Zeus in Therapy by Douglass Stott Parker, Tutto Theatre at the Rollins Theatre, Long Center, August 16 - 25, 2013

(Tutto Theatre)

by Michael Meigs

Tutto Theatre's Zeus in Therapy by the late UT classics professor Douglass Stott Parker is dazzling, and at times, as his brilliant wordplay coincides with the gesturing and capering of the astonishing Greek chorus, it is simply stunning.

'Stunning' is a word thrown about lightly in the casual talk of our day. But I mean it literally. The brilliance, complexity and sheer entertainment value of this staging and this cast is sufficient to blow your circuits, if you're trying to absorb everything this production is offering you.

Perhaps only literature geeks and poetry lovers stand in danger of that. You may be happy simply to settle back in your seat in the Rollins Theatre and ride with this lengthy evening on any of its several levels.

Set design by Chris Cox

Most of us have at least a rudimentary recall of Greek mythology, perhaps from storybooks in middle school. You can enjoy the revelation of the stories of this quirky, cranky bunch of deities: Zeus himself, the all-powerful principal god with that rampant lust; Hera his demanding wife and sister ("wifster"); the Titans who pre-dated the Greek gods and old Cronus, Zeus's father; trident-brandishing Neptune and hammer-swinging Hephaestus; Dionysus, god of wine, born from the thigh of Zeus; cup-bearer Ganymede; the incarnations of all the lovely maidens who gave Zeus's life its zest; and a vast additional number of mortals and immortals.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Original Family Theatre in Austin -- Playground Superhero and Mariachi Girl

by Michael Meigs


Children's theatre -- sometimes passed off as 'family theatre' -- is not easy, despite the deceptive appearance of ease when it's well done. And there's not that much of it in Austin.


Visiting companies set up shop for a single day's performance at the One World Theatre out on Bee Caves Road or at the Paramount and State theatres downtown. And of course, studios such as KidsActing, Buzz Productions, Easy Theatre and Center Stage offer young persons their first experience of performance. There's even the Flying Theatre Machine that will initiate them in improv.


Very often purveyors of children's theatre or theatre by children are offering authorized adaptations of familiar stories, successful children's books, and movies. Lots of these studios and various schools are doing Disney scripts -- for example, the MacTheatre at McCallum Fine Arts Academy performed Disney's Beauty and the Beast this past September and the Buzz Productions did Disney's Alice in Wonderland, Jr. this past May.


There's some piracy, too -- not the Long John Silver type but copyright infringement. To date those occasional offerings by community groups and others have remained below the radar (luckily for them, because Uncle Walt's administrators and their ilk are little inclined to tolerance or mercy).


Last week I attended two productions of original scripts for family theatre, done by uniquely Austin theatre companies in partnership with well-established Austin arts institutions. Judy Matetzschk-Campbell's Pollyanna Theatre Company has been performing since 2002; Teatro Vivo of Rupert and JoAnn Reyes, established at about the same time to serve, entertain and reflect Austin's Tejano community, has now moved into family theatre with a script submitted by Roxanne Schroeder-Arce to their first Latino New Play Festival in 2011.

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

Petra's Pecado, Teatro Vivo at Salvage Vanguard, December 3 - 20

First, a gentle admonition to the transcribers at the Austin Statesman: the title is not "Petra's Pescado" (Petra's Fish). Teatro Vivo's newest presentation is Petra's Pecado or "Petra's Mortal Sin," which makes for quite a different kettle of fish.

This is Teatro Vivo's flagship play, the first of three "Petra" works written by Rupert Reyes. In the summer of 2008 when they staged the last one, Petra's Sueño (Petra's Dream), Reyes said he was putting the series to rest.

He had as much success with that declaration as Arthur Conan Doyle had with throwing his wildly popular Sherlock Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls.

Conan Doyle brought Holmes back for a long run. Similarly, giving in to the insistence of Teatro Vivo players and Austin's Spanish-speaking community, Rupert Reyes has brought back the first of the Petra stories. This time the company retrofits it with music. Judging from the excited comments around me in the audience on dress rehearsal night, Teatro Vivo scored another sentimental success.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Petra's Pecado, with music, Teatro Vivo at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, December 3 - 20

UPDATE: Click for ALT review, December 4

Received directly:

Teatro Vivo presents

Petra's Pecado
con música -- “It’ll be a sin if you miss it!”

Written and directed by Rupert Reyes
December. 3 -20, Thurs. - Sat. 8 p.m.,Sunday matinees at 2 p.m.
Salvage Vanguard Theatre 2803 Manor Rd
Tickets $21 - $16 ($13 students, seniors, ACOT)
Thursdays “pay what you wish night”
Tickets on-line at www.teatrovivo.org
Call 474-6379 for information

Teatro Vivo presents the return of the heart-warming bilingual comedy, Petra’s Pecado written and directed by local Austin playwright Rupert Reyes. This year’s production, Petra’s Pecado con música, is an all-new updated musical version of Austin’s favorite bilingual comedy.

It will take nothing short of a miracle to help Petra and her senior citizen friends in the small town of Las Flores, TX. to present the annual play about the Virgen de Guadalupe at the local church. Why did the new priest want her to direct the play as penance for her sin? Was Petra’s sin that big? No one knows, not even her husband. What they do know is that Tina Tamayo, Petra’s tortilla business rival, is out for revenge and will do anything to stop the senior citizens in their tracks. Will Tina succeed or will Petra and her friends overcome their fears and save a lot more than the play?

This two act bilingual comedy remains the most well known play in Hispanic community. It has played to sold out houses in all previous productions. The overwhelming response to this production by a wide variety of Austin audiences and the press prompted this return engagement that has been updated to include music and dance numbers.

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

¡No Se Paga! We Won’t Pay! , Teatro Vivo at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, August 13 - 30

On the evidence of this production alone, I would have to conclude that Rupert Reyes is a better playwright than Dario Fo, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1997.

Fo, a prolific and provocative theatre artist, was in the thick of Italian political debate from the 1960s through the 1990s. He and his wife Franca Rame were social activists and she was a member of the Italian Communist Party. They and others occupied an abandoned factory in Milan in 1973, titled it "Liberty Square" (Palazzina Liberty) and established a wildly popular theatre that garnered 80,000 season subscribers within a year.

Those were dangerous years in Italy for leftists. Rame was abducted, tortured and raped by a fascist group.

Fo's company staged Non si paga, non si paga! (often translated into English as Can't Pay? Won't Pay!) the following year. The farce dramatizes the plight of factory workers exploited by owners and abused by law enforcement.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Cuentos y Risas, Teatro Vivo at Dougherty Arts Center, March 5 - 15

Teatro Vivo is always fun, and this evening of two one-act plays is no exception. Both were written by the group's artistic director Rupert Reyes. The opening piece, Two Souls and A Promise, was presented for the first time last August as one of several short pieces. At that time I commented, in part,

"With 2 Souls and A Promise, veteran Rupert Reyes offers us a meditation that starts in whimsy and finishes with reflections on social equality. Young lovers Joe and Lisa cuddle at night on a mountaintop beneath the stars and exchange romantic promises for their souls to search out one another, should they ever be separated. Uh-oh! And yes, when Lisa immediately insists on going alone to get the car, she hits the wrong gear and precipitates it over a cliff, leaving Joe alone in life. We see Lisa as a departing soul, cross-shaped in a choir robe, confused and then really annoyed at this turn of events before she whisks away into the darkness. In the distance, one hears the birth of a child.

"So far, so good, and in line with Reyes’ most recent Petra frolic on the comic machinations of the supernatural. Two scenes follow, echoing dialogue and some movement. In the first, Joe, aged and infirm, is surprised when his son Pablo brings home a new classmate, Lily, with an uncanny resemblance to Joe’s young love Lisa. The comedy arises as son Pablo seeks Dad’s advice on wooing the young lady, who is feeling eerily attracted to the older man.

"The following scene is a variant of the idea that delivers us the aged Joe witha daughter. Again, the offspring unexpectedly brings home a classmate for dinner, and Joe and the visitor feel a strange affinity. Visitor Albert is handsome, deferential and enthusiastic about their shared class in Chicano lit. Only hitch: he is black. Reyes has fun playing Joe’s ill-concealed hostility with the growing awareness of supernatural bonds between them. With this second skit Reyes deepens the piece considerably, moving from a comedy of identities to one of social reconciliation."

The current production is only slightly modified. Reyes has walk-on scenes at the beginning and after the first reincarnation, in which he poses as a writer scribbling variations on a story -- a hint to those in the audience who might get confused by the double run-through of the reincarnation idea. Mateo Barrera is again cast as Joe and displays fine timing. For some reason this time I found him more convincing in the opening scene as the adolescent Joe, yet he still plays a convincing older Joe without resorting to makeup or to exaggerated mannerisms.

Karinna Pérez, recently in Teatro Vivo's Fantasmaville, plays the young girl throughout, and Jarrede Tettey plays Albert the visiting new student. At a key moment in the scene, each picks up the gaudy little heart charm that Joe's vanished girlfriend left to him along with the promise to return. It's an obvious little moment, almost cheesy in its simplicity, and yet it works.

I found that this time through I was again struck by the passage given to Albert. He says that his father was in the military, and he once observed a table of servicemen and their wives from Puerto Rico, in which blacks were married to whites, Latinos and Latinas, representing for him a new idea of equality and cordiality.

The second piece, Crossing the Río, is a skit about policing the U.S.-Mexico border along the newly constructed wall (Reyes' comment: "A brown people not welcome sign if I have ever seen one. We should be ashamed.") He deals with the absurdity of the wall by using it as a setting for slapstick. Reyes himself plays a tough ole Immigration officer, saddled with a brand new recruit who just happens to be his son (Mario Ramírez). The old guy has swallowed the administration's line on the border and he sputters, growls and fumes about the aliens and terrorists menacing American soil -- with the amusing quirk of making those macho Americano remarks mostly in Spanish.

A cheerful young man (Mateo Barrera) pops out of the wall but the old "Migra" officer is in no condition to apprehend him, so the job falls to the probationary officer (Ramírez). It turns out that they're the best of friends already, a fact that puts the new officer in a tight spot -- and even more so with a second arrival, the guy's sister (Karinna Pérez) , because she and the young guy are already sweet on one another. Gangsters have made threats, and the brother and sister don't dare try the regular crossing points.

There's amusing debate and further slapstick, especially when Reyes gets back into the scene, and eventually the young officer has to make an early career decision.

Some of the initial comedy between Karinna Pérez and Mario Ramírez comes as she is searching for vocabulary in English -- though many of her later utterances are much more colloquial, sophisticated and grammatically correct. But we can cut the playwright some slack on this and just enjoy the laughs, instead.

At the end of the piece Reyes comes forward to emphasize the company's respect for those who protect our borders -- ". . . and we're just having a little fun with them."

The piece doesn't pretend to provide any deep analysis of the complexities of nationality, migration or border control, but dwells instead on exaggerated beliefs, bureaucratic missions, and intergenerational incomprehension. And that's material ripe for making comedy.

Studs Terkel - Working, at Salgado exhibition, AMOA, December 3

At one point during the performance in the Congress Avenue gallery of the Austin Museum of Art an actress portrayng a waitress sang out, “Right this way, party of 32!”

Maybe we were more numerous, but I don’t think we got up to fifty.

This was an intimate performance – five actors doing three monologues and a duologue, standing in the gallery before the photographs taken by Brazilian economist and social activist Sebastião Salgado.

Arriving half an hour before the performance, I joined others who were absorbing Sagado’s vision. In the period 1986 – 1993 he traveled to 23 countries, where he photographed men and women at work in some of the most difficult jobs and environments imaginable. Sicilian fishermen herding enormous tuna into a killing tank on the open sea and then spearing them; laborers in non-mechanized sulfur pits in Indonesia, who carried 155 pounds of sulfur ore on their backs, ascending 2000 feet from the pit of an extinct volcano; ship-breakers on the beach in Bangladesh; cane-cutters in Cuba, both at work in the fields and gathered in exhaustion afterwards in their barracks.

Salgado’s work is gorgeous and chilling.

Read More at AustinLiveTheatre.com. . . .