The title of Philip Kreyche's Love Me is deceptively simple. As playwright and principal actor he takes on German expressionism, focusing on the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka in the period 1918-1919, when the painter was known among his circle of bohemians in Dresden simply as "mad Kokoschka."
Renowned as an artist of dark and powerful brushwork and a writer of equally dark, sex-obsessed essays and narratives, in 1912 Kokoshka became involved with Alma Mahler, whose husband had just died. The painting at the left, Two Nudes (1913), is Oskar's vision of them together. The affair burned out by 1914, partly due to his possessiveness. Kokoschka enlisted in the cavalry, mostly to escape her, and in Galicia suffered a gunshot wound to the head and a bayonet wound to the side. He convalesced and returned to his art, employed as an art instructor. In 1919 he commissioned an anatomically correct life-sized female dummy, a purchase that caused a scandal when he published his correspondence with the manufacturer.
Ryan Manning provided a lot of the energy for the Austin Community College Experimental Student Performance Lab. This summer 2009 enterprise put on four pieces, all student-written and student-directed, all performed by ACC students. Manning wrote three of them and performed in three. Whatever ESPL show was up there, Manning was part of it, somehow.
Bravo for that energy and engagement.
Austin Live Theatre published a review of Manning's "Beckett" piece An Empty Stageon July 25. The Manning canon is filled out with this double bill of his goofy-but-fun The Men from Mars and his "Pinter/Sam Shephard" work Careful as Mice.
Austin Community College students can whoop it up as well as anyone, and the intimate Gallery Theatre on the third floor of the Rio Grande campus was a fine place to do so. Think of every space opera you've ever seen, from Star Wars to Star Trek to Battlestar Galactica, put them in a blender and dress up your actors with intentionally campy outfits and attitudes. That was The Men from Mars. We whooped right along with them in the electronic music as those creepy Martians with stockings over their faces came attacking our noble troops, who were Good Guy Macho stereotypes from every war movie you've ever seen. Read more and view images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .
