THE CHERRY BOWL, adapted from Chekhov by Ben Schave, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, November 8 - 23, 2013

November 8–23, 2013

Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.
$15 General Admission, $8 Students and Seniors; Thursdays Pay-What-You-Wish

tickets available via Eventbrite

Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Road, Austin, TX 78722 (click for map)

A commedia-inspired adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard by Ben Schave, one of Austin’s preeminent physical comedians. Chekhov’s masterpiece, boiled down to a whole mess of clowning fun.

No dialogue; 100% Chekhov; A good time for all ages

Featuring Adrianne Shown, Meghan Morongova, Kerri Lendo, Jessica Arjet, Kelly Hasandras, Zac Carr, Austin Alexander, Nate Dunaway, John Cook, Michael Jastroch, Joey Hood, Dave Alley

Stage Manager: Keith Sechrest; Set: Leslie Turner; Sound: Michael Joplin; Costumes: Courtney Hopkin; Lights: Zac Crofford'; Technical direction: Clifton Highfield; Assistant TD: Ash Nunley

STOP HITTING YOURSELF, a work in progress by the Rude Mechs, September 19 - 28, 2013, 2013

i





is proud to present

STOP HITTING YOURSELF
A work-in-progress production of a new play created by Rude Mechs

Sept. 19 - 28, 2013 (Thurs - Sat) at 8 p.m.
at The Off-Center, 2211-A Hidalgo Street, near E. 7th Street and Robert Martinez (behind Joe's Bakery) - click for map
All tickets $10.00 - available at: http://rudemechs.com/

Rude Mechs invites you to join us for a bare-bones work-in-progress showing of STOP HITTING YOURSELF as we get ready for the world-premiere in Lincoln Center's LCT3 program in NYC January 2014.

We presented the first draft of this new play in April 2013 at our venue, The Off Center, as part of Fusebox Festival's Machine Shop Series. This time around, we are focusing on script, staging and music. So you won't see any scenic design, but a bare-bones lighting design and the same costumes we used in the last production.

ABOUT THE PLAY With Stop Hitting Yourself, Rude Mechs is embracing the fundamental beliefs underlying late-stage capitalism and indulging in our version of 1930's Hollywood glamour. Part Pygmalion, part Busby Berkley, part self-help lexicon -- all while dancing around a queso fountain. Rude Mechs borrows from the plots of 1930's musicals to dig into the contemporary conservative dilemma: how to honor steely individualism without disavowing the virtue of charity. Tap dancing, fine dining, and the missionary position will all be employed in order to help all Americans stop hitting yourself.

COLLABORATOR UPDATES We are thrilled to welcome new collaborators to the show's development process. Company member Joey Hood is stepping in to replace Matt Hislope as he is off living his dream in Kansas. And we are thrilled to work for the first time with Scenic Designer Mimi Lein and Costume Designer Emily Rebholz as they join Company members Brian Scott (lighting) and Graham Reynolds (original score) on the design team.

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Video Promo: The Lieutenant of Inishmore by Martin MacDonagh, Capital T Theatre at Hyde Park Theatre, May 30 - June 22, 2013

A two-minute promotional video posted June 8 by






[performing at the Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd St. at Guadalupe -- click for map ]

for its production of

The Lieutenant of Inishmore

by Martin McDonagh
directed by Mark Pickell


May 30 - June 22, 2013, Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 p.m.
Hyde Park Theatre 511 W 43rd St -- click for mapTickets $20 and $30 (VIP seating and drink)via BuyPlayTix


Heads roll, shatter and blow in THE LIEUTENANT OF INISHMORE, the savagely funny, pitch-dark comedy by Martin McDonagh, the same playwright who brought you THE PILLOWMAN.

On a lonely road on the island of Inishmore, someone killed an Irish Liberation Army enforcer’s cat. He’ll want to know who when he gets back from a stint of torture and chip-shop bombing in Northern Ireland. He loves his cat more than life itself, and someone is going to pay.

Review by Jeff Davis at www.austin.broadwayworld.com, June 2
Review by Cate Blouke for the Austin Statesman's www.Austin360.com 'Seeing Things' blog, June 4

The Third New Russian Drama Festival and Two One-Acts by Yury Klavdiev, Breaking String Theatre Company, February 6 - 16

by Dr. David Glen Robinson


The third annual New Russian Drama Festival in Austin, organized and hosted by Breaking String Theatre Company and its artistic director, Graham Schmidt, offered a full weekend of theatre to Austin, with impressive guests, panel discussions, staged readings, a musical program and full stage presentations of two world-class one-act plays by the preeminent contemporary playwright Yury Klavdiev. My first and 
last impressions are that Austin is fortunate indeed simply to have access to such theatrical and artistic enrichment in the course a single weekend.

The core of the festival is the full staging of the Klavdiev works I Am the Machine Gunner and Martial Arts. They are well-matched and exemplary of new Russian drama. At one of the talkback sessions, an audience member asked translator John Freedman what characterized contemporary Russian drama. Freedman’s an intellectual, an observer, and a practitioner who could have offered a long-winded literary exposition, but his initial response was terse and to the point: “Violence.” Since the fall of the U.S.S.R. Russian playwrights have focused not on politics but on the dark side of capitalism and its new avenues for crime. Panel discussants detailed diametrically opposed political views of producing playwrights, usually by categorizing them as pro or con on President Putin’s policies.

I am the Machine Gunner led the evening’s program. Actor Joey Hood performed it as a solo, although the later panel discussion informed us that elsewhere it had been staged for two actors and even nine actors. In Austin it was Hood alone, shifting throughout the forty-minute performance between two characters: a contemporary street criminal and his grandfather, a combat veteran of World War II. I Am the Machine Gunner was more than just overwhelming.

Translator Freedman told us that among contemporary Russian playwrights, Klavdiev is foremost for taking an “in your face” approach. Blood, death and the f-word filled the air, nowhere more climactically than when Hood stood far downstage center and opened the mind of the machine gunner in a delirium of killing the leaves on the trees, shooting down the moon, filling the blue sky with black bullet holes and finally, finally ending the pain by destroying the earth.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Video by Robert Moncrief for Strike, a double bill by Yury Klavdiev, Breaking String Theatre Company at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, February 7 - 16, 2013

Robert Moncrief's video of Joey Hood, Molly Karrasch and Kaci Beeler of









talking about 

STRIKE:

MARTIAL ARTS and I AM THE MACHINE GUNNER

by Yury Klavdiev

presented February 7 - 16, 2013 at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, 2803 Manor Rd. (click for map) in conjunction with the third New Russian Drama Festival.

 

Click for additional information at AustinLiveTheatre.com

Vodka, Fucking and Television by Maksym Kurochkin, Breaking String Theatre, November 29 - December 15

by Dr. David Glen Robinson

This play, written in 2003, may reach an apex in the new generation of Russian plays. Breaking String Theater Company is getting used to this Russian art explosion, having produced a number of Russian plays in translation, and producing this extremely well written comedy with an exceptional ensemble of some of Austin’s most talented actors. Liz Fisher directs Vodka, Fucking and Television for Breaking String.

The only speed bump in the raceway to success for this sparkling vehicle is the obscenity in the title, which seems to have inhibited some of the more conventional marketing modes. No problem. Judging from the enthusiastic audience on opening night, word of mouth alone will counteract the dearth of posters in grocery stores.

The story behind VF+T is that of Russian theatrical creativity since the fall of the Soviet Union. The conduit for funneling the best new plays into English translations and on into the English-speaking world has been John Freedman, theatre writer for the Moscow Times. Graham Schmidt, Breaking String’s producing artistic director, describes Freedman as the rare man in the right place at the right time: he was visiting Moscow on a Fulbright to write his doctoral dissertation on Russian playwright Erdman when the Iron Curtain fell. Freedman moved to Russia, and the rest is ongoing cultural arts history. Freedman has been instrumental in bringing Maksym Kurochkin to the attention of the West. For more on this story, read Michael Meigs’ profile of VF+T and Liz Fisher for AustinLiveTheatre.com.

VF+T takes its title from the three vices that beset a 33-year-old writer and Red Army veteran variously referred to as Hero, Poet or Writer. His name is just as symbolic as are those of the other characters. He is Everyman (artist variant), portrayed by Noel Gaulin. In one of the most effective play openings that I have seen in the curtainless postmodern era, the house opens with Gaulin already onstage in pajamas and robe in the midst of his small but serviceable Moscow flat. The interior design is definitely post-Soviet Union; the room has central heating. 

Gaulin spins and contorts in apparent writer’s block, his grimacing face lit mostly by the laptop screen mocking him with its emptiness. The vices have a peculiar presence in the apartment, too: the flat-screen TV blares, and, pity Russia, its daytime TV is worse than ours (unfortunately, a good third of the audience misses the flat screen amusements because a table and pile of blankets block them). The kitchen sink if full of dirty dishes and used drinking glasses and bottles of vodka and wine are everywhere. The bed clothing and scattered blankets and comforters convey the tumbled look of recent sex, hinting perhaps at more to come.

Hero struggles and eventually declines into a a giant hallucinatory spasm. The personified vices materialize and swirl around him. The vices loudly claim triumph over the writer, backing him into every corner in the flat. Clutching for control, Hero declares that he will reclaim mastery if he can banish at least one of the vices from his life.

The rest of the play is a kind of reverse Judgment of Paris. Hero insists that each vice must make its best case for staying in his life, and he says he will expel the vice with the least compelling argument. Of course, aided by addictive denial, all the vices make great cases for themselves. The ensuing speeches are a showcase of Kurochkin’s writing skill, and they all jab and torture Hero’s weakening psyche.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Profile: Breaking String's Vodka, Fucking and Television by Maxsym Kurochkin, November 29 - December 18

 

by Michael Meigs


It's a long way from Chekhov's elegiac The Seagull to Maksym Kurochkin's Vodka, Fucking and Television. If Graham Schmidt, artistic director of Breaking String Theatre, were teaching courses on modern Russian drama -- which he is not, having decided for the time being to do rather than to teach -- then Chekhov's first major play, staged in 1896, would probably be on the assigned reading list for the first or second week of the fall semester. Not until one of the concluding classes in the spring semester would VF+T appear, as a 2003 piece that helped shape the resurgence of the production of contemporary original drama in Russia.

If the grad students were lucky, they might get to meet Max Kurochkin, the playwright, either in person or via Skype, since over the past couple of years Schmidt has gotten himself involved in a big U.S.-Russia theatre cultural project financed by the U.S. State Department, one that reaches beyond the capitals and the big-money producers to a handful of theatre-rich regional hotspots including Austin.

There are a couple of other ways to draw lines  between the Chekhov and the Kurochkin works, and those also involve Austin.  Breaking String's The Seagull was staged in October 2007. Director Graham Schmidt had translated the play. After working with many of the same artists in two other Chekhov pieces, he turned the company's focus to what's happening now in Russia.

For me these pieces anchor a timeline, however provisionally.  That 2007 Seagull was one of the first theatre pieces that Karen and I attended after relocating to Austin five years ago. It provided our entry point to a creative culture that continues to astonish and to delight -- an experience that directly prompted the eventual establishment of AustinLiveTheatre.com. 

Austin actress Liz Fisher and her husband Robert Matney were both in that memorable Seagull and in subsequent Breaking String productions. Last year during the company's second annual New Russian Drama Festival, Fisher and friends got together to do a staged reading of VF+T, presented as lagniappe to the company's full staging of Kurochkin's The Education of Bento Bonchev. She later agreed to direct a fully staged production of Kurochkin's comic and decidedly odd little twenty-first-century morality play. It opens this week at the Hyde Park Theatre for a three-weekend run.


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

Upcoming: Vodka, Fucking and Television by Maksym Kurochkin, Breaking String Theatre at Hyde Park Theatre, November 29 - December 15

is proud to present

Vodka, Fucking and Television

by Maksym Kurochkin, translated by John J. Hanlon
directed by Liz Fisher

November 29 - December 15
Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 p.m.
Industry night Monday, December 3
Back-to-back performances (8pm, 10:00pm) on Friday December 14, Saturday December 15
Talk-back Saturday, Dec 8 (With special guest - Translator John J. Hanlon)
Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd St. at Guadalupe
General Admission: $15 - 25, Sliding scale
● Student rush tickets released 10 minutes before curtain for all performances: $10
● Available at breakingstring.com/tickets and 512-784-1465


Widely regarded as one of Russia’s greatest living playwrights, Maksym Kurochkin was introduced to Austin in 2011 at Breaking String Theater Co.’s inaugural New Russian Drama Festival; he would return as the spotlight artist for New Russian Drama Festival 2012, which saw the American premiere of his play The Schooling of Bento Bonchev. Kurochkin’s plays’ imagination, immediacy, irreverence and humor have made him a sensation in Russia and now in Texas, and Breaking String is excited to extend its relationship with Max’s work.

Vodka, Fucking and Television is a dark comedy about a struggling writer, and the vices holding him back. But Kurochkin gives this plot a surprising twist: The vices become personified, and each gets a chance to justify their presence in the hero's life, or get the boot. Inspired by artistic malaise, Vodka,Fucking and Television is like the Cohen Brothers' Barton Fink meets Sartre's No Exit.

Led by director(and frequent Breaking String collaborator) Liz Fisher and featuring performances by noted artists Adriene Mishler, Joey Hood, Jude Hickey and Noel Gaulin, and design by Ia Enstera (scenic), Steven Shirey (lights), Glenda Barnes (costumes) and Lowell Bartholomee (video), and set within the embracing closeness of Hyde Park Theatre’s black box theatre space, VF&T promises to make a splash in Austin this holiday season.


MAKSYM KUROCHKIN is recognized as one of the most imaginative playwrights in Moscow today, “the ideal playwright for the global age,” as Moscow Times critic John Freedman defined him. He was introduced to Austin audiences in 2011, when Breaking String premiered a staged reading of his play, Repress and Excite. In 2012, Breaking String spotlit his work during New Russian Drama Festival 2012, which featured the American premiere of Kurochkin’s The Schooling of Bento Bonchev. In response to Bento and the festival staged readings, Austin Chronicle Arts Editor Robert Faires wrote, “These plays' irreverence, imagination, and immediacy were so familiar and engaging that if I hadn't alreadyknown they were minted in Moscow, I might have taken them for plays created locally.”

Regarding his accomplishments in Russia, Kurochkin is the recipient of the Boldest Experiment of the Year award from the Moskovsky Komsomolets daily for Kitchen, the Moscow New Drama award for the futuristic comedy Titus the Irreproachable, and the Russian Anti-Booker award for experimenting with new avenues in drama. In Afisha magazine, Russian critic Yelena Kovalskaya named Kitchen one of the top 20 plays in Russia in the first decade of the century.

The Moscow Times named his Repress and Excite the best play of the 2006-7 Moscow season. Translations of that play and Vodka, Fucking, and Television, his trailblazing work from 2003, appeared in TheatreForum magazine. A translation of The Schooling of Bento Bonchev was workshopped at Towson University in 2010 and published in Performing Arts Journal. Titus the Irreproachable, translated by Noah Birksted-Breen, was a featured reading at the Russian Theatre Festival in London in February 2010. John J. Hanlonʼs translation of Mooncrazed was presented at the HotINK festival at NYU in January 2010.


This translation of Vodka, Fucking and Television was produced under the auspices of the CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL THEATER DEVELOPMENT’s New Voices / New Visions initiative. The Center for International Theatre Development, led by Philip Arnoult, has been a frequent collaborator with Breaking String in bringing the best that contemporary Russian theater has to offer, home to Austin, TX.

BREAKING STRING THEATER, founded and led by Producing Artistic Director Graham Schmidt, produces drama important to Russian culture and exposes Austin audiences to new developments in Russian theater. We do this by staging excellent productions of Russian traditional and avant-garde plays, providing artists with a creative, respectful and professional work environment, and pursuing collaboration with Russian theater artists, notably through our annual New Russian Drama Festival, where we spotlight high-profile Russian playwrights and bring them to Austin for brief residencies, as well as premieres of new plays.

BREAKING STRING THEATER is a sponsored project of the Austin Creative Alliance, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Breaking String Theater enjoys core funding support from the City of Austin’s Cultural Arts Committee, and for this production of Vodka, Fucking and Television, we received a Q Rental Subsidy Grant from the Austin Creative Fund.

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Upcoming: Exit, Pursued by Bear by Laren Gunderson, Capital T at Hyde Park Theatre, August 16 - September 8

 

presents

(image: www.capitalt.org)

Directed by Mark Pickell

Costume Design by Cheryl Painter
August 16 – September 8
Thursday-Saturday at 8pm

Hyde Park Theatre 511 W 43rd St at Guadalupe (click for map)

Nan decides its finally time to leave her abusive husband Kyle and make a run for it but not until she’s tied him up, covered him in honey and invited the neighborhood bear in for a snack. Lauren Gunderson’s gut-busting, outrageous revenge comedy about dreams, healing, and the simple joy of tying a dickhead to the living room chair.

“If the Coen Brothers decided to set a feminist revenge tale in Atlanta and sprinkle it with Dixie Chicks pixie dust, it might look something like Exit, Pursued by a Bear, a raucous comedy of friendship, domestic abuse and performance-as-catharsis.” - ArtsCritic Atlanta

“BEAR is RAW and HILIRIOUS” - American Theatre Magazine”

Cast:  Kyle – Joey Hood; Simon - Stephen Mercantel; Nan – Molly Karrasch; Sweetheart – TBA

Click to read about playwright Lauren Gunderson at AustinLiveTheatre.com. . . .

Dividing the Estate by Horton Foote, Zach Theatre, May 29 - July 2

by Dr. David Glen Robinson

The Zach Theatre is a great showcase for local and regional art and talent, claiming as it does all the advantages of location, etc. It seems to hold court over Lady Bird Lake, with hill country scenery upstream and the shining, multi-colored towers of Austin across the lake. I visited Zach to see Dividing the Estate, Horton Foote’s 1989 play about a Texas family falling apart over estate inheritance.

To cut to the chase, the family had already fallen apart, and so had the estate of the title, which was really only a metaphor for that family. The former glory of the estate was represented by the gorgeous set by Cliff Simon. If you think this is a spoiler and with that the play was over save for upscale furniture-gnawing, think again,for this was indeed only the beginning. Dividing the Estate is a brilliant exposition of time and place and how the fortunes of families and individuals depend on those elemental things. The Zach Scott production of the play does it proud.

The time of the play is the mid-Eighties oil bust, the one centered in Houston. The place is fictional Harrison, Texas. The real-life place is Wharton, Texas, without a doubt. The characters discuss the features and problems of life in Wharton, Texas in great, accurate detail. These include the vast acreages of grazing land tumbling in value, proximity to Houston (in every sense), sulfur domes, oil wells, ranching mansions, a main street lined with empty store fronts and a plastics plant run by Asian investors (still in operation today).

Click to read more and view images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

The Aliens by Annie Baker, Hyde Park Theatre, March 22 - April 21

The Aliens by young play writing genius Annie Baker is a dazzling, offbeat oratorio of inarticulate thought and emotion.

Out back of a Vermont coffee shop there's a dingy employee break area. K.J. and Jasper, guys from nowhere of consequence, have appropriated it as their own hang-out space, like a couple of raccoons nesting under a deck.

K.J. sits motionless much of the time, lost in vague thought, surfacing from time to time to renew contact. Jude Hickey makes him courteous, rounded as a sloth, interested when focused, entirely comfortable in this little world bounded by chain link fence, trash cans and weather-stained brick walls. Joey Hood as Jasper is edgy energy burning in silence at the warped and weather beaten wooden picnic table planted on an unforgiving surface of glittering gravel.

Discovering them there is Evan, the slack jawed, empty headed part-time employee of the coffee shop. He never tells them what he does, but his consternation at finding them out there makes it pretty clear that he's a bus boy, not a barista. Just about any comment addressed to Evan filters into his brain, totters on the brink of consciousness, rebounds and then settles, stimulating the inevitable response: "Uh -- cool."

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: The Aliens by Annie Baker, Hyde Park Theatre, March 22 - April 21

presents

The Aliens

by Annie Baker

directed by Ken Webster

511 W. 43rd Street at Guadalupe (click for map)

Thursdays-Saturdays, March 22 - April 21

$19 general admission, $17 students, seniors, Austin Creative Alliance members

Click to purchase tickets

Annie Baker, the finest young American playwright and author of the 2010 HPT hits Body Awareness and Circle Mirror Transformation, weaves an extraordinary evening from a simple tale of three young slackers talking behind a coffeehouse. The New York Times called it "Gentle and extraordinarily beautiful." This play shared the 2010 Obie Award with Circle Mirror Transformation. Our HPT production is directed by Ken Webster and stars Jon Cook, Jude Hickey, and Joey Hood.

Upcoming: The Zoo Story by Edward Albee, Joey Hood & Tom Truss, various locations, April 16 - May 22

Found on-line at www.secondhandtheatre.biz:

Click to view choice of locations and dates (near UT, East Austin, South Austin, North Austin, Round Rock)

To reserve tickets online click the e address below

secondhandtheatre.biz@gmail.com or call 512 981 7332

Please include the date and time of the show you want to see and the number of reservations. We will confirm your reservation by email or phone.

Flying by Olga Mukhina, Breaking String Theatre at the Off Center, January 28 - February 19

ALT's first take, for NowPlayingAustin's "A-Team":

Olga Mukhina’s Flying is a fast, dangerous and exhilarating ride.

Graham Schmidt and Breaking String Theatre put audiences up close to the beautiful youth of post-Soviet Russia in this 2004 piece. Olga Mukhin Qa one of those who originated the “New Drama” that came raging into Russia's mid-1990’s. It plays until February 19 at the Off Center, 2211-A Hidalgo Street (behind Joe’s Bakery on 7^th Street).

Heedless, hedonistic and rootless, a gang of six young professionals address one another only by their remarkable nicknames. Snowstorm, Blizzard, Snowflake, Maniac, Orangina and Lenochka strut, talk, preen and play hard. They revolve about one another and thrust themselves through the drab Moscow nights like shooting stars. Director Schmidt, choreographer Adrian Mishler and composer Justin Sherburn give this story a kinetic power that leaves the audience breathless at the end of the first half.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Flying by Olga Mukhina, Breaking String Theatre at the Off Center, January 28 - February 19

Received directly and researched on-line:

i

in association with the Rude Mechanicals proudly presents

the North American premiere of

Flying

by Olga Mukhina
translated by John Freedman

directed by Graham Schmidt

at the Off Center, 2211 Hidalgo Street (click for map)

January 28 - February 19

January 28, 29, 30 (Friday - Saturday; Sunday at 5 p.m.)

February 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (Thursday - Monday)

February 10, 11, 13, 14 (Thursday - Monday)

February 16, 17, 18, 19 (Thursday - Saturday)

Performances at 8 p.m. except for Sunday, January 30

Tickets * $15-25 General Admission

* Mondays (February 7 and 14) are pay-what-you-want industry nights

A group of Russia’s so-called “golden youth,” smart, talented, well-heeled twenty-somethings are heading for disaster. Among them are DJs, VJs, PR agents and on-screen presenters for a hot new youth-oriented Moscow television production company. These people, with hip-sounding names like Snowstorm, Maniac, Snowflake and Orangina, are creating and living the images that will define the future. None wastes much time thinking about why one of their group is repeatedly battered by her husband or why another constantly takes tranquilizers to maintain her cool, collected image. But when an unsullied teenage girl joins their group one day, they are compelled to look beyond the usual limits of their purview. And when Snowstorm is arrested for possession of drugs and Orangina undergoes a religious experience, the insular nature of their world is quickly breached.

Breaking String has been proud to collaborate with playwright Olga Mukhina and critic / translator John Freedman in the development of this production.

The Cast: Jesse Bertron, David Boss, Joey Hood, Michelle Keffer, Adriene Mishler, Michael Plaster, Gricelda Silva, Jacob Trussell, Katie Van Winkle

The Crew: Graham Schmidt (Director), Angelica Mañez (Stage Manager), Adriene Mishler (Director of Movement) Ia Ensterä (Set Designer), Jamie Urban (Costume Designer), Steven Shirey (Lighting Designer), Justin Sherburn (Music and Sound Designer), Eric Johnson (Carpenter / Electrician)

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Baal by Bertolt Brecht, Paper Chairs at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, November 11 - 28

Received directly:

Paper Chairs excitedly announces its sophomore production

Baal

by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Peter Tegel from the 1922 edition

directed by Dustin Wills.

Ba·al [bey-uhl, beyl]

1. any of numerous local deities among the ancient Semitic peoples, typifying the productive forces of nature and worshiped with much sensuality.

2. (sometimes lowercase) a false god.

The slightly intoxicated, morally bankrupt patrons of “The Night Cloud” are putting on a play about their idol, Baal. Baal is a mysterious figure said to have roamed the forests, inns and bars leaving nothing but poetry, destruction and a hefty bar tab in his wake. The perfect – though some may disagree – idol for a band of hooligans in a seedy cabaret.

Bertolt Brecht’s first play, Baal, drags its audience deep into a body of youthful desires and complete moral abandon. Written in 1918, when Brecht was 20 years old – before the Epic Theatre and the overtly political work for which he is lauded – Baal unfolds in fragments; like a piecemeal of the nearly forgotten events of a drunken evening. It tells the story of our poet-musician and title character, Baal, fleeing the civilized world to live the extreme life somewhere in the forest finding plenty of people and pursuits to indulge his insatiable appetite for experience. The themes coursing through this text are especially pressing today: emerging adulthood, substance abuse, nature’s destruction, homosexuality, and exploration of the body. This performance of Baal also features original score and 8 songs written to Brecht’s verse performed live by the bar patrons and composed and directed by boozers Andy Tindall and Rob Greenfield. We also invite 12 audience members to buy priority seats at tables on stage – free refreshments included!

Featuring bar patrons Joey Hood (2010 Critic’s Table Best Actor), Robert Pierson, Jacob Trussell, Noel Gaulin, Michael Amendola (2010 Critic’s Table Best Supporting Actor), Rob Greenfield, Kelli Bland, Adriene Mishler, Elizabeth Doss, Kimberly Adams, Chase Crossno, Sonnet Blanton, and Gabriel Luna (2010 Critic’s Table Best Actor) in the title role, Baal. The Night Cloud Cabaret is designed by Lisa Laratta (2010 Critic’s Table Best Scenic Design), the costumes by bar regular Benjamin Taylor Ridgeway, and the lovely Natalie George hanging lights from the trees.

Baal runs Wednesdays – Sundays from November 11 to November 28 nightly at 8:00 p.m. (three weekends in total) at The Salvage Vanguard Theater (2803 Manor Rd.; Austin, Texas 78722). Tickets: Pay-What-You-Want Wednesdays and Thursdays; Fridays-Sundays - $15.00 general seating, $30.00 table seating. Advanced Purchase ticket pricing ($15 each) will be available through our website as of October 18, 2010 (www.paperchairs.com). There will be no performance Thanksgiving, November 25.

Paper Chairs creates sensorially dynamic theatre combining fractured subjectivity, music, unconventional audience situation, surrealism, provocative design and labor-intensive mechanics. We favor challenging texts that allow for a fusion of various performance styles, music genres, and historical periods to excite modern sensibilities and educate by suggesting past and present cultural connections. The work is outrageous, well-researched, and a little bit dangerous.

Bug by Tracy Letts, Capital T Theatre at Hyde Park Theatre, May 27 - June 26

Tracy Letts is hard to take. Any playwright is something of a god, sitting before that first blank page with the power to create and mold character and situation. Letts gives us the polarization of that Genesis -- evidently fascinated by the dark and the desperate, he crafts characters beaten down by one another, trapped in poverty, deprived of education and understanding, aching for meaning. He endows them with life, vivid relations and back stories

His Killer Joe, done here last year by essentially the same company of actors, was a powerful but despicable work resembling a vicious dogfight among human beings.

Bug is a different voyage from roughly the same origins. Director Mark Pickell and the cast set the rhythms, the characters, the relationships in the first half as if they were knowledgeable deepsea anglers hooking the great fish of the audience. In the second half they play us with determined cruelty and we have no choice but to follow. Bug reveals itself in Act II to be a trip into paranoia, fantasy and psychosis.

Read more and view additional images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Ongoing: Bug, Capital T Theatre at Hyde Park Theatre, May 27 - June 19

UPDATE: Review by Ryan E. Johnson at examiner.com, June 2

UPDATE: Review by Clare Croft for the Statesman's Austin360 "Seeing Things" blog, May 29

UPDATE: Feature by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin at the Statesman's Arts360 "Seeing Things" blog, May 26

Found on-line:

Capital T presents

Bug

by Tracy Letts
Directed by Mark Pickell
Starring Kenneth Wayne Bradley, Katie deBuys, Joey Hood, Melissa Recalde, and Joe Reynolds

May 27 – June 19
Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W 43rd St

Tickets are $15-$25 (sliding scale) and can be reserved by calling 479-PLAY or visiting www.capitalT.org

Insects bite, feed, and swarm in BUG, Tracy Letts' thrilling followup to KILLER JOE. BUG centers on Agnes (Katie deBuys), a lonely, middle-aged waitress victimized by her abusive ex-husband (Ken Bradley), and tortured by the kidnapping of her child in a supermarket almost ten years ago. After spiraling into a world of alcohol, cocaine, and seedy motel rooms, Peter (Joey Hood) a timid Gulf War veteran and drifter in search of a friend wanders into her life. As their interest in each other grows, so does their paranoid obsession with understanding what –or who – brought them together. Did we mention the infestation of bugs?

Warning: contains nudity, cigarette smoke, violence, and adult situations.

Running time 2 hours with one 15 minute intermission

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . .

The Atheist, Hyde Park Theatre, February 18 - March 13

Sleazy, pushy Augustine Early is the just the sort of brilliant sociopath that fascinates Ken Webster, judging from the programming at the Hyde Park Theatre.

The Atheist is billed as a "dark comedy," but it is no barrel of laughs. In fact, there are virtually no laughs at all in Joey Hood's intense, two-act 90-minute performance. If it's a comedy at all, it's a sardonic comedy, in the etymological sense: from 1630–40 <>sardoni(us) (<>sardónios of Sardinia) + -an; "the primary reference was to the eating of a Sardinian plant. . .which was said to produce facial convulsions resembling horrible laughter, usually followed by death." [OED]

Whatever the definition, it takes nothing away from Joey Hood. His intensity, rhythm, and bitter, corruscating delivery of this grotesque and bleak shaggy dog story fully deserve those standing ovations that he is getting every night at the theatre. The intelligence and daring of his interpretation almost justify the adulatory tone of Robert Faires' 2400-word profile in the Austin Chronicle last week.

Read more and view image at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: The Atheist by Ronan Noone, Hyde Park Theatre, February 18 - March 13

Click for ALT review, February 20

UPDATE: Review by Claire Carnavan for Statesman's Austin360 "Seeing Things" blog, February 19

UPDATE: Robert Faires' 2300-word profile of Joey Hood, Austin Chronicle, February 18

Received directly:

presents the Southwest premiere of

The Atheist
a dark comedy by Ronan Noone
directed by Ken Webster

February 18 - March 13, 2010

The Atheist is a wickedly funny dark comedy about a young journalist who is high on ambition and low on morals. Augustine Early is a reporter who will do anything to be famous, even if it means blackmailing a Congressman for a story that will make Augustine a star.

Featuring Joey Hood (Killer Joe, Bombs in Your Mouth, The Collection) and directed by HPT Artistic Director and Austin Arts Hall of Fame member Ken Webster (The Pillowman, Dog Sees God).

The Boston Globe called this show "viciously funny . . . especially to anyone who cares about the creeping power of tabloid values even in the 'serious' press.”

Curtain Up called it “a thrilling ride.”

Atheists, Christians, Jews, and Muslims will all find The Atheist a savagely funny night of theatre. Tickets are $19 and $17 for students, seniors, and ACOT members on Fridays and Saturdays. Thursdays are pay-what-you-can.

Hyde Park Theatre is located at 511 W. 43rd. Tickets can be charged online at www.hydeparktheatre.org, or by phone at 479-PLAY.