MUSEUM by Tina Howe, Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward's University, September 26 - October 6, 2013

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

presents

Museum

by Tina Howe

directed by David M. Long
September 26 – October 6, 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 -- click for map
Tickets: $22 Adults Advance ($17 Students, Seniors, SEU Community), $22 at the door
Available through the MMNT Box Office, 512.448.8484 and
Available online at http://www.stedwards.edu/theatre
Box Office Hours are M-F 1-5 p.m.
STUDENT DISCOUNT NIGHTS: Friday, September 27 and Thursday, October 3: Student tickets $8 with ID.
Reserved Seating -- Recommended for ages 12 and up.

Mary Moody Northen Theatre, the award-winning producing arm of the St. Edward’s University professional theatre training program, kicks off its 41^st anniversary season in fine comedic style with Museum, by Tina Howe, running September 26 – October 6, 2013.

Obie award winner Tina Howe sets her effervescent comedy on closing day at a contemporary art exhibition called “The Broken Silence.” And break silence she does, with glorious irreverence. All makes and models of people weave in and out of the exhibit hall, offering us a hilarious and heartfelt glimpse at the intersection of life and art. Inspired by actual comments overheard at the Whitney Museum biennial art exhibition, this play promises to engage everyone who has visited a mind-bending art exhibit, created contemporary artwork, or tried to find meaning in abstraction. Featuring Equity guests Babs George, Jarrett King and David Stahl.

“Eighty-five laugh out loud minutes.” – Curtain Up

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 5,000 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 10 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)

The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward's University, September 29 - October 9

by Michael Meigs

The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler by Jeff Whitty has an abundance of clever and not much of depth or heart. Director David M. Long does a bang-up job of making it a whizzing entertainment, having recruited three gifted Equity professionals to work with the six St. Ed's Equity-candidate actors relegated to secondary roles.

Playwright Whitty starts with an intriguing hypothetical: what happens to Ibsen's Hedda Gabler after she so famously commits suicide in the last scene of the 1890 play of the same name? We watch Hedda awake in an afterlife, confused, looking around to decipher the only partly familiar world around her. She rises from the 19th century sofa and discovers that her pillow is drenched with blood but she is apparently unharmed. Then her worst nightmare appears: her husband George Tesman, pained and concerned for her. Won't that man ever go away? Not even beyond the grave?

Whitty gives us a literary limbo, populated with an arbitrary assortment of fictional characters embraced by the popular imagination. Hedda learns that she has been committing suicide over and over again for more that a century. She and others in this limbo survive, deathless and ever the same -- until the moment in which they disappear from living memory.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Heddatron, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, February 11 - March 5

Central Texas is about to be knee-deep in Heddas. Dustin Wills and friends down at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre start that unplanned festival with this "back to the future" version. The promising, term-limited Palindrome Theatre opens a "world premiere" (!) adaptation by Nigel O'Hearn at the Blue Theate, beginning next week. And then in May Tony Ciaravino will do another, presumably more classic, with the Classic Theatre in San Antonio.

SVT's jangly, mystifying absurdist staging of Heddatron runs riot with Ibsen's play. To tell the truth, you don't need to be familiar with the original in order to appreciate this funhouse madness. Precocious young Ava Johns plays a smug-beyond-her-years sixth grader giving a book report on the play.

A sixth grader assigned to read Ibsen's subtle portrait of the destructive, self-destuctive young Norwegian bride? That should give you a hint and a warning.to fasten your seatbelts for a theatre ride that outdoes Honey, I Shrunk The Kids for weirdness, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly for menace, and The Iron Giant for cybernetics. The script riffs explicitly on the first two. And on Ibsen -- both on Hedda Gabler and the mutton-chopped, sometimes oblivious incarnation of the Norwegian writer himself.

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

Upcoming: Heddatron, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, February 10 - March 5

Found on-line:

Salvage Vanguard Theatre presents

Heddatron

by Elizabeth Meriwether
directed by Dustin Wills
Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 E Manor Rd
February 10 - March 5, Thursday- Saturday at 8 p.m., Sundays at 6 p.m.
(Thursdays Pay-What-You-Can at the door)
Tickets at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/145755

www.salvagevanguard.org

Like any well-made play, this one starts with a booming voice from the sky - though this booming voice arrives in the form of a hardcover copy of Hedda Gabler torpedoing into the lap of a terribly bored Michigan housewife. Suddenly, Jane Gordon finds herself captured by robots and whisked off to the Ecuadorian rainforest to perform the titular role in a robo-version of Henrik Ibsen’s famous drama. Jane’s ten-year-old daughter, Nugget, with the aid of her milquetoast father, an eager documentary filmmaker and her small arms dealing uncle must rescue her mother from the mechanical grip of her robot captors - whether she wants to be saved or not. Heddatron takes us on a hi(tech)storical journey through our trigger happy-TV-4G-machine-obsessed world to ask that great question, “What does it mean to be human?” Salvage Vanguard Theatre, with the help of the University of Texas’ tech-savvy IEEE Robotics & Automation Society, is ecstatic to offer a look at what happens when “real” robots and ever realer humans battle it out on the stage in the Austin premiere of Elizabeth Meriwether’s genre-defying head-trip Heddatron.

Feauturing: Amy Downing, Robert Pierson, Cyndi Williams, Jennymarie Jemison, Jude Hickey, Scott Daigle, Jarrett King, Matt Hislope, Kyle Lagunas, and Ava Johns
Design by: Lisa Laratta, Natalie George, Jessica Gilzow, Buzz Moran, and Lee Webster

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 . . . .

The Life of Galileo, Mary Moody Northern Theatre, St. Edward's University, November 12 -22

A lot is going on in Brecht's The Life of Galileo, and not just onstage. The program notes at the Mary Moody Northern Theatre will help you some, with a tidy summary of the historical figures, the heliocentric Ptolemaic model of the universe, and the heretical but accurate Copernican revision of it, and some of the elements of the plot.

With that crib sheet you can comfortably follow the depiction of that impatient and skeptical scientist's lifetime tussle with the Catholic Church. Director Michelle Polgar, three Actors' Equity members and the student cast and crew will give you the story, unrolling it much of the time in a design of curiously reduced lighting, as if the dark ages were lingering, literally, in the period 1610 - 1634.

You will not get much of a sense of the intensely brainy Bertolt Brecht or his reasons for fastening upon those 400-year-old events. Study of any of the several texts that Brecht crafted between 1938 and 1955 would show you that ideas and apprehension -- Angst -- are fundamental to the work.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Little Shop of Horrors, SummerStock Austin at Rollins Theatre, August 1 - 9

SummerStock Austin's joyous production of Little Shop of Horrors gets extra class credit in recognition for its part in re-Americanizing this reviewer.

After last May's production of the same script by the Georgetown Palace Theatre, I took the liberty to grump that theirs was a "Grade A production of a Grade D musical play."

I did explain that unlike the rest of the audience, I had never been exposed to Audreys 1 or 2, either on film or in the theatre. Little Shop didn't travel to places like the Dominican Republic, my last posting abroad, where the musical theatre tastes ran to Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita. So I was a blank slate at that time both for Alan Menken's music and Howard Ashman's book and lyrics.

Last Sunday evening we were sitting in the middle of the front row, exhibiting the naive courage of theatre fanatics, so we took the full blast of SummerStock's music, singing, dancing and highly stylized camp. And, you know, seeing a Grade A production of a Grade D musical play up close and personal is a helluva lot of fun.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .