a cup of coffee and some talk on her upcoming work with Breaking String - a full-on production of Vodka, Fucking and Television by 2012 New Russian Drama Festival spotlight artist Maksym Kurochkin, to be staged at Hyde Park Theatre this coming November. Fisher's pale blue eyes, smokey voice and arresting stage presence have knocked out thousands of Austin theater-goers over the past decade, and her work with Breaking String's been extensive, with award-winning performances in The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and as a co-producer of the inaugural 2011 New Russian Drama Festival.

Fisher - an old hand when it comes to new plays - projects palpable excitement at the idea of staging a Kurochkin piece. "Maksym writes these sprawling, epic stories, some of them even have a mythic feel, mixing reality with fantasy, spanning centuries. This one's a four-hander, it's compact, but even here he's skewering audience assumptions, pranking all over the place, pushing against his own limits.”

Fisher's upcoming production grew out of her work on the second annual NRDFest this past March (here's a rundown on Breaking String's efforts to link Austin with Moscow's contemporary theater scene). To complement the American premiere of The Schooling of Bento Bonchev, she worked up a staged reading of Kurochkin's 2003 comedy. Vodka introduces the "Hero" - a writer at the end of his rope who tries shedding the vices that hold him back. The plot hinges on a delightful, irreverant device: Kurochkin presents these vices as characters - Vodka, Fucking and Television - who are challenged to justify their presence in the hero's life, or get the boot.

From her first encounter with Max's work, Fisher sensed its "Austin" vibe. "It felt young, fresh, smart, darkly comic, and there's so much new work being staged here. And of course, with Vodka being a four-hander, it was perfect for a staged reading. Right after the festival, Robert Faires said it'd be easy to mistake Max for an Austin playwright, and I think he really nailed it."

Read more at the Breaking String blog. . . .