Natividad - A homemade Pastorela, Austin Latino Theatre Alliance at Emma S. Barrientos Mexican-American Cultural Center, December 1 - 17

Every year since 1997 Austin's Spanish-speaking community has crafted a Christmas play, taking the model of the traditional Pastorela pageant of long date, in which the birth of Jesus is witnessed by a simple shepherd girl. As in virtually all folk theatre, the story can be told many different ways and styles. The sponsoring coalition ALTA (the Austin Latino Theatre Alliance) recruits a different director every year for the Spanish-language enactment, so that each Austin Pastorela is unlike another -- the versions stretch back in local memory, like Christmas ornaments specially crafted for the tree.

Shifting the metaphor: it was a pleasure again this year to unpack ALTA's annual gift to the public. Director Alejandro Pedemonte and playwright Miguel Angel Santana have put together a thoroughly contemporary Christmas story. Natividad is the gentle story of the upper-middle-class Pastor ("Shepherd") family, gathered for Christmas in a home furnished both with contemporary art -- courtesy of Austin artists -- and cleanly modern contemporary furniture, courtesy of the Motif furniture stores of Austin and San Antonio.

David and Estrella ("Star") Pastor have two attractive unmarried adult children, Sara and Benjamin. Sara's serious boyfriend -- her novio -- attends the meal. Peripheral figures provide drama and comic relief: Aunt Lucy, extravagantly dramatic and suspicious; rustic neighbor "El borrego" Reyes ("Sheep" King(s)) and a couple of flirtatious young ladies, Solia and Dora. In the family chat over dinner Tia Lucy rakes up disputes from many years before and insinuates that Sara's novio is being unfaithful because he is concerned by the plight of a young pregnant unmarried woman he met at his grocery store job.

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

No One Else Will Ever Love You by Katherine Craft, private residences, August 28 - September 12

Offering a play in someone's house or apartment breaks down some of the conventions of theatre. There's more of a sense of risk for all concerned -- players, audience and host.

In most theatrical events the audience is anonymous, a collection of shapes outside the brightly lit playing space. And most of them like it that way. The front row never fills up first. Maybe there's a latent worry about sitting within grasp of the actors.

No One Else Will Ever Love You is theatre up close, in the living room instead of in the reassurance of a formal theatre setting. The cast uses a different living space each weekend.

I was wandering around condominiums on East 33rd street last Friday evening with an address on a slip of paper. I must have been pretty obvious when I walked behind the building into the parking lot. "Looking for the play?" asked a neighbor as he was pulling out of his parking slot. "It's over there, behind that wall."

I walked back around to the front. No sign. It was dark outside the ground floor apartment. But through the window I could see a few persons standing in the living room. I knocked, asked, and was admitted.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: No One Else Will Ever Love You by Katherine Craft, private location, August 28 - September 12

UPDATE: ALT review of September 8

UPDATE: Actor Bastion Carboni interviews director Dan Solomon on Austinist.com, 8/28

Received directly and explored on-line:

No One Else Will Ever Love You

by Katherine Craft
Directed by Dan Solomon
Starring JennyMarie Jemison, Spencer Driggers, Karina Dominguez, and Bastion Carboni.

Rick and Jen are back in the country after their honeymoon, and they've invited Rick's best friend Nora, along with her boyfriend Charlie, over for dinner. As they open their fifth bottle of wine, Rick and Charlie both struggle with their desire to dominate the room - and more importantly, Nora. Staged in the living rooms of local volunteers, this one-act play about the chess matches that some men play for power over the women in their lives, and the subsequent effort to be no one's pawn, presents a visceral and immediate theatrical experience.

August 28 and 29,September 4 and 5,September 11 and 12
All performances are at 8pm.

All tickets are $10 and available online at www.nooneelsewilleverloveyou.com. Venue addresses will be given after ticket purchase. All venues are centrally located in Austin.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Orestes, Cambiare Productions at the Off Center, July 31 - August 15

Hidden Treasures from Afghanistan's National Museum are now on exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the last of several stops in a 15-month tour of the United States. I caught the exhibit in Washington DC last year, but you may have seen it this spring in Houston.

A haunting diorama of a barren Afghan plain shows how the unimaginable golden treasures were preserved in hidden subterranean vaults for thousands of years, even as the fabulous palaces of antiquity above them were torn down for re-use as construction material.

I had hoped that Will Hollis Snider's Orestes would offer us reworked antique treasures, but he provides instead an empty, echoing structure constructed from the pulled-down palaces of Greek myth.

The structure is not entirely barren. One clever touch is to convert the ravaging Erinyes or Furies from avenging spirits to fantasms of Orestes' mind, embodying the murdered -- his sister Iphigenia, sacrificed at Aulis by their father Agamemnon; Agamemnon himself, murdered by his wife, their mother Clytemnestra, upon his return from Troy; and Clytemnestra, whom Orestes has just killed, on instructions from the god Apollo.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .