AUSTIN IS A PLACE (YOU ARE HERE), Theatre en Block, April 18 - May 12, 2013

presents

AUSTIN IS A PLACE (YOU ARE HERE)

Directed by Derek Kolluri, Jenny Lavery, Tyler King and Jessica Hughes and featuring a seven person cast with original music by Blake Addyson,

April 18 - May 12, 2013, Thursday through Sunday, at 8 p.m.

at Mexitas and Lucky Lady Bingo located at 1107 N IH35, between 11th &12 Street (click for map)

Ticket information will be located on the company website soon.

Following February’s successful FronteraFest production of VIOLET CROWN: DOG’S TOWN (Best of Week and Best of Fest winner), Theatre en Bloc announces the location and show dates of their next show, AUSTIN IS A PLACE (YOU ARE HERE).

A bright pink building, hard to miss, yet often overlooked, sticking out along the highway, the Mexitas and Lucky Lady Bingo complex represents one of the landmark properties of the east side of Austin, as it remains remarkably untouched by the growth and development surrounding it. 

Co-Director Jenny Lavery notes, “The intersection of community, commerce and history is what makes this the best location for the show. Considering the development along the I-35 corridor east of downtown, it’s likely the building will be re-appropriated. It’s stark to look at all the places in Austin that are being bought up and closed down - repurposed or leveled and rebuilt. The space is likely to be another of those places. Maybe sooner than later. The phenomenon is part of Austin’s zeitgeist; we all know the landscape will change eventually. For some it’s a boon and for others, a burden.”

The piece, a sponsored project of the City of Austin Cultural Arts Division and Creative Alliance, has been developed over a six month long process. Cast members rehearse in a workshop style environment while keeping a finger on the pulse of the people, interviewing hundreds of Austin residents to gather their stories about the city. The collected material has been used as the inspiration to generate a new piece of devised theatre that uses movement, spoken text, music and striking visual elements to explore the struggles and triumphs of the people of Austin as this place shifts steadily from sleepy town to major city. 

AUSTIN IS A PLACE (YOU ARE HERE) marks the company’s fourth new work production since their beginning in November 2011. Theatre en Bloc's work includes AMERICAN BEAR, JUST OUTSIDE REDEMPTION and VIOLET CROWN: DOG'S TOWN.

To stay current with news about this show or any of Theatre en Bloc’s other shows, visit us at www.theatreenbloc.org, on Twitter @bloc_en_bloc or email us at theatre.enbloc@gmail.com.

Theatre en Bloc is a creative laboratory where brave experiments with theatrical traditions collide with new voices, styles, modes and aesthetics. The result is honest new work crafted for and designed to unite diverse communities. At our core, Theatre en Bloc is driven by the belief that great art fosters great communities.

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill, Southwestern University, September 28 - October 2

Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine is a gender bender and a time twister, a sly comic look at sex and sexual roles in the Victorian British Empire and in the contemporary United Kingdom. One of the many clever twists of the piece, the fruit of some intensive workshopping with actors, is that seventy-five years pass between the two acts but the characters age only thirty years. Churchill explained that that arose from the fact that her 1970's contemporaries felt that their own sexual roles were shaped by the standards of Victorian England.

Some of the results are predictable -- males with flaring nostrils and surging sexual drives in colonial Africa, a devotion to good Queen Victoria, women dutiful yet unfulfilled, and the modern confusions about marriage, sexuality and child-rearing. Others are anything but predictable: notably the cross-gender casting in both worlds, which directly raises the issues of roles, gender roles, play and role-play.

Add to that the audacious transformations of the seven-member cast. Robert Frost as manly Clive, master of the mansion, the family and the natives in deepest darkest Africa in Act I, becomes the impetuous and spoiled seven-year-old Cathyin Act II. Chris Weihert, who in conscientious drag plays Clive's pining wife Betty in the first part, becomes Vicki's miffed, well meaning husband in the second. Jessica Hughes slips a full generation with the ease of a firefighter dropping down the fire pole in response to a three-alarm fire: sniffy traditional mother Maud living with her daughter Betty and family in an increasingly menacing Africa, and then Betty herself, now in her sixties, divorced, alone and slowly awakening to her own long-neglected body.

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

Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet, Southwestern University, September 30 - October 4

Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet is a lighthearted little romp that sends up both Shakespeare and the academic ivory tower with a mischievous feminist sense of humor

Our heroine Constance Ledbelly is an undistinguished worker bee in the literature department of an unidentified university, where she has worked ably without recognition for her pompous supervisor Professor Claude Night. Her devotion to him is absolute but irrational, for he's a caricature of self-centered male vanity, interested principally in attractive female undergraduates and in getting his full professorship.

Connie has her own wild thesis about Shakespeare, one that will make or more likely break her already flattened career. She thinks that someone, somewhere, rewrote Romeo and Juliet and Othello to turn them into tragedies. All those deaths could have been avoided, if only there had been a truth-telling Fool to clear up the misunderstandings. She is toting around a copy of an undeciphered 300-year-old manuscript that she hopes will confirm her hypothesis.

That is, until the good Prof. Night dumps her and heads off to a well-paid post at Oxford with one of his bimbos. At that point either Connie has a serious psychotic episode or else she really does travel to the mystical worlds of Othello in Cyprus and then to the Capulets and Montagues in Verona. Plopped down into each intrigue at the crucial moment, Connie promptly clears up the misunderstandings, putting Iago into the doghouse and forestalling the duel in the piazza that triggers tragedy in Verona.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

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 . . . .