Somewhere in Utopia (A Travesty), Out of Context Productions for FronteraFest at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, January 25 - February 4

by Michael Meigs

Face it: there's no use getting annoyed with the theatre of the absurd, no matter how confusing it may seen. Or even with the neo-theatre of the absurd such as this piece by Jared J. Stein, produced a good 50 years after the audacious thumbing-its-nose-at-the-bourgeois art style hit the European stages.

In Somewhere in Utopia Stein portrays a dystopia: two principal characters are fixed unthinkingly before a television screen as the audience files into the black box of the Salvage Vanguard Theatre. One slim, nervous androgynous white-skinned creature is wearing a black Harlequin-style mask; the other, a stolid, angry African-American glaring at the television, is wearing a white mask. There's a lengthy, subtle silent play between them as we wait for the action to begin. With almost no movement other than Bobby's apprehensive trembling and occasional changing of the channel and the sustained glare of Marcus, they are establishing a full story even before the house lights go down. I was fixed in my seat by the vibrating tension between them, made even more painful by the callow undergraduate talk in the seats behind me, a couple of rambling conversations about weekend activity and plans to study abroad. Couldn't those spectators see that there was a full-blown silent catastrophe occurring right in front of us?

Director Becca Plunkett leaves no character unturned. There are four in the piece and actors' sexes are transformed. Bobby and Marcus are certainly women but seem to be representing men locked in some sort of mutually destructive relationship; the narrator when s/he appears is a self-confident prancing and sneering actress carefully painted to have five o'clock shadow. The fourth, emerging from a heavy, mattress-sized vinyl bodybag, is Cassady, a fast-talking pseudo-American-Indian girl portrayed by a man with the lean figure of a runner,wearing a skirt and an impossible headdress.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Somewhere in Utopia, Out of Context Productions for FronteraFest at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, January 25 - February 4

Received directly:

continues its inaugural season with

Somewhere in Utopia

written by Jared J. Stein
directed by Becca Plunkett

January 25 at 9:15 PM, January 28 at 7:15 PM, February 3 at 9:15 PM, and February 4 at 3:00

FronteraFest at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, 2803 Manor Rd.

Tickets are available at the door and online at www.ocplimited.com and www.hydeparktheatre.org. Please contact info@ocplimited.com for booking inquiries.

Out of Context Productions is thrilled to present the Austin Premiere of Somewhere in Utopia as the second production in their first full season of shows. Written by Jared J. Stein and directed by Becca Plunkett, the show will take place at the Salvage Vanguard Theater (2803 Manor Road 78722) as part of FronteraFest Long Fringe. The performance dates will be

In this peculiar piece, our heroes, Marcus and Bobby, have not left their home in years. Their only joys consist of watching TV and waiting for the mail, joys withheld by the omniscient, sadistic and sexually eccentric Narrator. Then there’s Cassady. She was in the body bag.

Somewhere in Utopia confronts many of the things that modern society has defined as “normal.” It attacks societal norms of race and gender while simultaneously questioning the human race’s undeniable propensity for violence. The play’s setting, characters and content are all utterly absurd, forcing the audience to consider that true absurdity lies within the norms themselves. Somewhere n Utopia is a play that seemingly deals with nothing, but as the play progresses, it becomes clear that there is very little difference between nothing and everything.

The initial development of Somewhere in Utopia occurred in 1994 while Stein was a BFA Director at Carnegie Mellon Drama in Pittsburgh. Its first full production was at the Francis Ford Coppola One-Act Marathon in 2000, while the author was an MFA student at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. Workshops followed in Los Angeles, New York and Bulgaria, and its last full production took place at the Blue Heron Arts Center in New York in 2004. It has now been revised in collaboration with Becca Plunkett for the Austin production.

Dramaturg Leon Katz said of the play: “...So remarkable and original a voice that I’d hate to see its fantastic quality inadvertently overlooked. [Jared J. Stein] has written what Beckett and Arrabal have made into a genre: a comedy of universal rage...and doing it with a sense of image and language that, to my mind, puts it awfully close to the company of the great ones noted above.”


Out of Context Productions is a young theatre company based in Austin, Texas that is committed to collaborating with both students and theatre professionals to produce works that are both thought provoking and exciting. This project marks a collaboration between a wide range of current and former Southwestern University students as well as theatre artists around Austin.
For more information contact us at info@ocplimited.com

Upcoming: A Lie of the Mind by Sam Shepard, Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward's University, November 10 - 20

Received directly:

presents

A Lie of the Mind

by Sam Shepard

directed by Jared J. Stein

November 10 – 20

Thursday – Saturday evenings at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m.

Added performance on Wednesday, November 16at 7:30 PM

Mary Moody Northen Theatre

St Edward’s University, 3001 South Congress Avenue (click for map)

$18 Advance ($15 Students, Seniors, SEU Community), $20 at the door

Available through the MMNT Box Office, (512) 448-8484

Box Office Hours are M -F 1- 5 p.m.

Special student discount night on Friday, November 11. Student tickets $7 with ID.

A Lie of the Mind is recommended from mature audiences. The play contains strong language and adult situations.

“[A] savage love ballad...of black anomie and blacker humor.” — New York Theatre

From Pulitzer Prize-winner Sam Shepard (Buried Child) comes a searing examination of family relationships and the illusory nature of redemptive love. Two families united by the marriage of their children are ripped apart when a man violently beats his wife and leaves her for dead. The long road to healing serves as a vehicle for a deep, haunting and darkly humorous exploration of love and loss in the American landscape. Winner of the 1986 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, A Lie of the Mind features Equity guests Sheila Gordon, Bernadette Nason and Rod Porter (The West Wing).

About Mary Moody Northen Theatre Through the Mary Moody Northen Theatre, students work alongside professional actors, directors and designers to explore all facets of theatrical production, create vibrant productions and earn points towards membership in Actor’s Equity Association, the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States. This program is one of only three in the country that offer Equity member candidacy within an undergraduate-only curriculum. 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 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. St. Edwards' has also been named one of "America's Best Colleges" by Forbes and the Center for College Affordability. St. Edward's is a private, Catholic, liberal arts university of more than 5,400 students located in Austin, Texas. For more information on St. Edward's University, visit www.stedwards.edu.

A Samuel Beckett Cabaret with Rick Roemer, Fourthworld Theatre Projects, FronteraFest , January 19 - 30

With no particular fanfare, Rick Roemer is offering you the chance to understand the stretch and diversity of the art of the professional actor. But just for a brief shining moment, so check your agenda.

Roemer appears in these stark pieces by Samuel Beckett this afternoon, Tuesday evening the 25th and Sunday afternoon the 30th. As the complement, you can appreciate his appearance as the haughty, comic Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest four evenings a week at the Austin Playhouse, until February 20.

His colleague at Southwestern University in Georgetown Jared J. Stein directs Roemer in these three short pieces by Beckett, collected under the ironic banner title of A Samuel Beckett Cabaret. For the FronteraFest 2011 Long Fringe the production is sponsored by "Fourthworld Theatre Projects" and an informal company assembled from theatre students at Southwestern, including Becca Plunkett, Edward Coles, Kinsey Keck, Matthew A. Harper and others.

Samuel Beckett's 1949 piece Waiting for Godot is the most familiar of his texts, with the 1956 Endgame probably in second place. Notable productions of those longer pieces appeared in the Austin area over the last year -- a cheerfully comic version of Godot at the Sam Bass Community Theatre in Round Rock , a Classic Theatre production of Godot that won three of San Antonio's ATAC Globe awards, and a memorable staging of Endgame by the Palindrome Theatre Company at the Larry L. King Theatre of Austin Playhouse.

Beckett wrote intermittently for the theatre for 25 years after Endgame. His pieces became briefer, more concentrated and more engimatic. Of the 29 shorter theatre pieces collected in the Grove Press edition , the last ones are the shortest and most dense. Catastrophe from 1982, dedicated to Czech writer and political resistance leader Vaclav Havel, is only four pages long. Ohio Impromptu, first produced at Ohio State University in 1981 is three and a half pages and features a character reading aloud to a silent listener. In this Beckett cabaret, those pieces bracket Krapp's Last Tape from 1958, in which Roemer, the solo performer, has lengthy silent intervals of pantomime, including an exquisite sequence with bananas -- worthy of the best of Buster Keaton -- and interacts with his own insufferable self of 30 years earlier via a tape recording.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: A Beckett Cabaret,Salvage Vanguard Theatre, January 19 - 30

Fourthworld Theatre Projects presents its first Austin-grown production

A SAMUEL BECKETT CABARE:

Catastrophe, Krapp's Last Tape, and Ohio Impromptu by Samuel Beckett

with Rick Roemer, Kinsey Keck, Matthew A. Harper, and Sam Allen on bass; directed by Jared J. Stein; designed by Desiderio Roybal; produced by Fourthworld Theatre Projects and Edward Coles; associate producer & assistant director, Becca Plunkett.

At the Salvage Vanguard Theatre (2803 Manor Road, 78722) as part of FronteraFest: Wednesday, January 19^th at 7:00 PM; Saturday, January 22^nd at 3:15 PM; Tuesday, January 25^th at 9:15 PM; Sunday, January 30^th at 1:00 PM.

Reservations can be made online at www.hydeparktheatre.org or by calling 512-479-PLAY. All tickets are $14.

The production stars Rick Roemer (Austin acting credits include Amadeus, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Exits and Entrances, and A Man of No Importance) and is directed by Jared J. Stein (local credits include Lysistrata, Buried Child, and The Man Who Came to Dinner at Southwestern University). The piece will be presented as part of FronteraFest's Long Fringe (produced by Hyde Park Theatre in association with Austin Script Works) at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, starting January 19, 2011.

A SAMUEL BECKETT CABARET celebrates absurdity and rejects regret. Or rejects absurdity. Or celebrates regret, or even regretting regret. But most certainly it lambasts the triviality of the differences. Krapp's Last Tape, perhaps one of Beckett’s most accessible plays, is sandwiched between two of his most perplexing shorts, Catastrophe and Ohio Impromptu. A regrettable experience for the entire family!

Fourthworld Theatre Projects has been partnering with organizations throughout the world since 2004 in order to create work for the stage that transcends cultural boundaries. Fourthworld's international collaborations have resulted in pieces performed and further developed throughout North America and Europe (e.g. in the United States: La Mama E.T.C., the Chocolate Factory Theater, Lark Play Development Center, Mixed Blood Theatre, McCarter Theatre Center, InterAct Theatre, The Playwrights Center, and numerous universities). Amongst its intensive workshop projects is the annual Rhodopi International Theatre Laboratory in Smolyan, Bulgaria, which, since 2005, has allowed theatre artists, scholars, and students from six continents to work together each summer in the mythological birthplace of Orpheus, Eurydice, and the cult of Dionysus (www.rhodopi.org). In 2010, the company decided to make Austin its new United States base.

Buried Child by Sam Shepard, Southwestern University, April 22 - 26

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 . . . .

Upcoming: Buried Child by Sam Shepard, Southwestern University, April 22 - 26

UPDATE: Click for ALT review




From the website of the Department of Theatre and Dance at Southwestern University, Georgetown:

Buried Child
by Sam Shepard
Directed by Jared J. Stein
April 22–26, 2009
Southwestern University

Winner of the 1979 Pulitzer Prize, this powerful and brilliant play probes deep into the disintegration of the American Dream. A bizarre and explosive family reunion takes place unexpectedly when a prodigal grandson returns to his estranged family’s Illinois farm. At first recognized by neither his grandparents nor his own father, he soon realizes this homecoming has unearthed an unwanted family inheritance, rather than the idealized mid-western roots he hoped to find. Sometimes humorous, often monstrous, the play’s roots in ritual and its approach to monumental, timeless themes of human suffering—incest, murder, deceit and rebirth—resemble the destruction wreaked by the heroes of Greek Tragedy.

Read More on AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .