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

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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.

The Tempest, Austin Shakespeare at the Rollins Theatre, Long Center, September 9 - 26

Prospero's kingdom is an enchanted isle, suggested by the wide circle marked out on the floor of the Rollins Theatre. As did Shakespeare, Ann Ciccolella invites the audience to create that world by participating with their imaginations. The scenery is minimal -- little more than towering dark blue flats at the back of the playing area, an unassuming balcony or elevation at stage right, rear, and a couple of rickety bushes on platforms pushed onstage as needed.

One needs little more than that, augmented by the rich suggestiveness of Jason Amato's lighting. The dense artificial haze generated as the play begins is superfluous and somewhat distracting.

The waves of the opening tempest are evoked by the stage hands holding long, wide muslim bands across the playing area downstage and deepstage, raising and agitating them so that their billows suggest the increasing fury of the storm. The crew despairs of salvation, the members of the noble retinue returning to Naples from Carthage are aghast. Above them on the island's lookout, gentle Miranda and her father Prospero look on.

The Tempest was probably Shakespeare's last work, and it's easy to interpret it as his farewell to the stage. A studious magician in a magic isle is wrapping up loose ends -- preparing to renounce his magic and to drown his books, righting wrongs done against himself and his daughter, rebuking the guilty and preparing to leave and to reassume his dukedom. Prospero's a man of wisdom, a master of the isle and the spirits upon it, endowed with powers sufficient to command the elements. Many an actor plays him with sweep and rhetoric and high authority, like Charleston Heston doing Moses in the Ten Commandments.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Our Town, Zach Theatre, April 15 - May 23

Our Town is both their town -- Thornton Wilder's Grovers Corners, New Hampshire, 1904 - 1913 -- and our town, Austin in 2010.

Dave Steakley and the large, talented cast at the Zach have a good time with the clever palimpsest of modern Austin that they use to reinvigorate a text that many of us first read in high school. It works, too, at least most of the time. This styling reminds us gently, insistently and with a smile, much like Wilder's Stage Manager narrator and chorus, that the although the play refers to a specific time, place and culture, it's really about the eternally repeating experience of mankind. Those ancients and ancestors, of the Sumerians and other vanished cultures including our immediate forefathers and foremothers, went through these experiences or something very much like them. Family, growing up, courtship and marriage, the end of life and the passage to something eternal.

Wilder's innovation, in a time of earnest realism in the theatre, box sets and meticulously furnished onstage drawing rooms, was to sweep the stage bare. He was unapologetic about that. The Stage Manager describes for us the layout of the town -- the churches, the shops, the livery stable, the Cartwrights' mansion on the hill, the Gibbs house and that of the Webbs. All are invisible. "And here," says he, "is a tree, for those who must have some scenery." He allowed characters and stagehands to carry on some chairs and a table, but the rest of Grover's Corners existed in the mind's eye.

Dave Steakley mostly respects that approach and enjoys the liberty it gives him as a director. Jason Amato's subtle, lustrous and haunting lighting dresses this stage, more than anything else, and every moment at the Kleberg stage is visually memorable.

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