How The Other Half Lives by Alan Ayckbourn, City Theatre, March 25 - April 18

Alan Ayckbourn applies a clever staging twist of time and space in the first act of this contemporary English comedy of manners, and it is a delight to watch the City players accomplish it.

How The Other Half Loves, as the title implies, is a satire of class and sexual mores. I repeatedly mistyped that title in the ALT "images" feature for the production, because my fingers were finding their way back to How The Other Half Lives, the famous work of photojournalism by Jakob Riis, an 1890's exploration of the slums of New York City. That's an additional little ironic note on economic development in the UK, for these two couples are separated far more by class habits than by economic well being.

Frank Foster is the hapless, clueless university-graduate manager at an unidentified firm and Bob Phillips is his smugly lower-class subordinate. The generic living room represents the snug little homes of each man and his wife. Ayckborn's joke is that he runs separate actions simultaneously in the same space, with the couples unaware of one another's presence. This is better than cinematic cross-cutting of scenes, for we're suddenly endowed with a sort of hallucinogenic X-ray vision, comparing the couples, their relationships and their games with one another -- for we rapidly understand that Foster's wife the nervy, nervous Fiona was out the previous evening for a spontaneous roll in the hay with yobbo subordinate Bob Phillips. Phillips' wife Teresa is angry that he was out until 2 a.m. the previous evening and is avoiding her insistent questions about his whereabouts.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Images: How The Other Half Loves, City Theatre

Click for ALT review, April 8

Received directly:

images from City Theatre's production of

the Alan Ayckbourn comedy classic

How The Other Half Loves

March 25 – April 18
Thursdays – Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 5:30 p.m.
Reservations 512-524-2870 or by email to info AT citytheatreaustin.org
The City Theatre. 3823 Airport Blvd., east corner of Airport Blvd. and 38 ½ Street (behind the Shell station)

View more images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Muses III: Memories of a House, Vestige Group at private residence, August 20 - 30

Pocket theatre.

Home theatre; intimate theatre.

Theatre for no more of you than can fit comfortably into a 12x15 room with the actors.

Muses III by the Vestige Group puts you into a small group for this experience. They have concessions available on the lawn beforehand, under the tall and twisty live oaks. They suggest that you get to know the persons in your group.

You probably won't, because your guide is not going to push the touchy-feely approach among your dozen faces. You'll be up close and personal with the actors soon enough.

The evening reminded me very strongly of those odd national day receptions we attended in central Africa. For one thing, the proprietors have acquired an eclectic houseful of handicrafts, art, masks, textiles and textures from across the world. We strangers carefully tramped through the house, settled on sofas as directed, slipped along the corridors and lingered out by the pool. As in a diplomatic reception, our mission was to get to get acquainted -- in this case, not with one another but with this odd collection of characters dreamed up by the writers.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

A Matter of Taste, FronteraFest Blue Theatre, January 25, 29, 31, February 1

Playwright Bastion Carboni has some good ideas but he gets in their way. There are five ingenious skits in this Long Fringe entertainment but he has the mistaken impression that an audience will be as interested in the creative process as he is.

Carboni has actress Jenny Keto preface the evening with a confused, swaggering but finally non-helpful appearance as "the playwright." And at the end of a pretty enertaining evening he brings on the director(?) and others for an egg-timed 3-minute wrap-up with comments. Most insightful of them: "Andrew (Varenhost) acts too tall!"

Let's call those hiccups of the creative process. More of interest are the five "black-out" pieces:

• A morose young man, Warren (Varenhorst), would like to commit suicide but who is too inept or clumsy to do so. I shivered when I saw Andrew put that tool up under his chin and get ready to tap it home; but once interrupted by his girfriend Babs (Kira Matica) and then her buddy Bernice (Liz Watts), he eventually gives up and disappears. The heart of the skit is the two women bitching back and forth at one another about flipped-out Warren and why Babs puts up with him.

• The skit that must have provided the main title, in which a young woman (Kira Matica) finds her nutso friend Larry (Adam Glasseye) standing over a prostrate figure covered by a blanket. Larry is delighted by the prospect of having this dead body for dinner. Larry recruited his dinner with a personal ad, checked him for AIDS, and is ready to go. The bickering between him and Matica shifts gradually from the impossibilities of the concept to the practical details. Since the figure under the blanket was Varenhorst, we in the audience were left confused as to whether this was Scene Two or a completely unrelated sketch. The outrageousness of the concept made it very easy to laugh; once one accepts the idea of casual cannibalism, why shouldn't one quarrel over which baking pans to use and how to prepare the meat? Glasseye was manic and crystal clear; his partner's apparent agitation at his ideas at times overrode her diction, so we missed some of the jokes.
  

• An expressionistic piece introduced by another "playwright" intervention brought us Jen Brown vomiting paper flowers and writhing about the stage. Not so funny, but an acceptable exercise in Dada.

• A piece in which a couple of horny teenagers climb a mountain top for private business and find a prospective suicide (Glasseye) about to throw himself from the cliff. They question him and he patronizes them, showing a calm rationality completely out of keeping with his announced intention. Of the five sketches, the least convincing. If the man is sufficiently stressed to end it all, his behavior with the visitors just didn't ring true -- or funny.

• A sly little piece in which Varenhorst as Marc and Jen Brown as Sadie are revealed in bed with one another, as Marc's girlfriend returns to the apartment. They spin stories for her, asserting that they're brother and sister and that they love to have sex with one another. Girlfriend reacts with appropriate horror and eventually storms out, and then we (and they) are left to sort out the truth of the relationship. I initially had trouble deciphering the relationships myself and I wonder if the text made their allegations to the girlfriend sufficiently explicit. There's a nasty, delicious little moment at the end when Marc turns down an offer that few rational men would refuse (considering that it comes from Jen Brown).

There's a core here of irreverent, smart alecky writing that delivers a good time on stage. The sketch format doesn't allow much character exposition, so we're provided jagged humor tied to the incongruities of the imagined situations. I'd like to see the playwright go long next time, moving his characters through plot and through change, Why is Marc fixated on escaping commitment? Why is the young woman in his bed willing to play the scene for him? And what happens next?

Marisol, Vestige Group at the Off Center, September 18-28

Dark, dark, dark.

José Rivera’s 1993 piece Marisol, now in production by the Vestige Group at the Off Center, may draw on the Latin American tradition of “magical realism,” but his vision is that of a Puerto Rican author raised in the outer boroughs of New York City. Think of a melding of Hieronymus Bosch and Salvador Dali. The dark clouds of Apocalypse are fulgent with irony and savage black humor.

The final image of this piece is that of angry humans throwing rocks into the sky, taking sides with the angels against God.

We enter the dark space of the Off Center to find an angel in one elevated corner, grasping an AK-47 in vigil against the heavens. Very early in the action, this same angel appears to our heroine Marisol Pérez to submit a verbal resignation from responsibilities as her guardian. More important work is in preparation: the angels have decided to rebel against a senescent, uncaring deity.

With that premise set, the angel disappears for most of the rest of the play. Marisol’s familiar miserable commute and living situation in New York City begin to go awry. Marisol hears and reads reports that she (or someone with her name) was clubbed to death at the subway station on 180th street in Washington Heights, at the same late hour she was being hassled by a homeless man brandishing a golf club.

The moon has disappeared, but radio journalists reassure us that the government is preparing an expedition to haul it back into place. What is that huge unfamiliar windowless building across from her work in mid-town? Who is this incensed man who breaks into the academic publishing office and demands to be paid for his work in the filming of Robert Deniro’s Taxi Driver?

June, her sympathetic woman co-worker, persuades Marisol to come to her apartment for refuge, but on their arrival June advises her that June’s unbalanced brother, Lenny, has been sexually obsessing over Marisol for two years. His meeting with her generates confusion, panic and threats.

When Marisol returns solo to her apartment to seek her things, the world has tilted entirely, with no landmarks recognizable and the sun traversing the sky from north to south. Laws of time, physics and geography have come apart.

Staging Marisol is a brave act for this young theatre company, in part because Rivera’s text fits too well the bleak, self-conscious self-dramatizing genre stereotypically beloved of struggling obscure theatre troupes. One imagines the impoverished author saying to himself, So, New York and the corrupt world do not recognize my talent or burning thirst for justice? They’d prefer for me to die poor, miserable and unseen in the wilds of the outer boroughs? Then I’ll show them the end of their own smug, self-centered world!

The scenes dangle together like cartoons on a clothesline, each devoted to yet another crazy or nasty or nutso entering Marisol’s life. The grace that lifts this text is Rivera’s imagination and sense of black humor. If there is no God, or if God has simply dropped the reins, the impossible becomes probable. A visiting angel can plant a sleeper with visions or with sexual ecstacy. Landscapes can transform. The disappeared or murdered can resurrect as if nothing happened. Marisol and Lenny can find themselves bound in an unholy and impossible immaculate conception, delivery and strangled stillbirth.

Humans can stone God and follow angels in rebellion. Perhaps in revolution.

Emily Pate as Marisol is the lovely, earnest presence through whom we experience the confusion of this world overturned. Andrew Varenhorst as the wayward Lenny has a lanky, distracted menace and later intensity that seize us, especially in the mad scenes of delivery and mourning. Crisp, assertive characters are drawn by Julie Winston-Thomas as June and Bastion Carboni as three different but psychically related nutsos. Dawnica Mathis the surly angel chills us but takes a declamatory approach to her lines, perhaps a deliberate indication of the angel’s role as ideologue of apocalypse.

My favorite performance was that of Jenny Keto. She appears only briefly as a young woman in a fur coat, bearing marks of a beating by credit-card enforcers, the gestapo lurking in that windowless building downtown. Keto is hysteria contained, totally focused, with economy of motion and beautifully, sparsely articulated emotion.

A cavil – directors Susie Gidseg and Jen Brown forfeit some of the opportunities of a “black box” staging and badly break the rhythm of the first act with the pauses and awkward manipulations of scene changes. A lot of labor and time is consumed in semi-darkness by actors and stagehands as they carry on and off Marisol’s bed (twice), the setting for the office, and the furniture for June’s apartment. These scenes could have been furnished more simply or just played in fixed areas of the stage. The opening scene in a #2 or #5 line subway car approaching East 180th Street is a techie’s delight – four upright poles on a platform, a rear projection of a subway car, and a recorded rush of subway noise. But it distracts us and makes it difficult to make out the mad babble that might be the prelude to an approaching murder.

Music before the opening was appropriate, lonely and ethereal.

Some very effective images anchored the scene – the rear projection, at the opening and the ending, of powerful images of angels, and the glowering presence of the armed Dawnica Mathis, scrupulously ignoring the entering audience. I speculate that she might have been even more compelling if she had been allowed to eye us from time to time in those pre-opening minutes, the way that stony Secret Service bodyguards watch for threats.

This stark production repays your time and attention. Don’t go expecting any easy laughs, and prepare to watch the world coming apart at the seams.



Review posted on the Austinist by SaraMarie, September 22

Review by Barry Pineo in the Austin Chronicle, September 25

Review of the 1993 production by Frank Rich of the New York Times

Wikipedia on Jose Rivera, playwright

José Rivera at Internet Movie Database

José Rivera on writing and cultural diversity (1995)

An Actor's View of the Opening Night of Marisol (by Julie)

Vestige Group on MySpace

Footnotes:

1) Playwright José Rivera no longer lives in New York. He resides in Hollywood and he wrote the script for The Motorcycle Diaries, the 2004 film about a young Ché Guevara.

2) The Vestige Group gave me a complimentary ticket for the opening of this production and I accepted it, doubly burdening my conscience. Maybe taking a free ticket offers the appearance of providing special services in return for favors. (You can tell that I was a Federal employee for too long.) But more important, recognizing that theatre groups live on scraps and donations, I should have gone ahead and been generous for that Thursday "pay what you can" evening.

3) Continuing that thought, are YOU a member of the Austin Circle of Theatres? Have you made a donation through their website? I joined this week and did so, figuring that it was the closest thing to union dues for an unpaid on-line theatre journalist.
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