University of Texas at Austin Department of Theatre & Dance and Phoenix Theatre Company present as part of The Spring 2010 Lab Theatre Season
The Pocketbook Monologues by Sharon McGhee directed by LaTasha Stephens March 4 - 6, 8 p.m., March 7 at 2 p.m. Lab Theatre -- free, limited seating
The department's newest student-run theatre company will present Sharon McGhee's play using women of different races to tell stories that range from a girl’s first brush with womanhood, to waxing, to how an old...er widow lives without her deceased husband.
The Play Hailed by many as “The Vagina Monologues with Soul,” The Pocketbook Monologues has played to sold-out houses in New York, Chicago, St. Louis and Milwaukee and made its television debut on the 2009 season of The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .
The Salvage Vanguard's annual Works Progress Austin (WPA) - the development project that gives artists a playground to develop new works - returns on January 8th through 24th.During the course of three weeks, a variety of actors, writers, directors, dramaturges, and musicians are given the opportunity to incubate and experiment. Inspired by Roosevelt's Works Projects Administration, Salvage Vanguard's program aims to put artists to work.
Pride and Prejudice at UT's B. Iden Payne Theatre is a beautiful, graceful production. This is a musical text, and not only because of the jigs and reels at the balls sponsored by cheerful Mr. Bingley. Jane Austen's familiar novel about impoverished young ladies and their ultimately successful romances is written largely in dialogue, with cadence, understatement, wit, parry and riposte, quite as if it were a verbal score.
No wonder it has been so successfully translated to the cinema, again and again, and no wonder all 495 seats in the theatre appeared to be filled on opening night. James Maxwell's adaptation gives us much of that familiar dialogue verbatim and all the familar characters.
The surprise of love . . . The University of Texas Department of Theatre and Dance presents Jane Austen's classic novel adapted for the stage Pride and Prejudice
November 13 – 22, 2009 at the B. Iden Payne Theatre.
James Maxwell adapts Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's timeless novel, originally published in 1813. The highly plot-driven comedy of manners set in 1811 centers on the Bennet family, a comfortable, but not excessively wealthy family living in the countryside of England. As the Bennets have five daughters and no sons, Mrs. Bennet's main objective in life is to find (wealthy) husbands for her daughters and retain Longbourn, the family estate, in the Bennet name. When Jane, the eldest daughter, falls in love with a wealthy landowner named Charles Bingle, Mrs. Bennet believes her problems solved. Bingly's snobbish family and his close friend and acquaintance Fitzwilliam Darcy have other ideas.
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.
Austin’s Cambiare Productions is proud to present a darker, more intimate vision of Euripides' classic Orestes.
Adapted and directed by Austin Critics’ Table nominee Will Hollis Snider (Sonata Escondida, Intermission, Elektra, The Nina Variations), Orestes will be performed at the Off Center (2211-A Hidalgo, Austin) Thursday through Saturday, July 30th through August 15th at 8 PM.
Tickets are priced at $15, $12 for students, and will be available at the door. Thursdays will be pay-what-you-can nights. Reservations can be made at reservations@cambiareproductions.com or at (512) 524-3761.
Snider’s adaptation takes Euripides classic, strips away the presentational storytelling of three millennia ago and reinforces the story with other classic texts including Iphigenia at Aulis, Elektra, The Libation Bearers, Iphigenia Among the Taurians, Agamemnon, and The Eumenides.
The production places the title character squarely at the center of his own story. It is set days after Orestes’ murder of his own mother, Klytaimnestra, in retribution for the assassination of his father. The dark fevered hallways of Orestes' mind are explored as he seeks absolution and release from the curse of the House of Atreus.
Sprinting backwards through the events leading up to Klytaimnestra's bloody death, the production unravels before Orestes' eyes the deceit and duplicity of the last generation of the House of Atreus as the black and white of zealous revenge recedes to the greys of politics and treacherous love. Confronted with the truth, haunted by Furies and hunted by his own people, Orestes makes one last desperate stand against God and man.
