GLASSHEART by Reina Hardy, Shrewd Productions at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, August 30 - September 14, 2013

presents the World Premiere of 

GLASSHEART

by Reina Hardy
August 30th through September 14th
Week 1 - Friday and Saturday at 8 pm, Sunday at 6 pm
Week 2 - Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 pm, Sunday at 6 pm
Week 3 - Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 pm

Tickets: $15-25 sliding scale

Click here for Tickets

Salvage Vanguard Theatre: 2803 Manor Rd., Austin, TX 78722 - click for map

Beauty never showed up. After centuries under the curse, the Beast and his one remaining magical servant have moved into a shabby apartment near a 7-11, hoping for a lower cost of living and better luck with girls. In the threatening, impossible, completely ordinary world of paying rent and taking public transportation, is a happy ending even possible? Are there witches in Chicago? Is this hat sufficient? And can a good story and a little light save the day?
A romantic comedy about facing the witch in your head, and finding the wish in your heart.

About the Playwright Reina Hardy is from Chicago and recently fetched up in Texas. She is a Michener Fellow at UT Austin, a 2013 finalist for the Terrence McNally Prize, the recipient of the 2012 Interact 20/20 Commission, and a National New Play Network Playwright. Her plays,which usually contain magic, have most recently been seen at Capital Stage Sacramento, Las Vegas Little Theatre, Orlando Shakespeare, and the Great Plains Theatre Conference, where Reina was awarded the Holland New Voices Award. She spent part of this summer at the Kennedy Center, workshopping her as-yet untitled script about the universe and hangovers. Glassheart is one of two productions that Reina is enjoying in Austin this season, with Stars & Barmen to be produced at the Vortex in the fall.

About the Cast & Crew Kyle Zamcheck directs an all-star ensemble in this modern re-telling of a classic story including Lana Dieterich,*Carolyn Faye Kramer, Shannon Grounds and Michael Miller as the Beast. Award-winning designers Pam Friday (costumes), Anne-Marie Gordon (set design), Patrick Anthony (lighting design), and Buzz Moran (sound design) create Hardy's magical world of a fairytale down-sized to a one-bedroom apartment.

* Carolyn Faye Kramer appears courtesy of Actors Equity 

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

The Pain and the Itch, Capital T Theatre at Hyde Park Theatre, October 25 - November 17

by Michael Meigs

Mark Pickell has an eye for mordant black humor, so Capital T's productions fit perfectly into Ken Webster's Hyde Park Theatre -- both into that odd and intimate space and into the ironic, brash, better-than-hip ethos of the place. If you like Ken's stuff, you'll love Mark's. And a further lure: the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago has premiered the last seven works of this playwright.


Bruce Norris' savage deadpan flaying of the earnest American upper middle class in The Pain and the Itch is more than mere satire, though. It's a paradox wrapped in an enigma presented in one of Ia Esterä's exquisitely imagined box sets. In the guise of a family visit to attorney Kelly and her house-husband Clay at Thanksgiving time, Norris serves up at least two mysteries: what is that reserved Middle Eastern taxi-driver doing in this American home? And what is the malady of adorable five-year-old daughter Kayla that Cash the pediatrician surgeon brother-in-law is called to investigate and at the same time to conceal?


I missed the staging of this 2005 play when the University of Texas MFA program did it in a April, 2011, followed immediately by Norris's Clybourne Park (which was later awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the 2012 Tony for best play).


The arc is from the squabbling of grown siblings to the disconnects of incomprehension, television, clashes of culture, accidents, victims and deceit. Norris writes with a scalpel whetted to such a fine edge that at first one doesn't realize the depth and damage of his adroit strokes as he dissects the bland, blind conceits of this all-American family.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: The Pain and the Itch by Bruce Norris, Capital T Theatre, October 25 - November 17

The Pain and the Itch

by Bruce Norris

Directed by Mark Pickell

October 25 – November 17

Thursdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m.

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

Worst. Thanksgiving. Ever.

Clay and Kelly share a perfect suburban house with two perfect daughters and have a perfect life. That is until Clay’s mother, Carol, and his brother Cash, with his young Eastern European girlfriend come to have Thanksgiving dinner together.

When a mysterious intruder disrupts Thanksgiving dinner, the gloves come off and an already nervous situation takes a turbulent turn for the worse. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Bruce Norris’ wickedly funny comedy of desire, deceit and family values is guaranteed to get under your skin.

Capital T is proud to present Pulitzer Prize Winning Playwright Bruce Norris’ scathing satire directed by 2 time Austin Critics Table Award Winning Director Mark Pickell (Killer Joe, Hunter Gatherers). The all star cast includes Austin favorites Kenneth Wayne Bradley (Killer Joe), Lana Dietrich, Liz Fisher (Hunter Gatherers), Indigo Rael (Exit Pursued by a Bear), and Ben Wolfe (I Heart Walmart).

Cast

Mr Hadid – Ben Wolfe

Kelly - Liz Fisher

Cash - Kenneth Wayne Bradley

Kalina - Indigo Rael

Carol – Lana Dieterich

Click to read about playwright Bruce Norris at www.capitalt.org


 (Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Upcoming: Getting Betta by Don Fried, Paradox Players at FronteraFest and Howson Hall, January 24 - February 4

Received directly:

present the regional premiere of the futuristic comedy

– Getting Betta –

by Don Fried

directed by the playwright

at the Blue Theatre, 916 Springdale Rd. (click for map)

for the 2012 FronteraFest Long Fringe

Tuesday, January 24 – 7:00 pm; Tuesday, January 31 – 9:15 pm; Thursday, Februrary 2 – 7:00 pm; and Saturday, February 4 – 1:15 pm

Tickets for the Fringe are $15 and are available at www.fronterafest.org or by phoning 512-479-7529.

3 additional performances will be at Howson Hall Theater, UU Church, 4700 Grover Avenue, Austin, TX 78756 (click for map)

Friday, March 2 – 8:00 pm; Saturday, March 3 – 8:00 pm; and Sunday, March 4 – 3:00 pm

Tickets for the Howson performances are $15 and are available at the door.

Paradox Players presents the regional premiere of Don Fried’s futuristic comedy Getting Betta at the 2012 FronteraFest Long Fringe, January 24 – February 5, at Austin’s Blue Theater. Playing the title role of Betta is award-winning Austin-based film and stage actress Lana Dieterich, who starred in the 2011 Long Fringe production of Fried’s Senior Moments. Also featured are long-time Austin actor Craig Kanne and recent Texas State theatre graduate Brittany Flurry.

In the play, Michael is a technologically-challenged senior citizen living in a retirement home. Betta, a virtual computerized assistant, is assigned to him against his wishes by the administration of the facility. After a brief period of conflict, Michael and Betta reach a truce and settle down to live together. However, as Betta acquires technology upgrades to make her more human, she becomes paranoid and schizophrenic, and things spiral out of control.

The San Juan Capistrano (California) Patch review of Getting Betta had this to say: “What is love? What is family? Does technology serve us, or do we serve technology? Do you have to be a human to be human? You’ll laugh at, as much as ponder over, some of the answers suggested in Getting Betta.”

Getting Betta premiered simultaneously in Colorado and California in March, 2011. Fried, who also directs the production, has had his work performed throughout the U.S., in Canada, and England. In March, he travels to London to work on the world premiere production of his play Phoenix, which was inspired by the life of British singer/songwriter Nick Drake.

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts, Zach Theatre, March 31 - May 22

Director Dave Steakley proves that with a first-rate cast and a gifted scenic designer he can turn Tracey Letts' savage misanthropy into a mesmerizing long evening in the theatre.

That's no modest achievement. The last -- and first -- Letts work I saw was Capital T Theatre's Killer Joe, which I found violent and obscene. Not in the sexual sense, but because of Letts gloated while degrading his working-class characters. Perhaps Letts is easier to stomach in the modestly affluent middle-class home of the Westons than in the trailer park setting of Killer Joe.

Things fall apart in both places. Or, abjuring Yeats since in the opening scene Letts has the patriarch, retired literature professor Beverly Weston, ramble to the uncomprehending new housekeeper about T.S. Eliot, each play is set in a wasteland populated with hollow men. And while we're dealing with symbolism, let's get the housekeeper out of the way. Johnna Monevata is a simple, good-hearted full-blooded Indian -- a native American -- so we can see her as the authentic antithesis to the drug- and alcohol-soaked psycho Weston family that symbolizes the contemporary Anglo heartland.

You won't see Michael Holmes again until the curtain call, for patriarch Beverly Weston disappears, causing confusion and alarm. After he has been missing for four days, plain-Jane stay-at-home sister Ivy (Irene White) calls her two sisters as well as Aunt Mattie Fae and Uncle Charlie. All converge on the expansive, bourgeois triple-level set crafted by Zach's Michael Raiford, complete with a mechanical chair on a track by the staircase, allowing tottering mom Violet to get downstairs. The Zach jocularly calls it "one bitch of a family reunion." I call it a gripping extended battle, a sort of lengthy, determined knife fight, in which drug-dazed Violet (Lana Dieterich) and her embittered sister Mattie Fae (Janelle Buchanan) are the chief protagonists.

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

Upcoming: Morning's at Seven by Paul Osborne, Different Stages at the Vortex Repertory, November 19 - December 11

Received directly:

Different Stages opens its 2010–2011 season with Paul Osborn’s comedy

Morning’s at Seven

November 19 - December 11
at the Vortex Repertory, 2307 Manor Road

This story is about the intertwined relationships and long standing sibling rivalries of the four aging Gibbs sisters. Three of them have lived next door to one another for fifty years and the eldest sister lives only a few blocks away. Living so close has taken its toll. The quiet lives these women share with their husbands start to come unhinged when some of them begin to question what to do with their remaining years. Tensions rise when Ida’s 40–year–old son brings his fiancé of 12 years to the house for the first time. A story about growing old, growing up, and letting go.

Directed by Karen Jambon (Eurydice), Morning’s at Seven features Jennifer Underwood (The Carpetbagger’s Children), Lana Dieterich (Vigil), Bobbie Oliver (Spider’s Web) and Kathleen Lawson (On Golden Pond) as the four Gibb sisters. Playing the three husbands are Michael Hankin (The Skin of Our Teeth), Richard Craig (Lettice and Lovage), and San Damon (Spider’s Web). Playing Ida’s son and his fiancé are Jonathan Urso (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) and Anne Hulsman (The Carpetbagger’ss Children).

Performances are Thursdays through Saturdays at 8:00 p.m. and Sundays at 7 p.m. There is no performance on Thanksgiving, Thursday November 25. Added performance on Wednesday December 8 at 8 p.m. Tickets are Pick your Price: $15, $20, $25, and $30. For tickets and information call 478-5282.