Tragedy: A Tragedy by Will Eno, Hyde Park Theatre, September 12 - October 12, 2013

by Jess Helmke

Much To Say About Nothing

The sun has set. The theatre is quiet. And a play begins. Just another normal Thursday night in the Austin Hyde Park neighborhood.

But maybe it’s more than that, suggests playwright Will Eno. His play Tragedy: a Tragedy is now running at Hyde Park Theatre, engaging audiences with ironic perceptions of mundane, everyday life. Eno’s repetitious cyclone of humor entertains the audience with threads of thematic action, roccoco rythmic storytelling, glimmers of conflict, lyric poetics, and the occasional element of surprise.

The mere fact that Will Eno uses television as his theatrical setting is unexpected. The play of gives us four main characters: Frank the anchor, John the weatherman, Constance the elated and naive reporter, and Michael the global reporter . Tragedy begins as a straightforward newscast, typical in speech pattern and line delivery, butr a little disappointing since there seems to be a lack of events to report. Characters speak directly to the audience as if we were sitting in the comfort of own homes, and their stage business is humorously appropriate with index fingers to the eapieces and sips of coffee by the anchor. I totally bought it.

The power and versatiity of the tool of theatre is exploited in most of Will Eno’s work, and the comedy Tragedy: a Tragedy is no different. Its discussions about darkness remind us of a bare stage. Its painful nostalgic childhood stories almost make us nervous all over again. And the play’s still, quiet moments lie glimmering like the stars. Begging observers to think. To try. To understand. To comment. To DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING in this existential awareness report from Action 7 News.

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

Video: Tragedy: A Tragedy by Will Eno, Hyde Park Theatre, September 12 - October 12, 2013

Video by Eric Graham for the



        presentation of

September 12 - October 12, 2013
Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 p.m.
Hyde Park Theatre 511 W. 43rd Street at Guadalupe - click for map
Will the sun rise again? It's looking unlikely, but no worries: our crack news team is on the story.  Featuring Nathan Brockett, Michael Ferstenfeld, Molly Karrasch, Benjamin Summers, and Ken Webster. Directed by Ken Webster.


Click to buy tickets via BuyPlayTix ($20 general admission, students/seniors/Austin Creative Alliance $18)

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

TRAGEDY: A TRAGEDY by Will Eno, Hyde Park Theatre, September 12 - October 12

[511 W. 43rd Street at Guadalupe - click for map ]



presents

Will the sun rise again? It's looking unlikely, but no worries: our crack news team is on the story.

"A charming display of witty satire in the face of Armageddon. . . . this 75-minute play serves as a big ol' poke in the eye to media in an age of geopolitical uncertainty, pending disaster, and a preoccupation with ratings." - Theatermania.

Starring Nathan Brockett, Michael Ferstenfeld, Molly Karrasch, Benjamin Summers, and Ken Webster. Directed by Ken Webster.

Click to buy tickets via BuyPlayTix ($20 general admission, students/seniors/Austin Creative Alliance $18)















(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Upcoming: Antigone by Jean Anouilh, Oh Dragon Theatre Company at Casa de Luz, November 9 - 18

Oh Dragon Theatre Company

presents

Antigone
by Jean Anouilh

directed by Nathan Brockett
Casa De Luz Auditorium - 1701 Toomey Road Austin, TX 78704 (click for map)
Saturdays Nov. 10 and 17 at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m.
Friday, November 16 at 8 p.m.
Sunday, November 18 at 8 p.m.Ticket price - $10.00




Nathan Brockett adapts French playwright Jean Anouilh's modernized version of the Greek tragedy Antigone. The story is set in the sleek palace of a fascist state ruled by Creon. His niece Antigone is horrified by Creon's order that the body of her brother--who led a rebellion against the state--be left on the battlefield to rot. When she violates the edict, guards haul her before Creon, who struggles to convince her that his reasons are honorable, despite the ugly consequences, but Antigone remains steadfast, even though her death will result.

Featuring the talents of Danielle Evon Ploeger, Richard Dodwell, Samantha Wiley, Austin Amelio, Anna Schatte, Cami Eastman, Kel Sanders, Michael Davis, and Dalton Hamilton.

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Auditions for Jean Anouilh's Antigone, Oh Dragon Theatre Company, August 20 - 21

Oh Dragon Theatre Company is proud to announce auditions for their upcoming production of "Antigone," directed by Nathan Brockett. 

 

Monday, August 20th & Tuesday, August 21st at 7pm-10pm at The Space (7915 Manchaca Road) (click for map). Performance dates : November 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th.

Jean Anouilh's adaptation of Antigone is a tragedy inspired by Greek mythology and the play of the same name (Antigone by Sophocles) from fifth century B.C.

Please prepare a one minute contemporary monologue that uses heightened language (Ruhl, Mamet, O'Neil). Be prepared to participate in cold readings as well. Please also bring a copy of your headshot and resume.

To schedule an audition time, please send an email to ohdragontheatrecompany@gmail.com. If you show up without a time slot, we will not be able to guarantee you an audition.

Upcoming: Marvelous Things by Lindsey Greer Sikes and Paul Marbach, Blue Theatre, October 6 - 23

Received directly:

Lindsey Greer Sikes presents a new story for the stage:

script by Lindsey Greer Sikes, original music by Paul Marbech

directed by Lindsey Greer Sikes October 6 – 23, Thursdays - Saturdays at 7 p.m., Sundays at 5 p.m.

at the Blue Theater, 916 Springdale (click for map)

Tickets $12-$20, reservations via marveloustickets@gmail.com

Click to view FaceBook Event Page

In a theatre, who's to say what's real and what's imagined?

Coming this October to the Blue Theater is a new work by Austin Playwright and Director Lindsey Greer Sikes. Inspired by native-Texas indie-rock band Eisley’s “Room Noises”, Marvelous Things is a theatrical event which aims to challenge the traditional form of the play as well as the role of the audience, who are not only spectators but participants in the creation of a false reality—or as we more commonly call it, the theater.

We invite you to meet Winnie: a young woman full of life and always in awe of it. But as her wedding day approaches she becomes unable to distinguish the world in which she is living from the marvelous things she imagines. And as the consequences of lives around her quickly unravel, so the creatures of her mind come alive from within the world of the audience and take to the stage. Presumably, Winnie remains safe in the delusions of her imagination, until a spine-tingling series of final events forces her to confront delusion, reality and ultimately: theatrical reality.

Marvelous Things will be presented at the BLUE Theater on Thursday/Saturday at 7 PM and Sundays at 5 PM from October 6^th – 23^rd. Tickets can be reserved by emailing marveloustickets@gmail.com and purchased at the door on a sliding scale from $12-$20. For a truly Austin experience, be sure to arrive early and grab some dinner with our hot-off-the-grill BBQ, fresh pie, and featured specialty drinks including a spiked Southern Iced Tea! Cash only.

Written and Directed by Lindsey Greer Sikes. Orginal Music Composed by Paul Marbach. Featuring Rachel Weise, Nathan Brockett, Sara Harless, Stephen Mercantel, Emily Kennedy, Brett Hamman, Bastion Carboni, Heather Diamond, Jonathon Itchon, Vanessa Marie, Solveij Praxis and Georgia Young.

Eurydice by Sara Ruhl, Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward's University, February 3 - 13

In Sarah Ruhl's world, stones can talk, the dead can send letters to the living, and the devil connives to send a fragile bride to her death so he can court her in the afterlife. On the far side of the river of forgetting, memory fades and the ability to read disappears. Young Orpheus, bereft in this life, telephones a long-distance information operator in an effort to try to locate his dead wife.

Despite the striking mythic beauty of its concepts, Ruhl's Eurydice made me profoundly uneasy last year when Different Stages did it at the City Theatre. Perhaps because the shade of Eurydice's father clings to his memories and continues to dream of her, despite the emptiness and unchanging nature of life after death.

Ruhl has a frank and direct consciousness of the all too transitory nature of this existence. She wraps that message in the reworking of the Greek fable of the musician Orpheus who braved the underworld and came close -- just that close -- to bringing his bride Eurydice back.

Jamie Goodwin as the quietly grieving dead father has depth, dignity and stature, in contrast to the simplicity of Nathan Brockett and Cassidy Schiltz as the eternally naive lovers.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

The Imaginary Invalid by Molière and David Chambers, Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward's University, September 16 - 26

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin would not have objected at all to this re-do of his 1673 farce. He wrote The Imaginary Invalid in rapid-fire prose, using verse only for comic ballets at the intervals (omitted in this staging). David Chambers' translation/interpretation of the piece follows the action faithfully, although often with slangy word choices. Between them, Chambers and director David Long apply a clownification of the characters and a Borscht Belt leer not obvious in the original texts.

David Long has a good time, sending the characters zinging along. Some of his direction recalled those presentational techniques he used last year for bobrauschenbergamerica -- marking soliloquies and the young lovers' mock operetta with rapid, showy shifts of lighting, for example.

Argan, the title character played with fine finicky flair by veteran actor Richard Robichaux, is a rich hypochondriac with two daughters. Their mother passed away and Argan remarried -- to an effusive gold digger determined to persuade him to deed his property to her. Chambers renders this character -- Béline in the original -- as "Nastya," played by the charming Jill Blackwood with a patently fake Russian accent. Argan is determined to marry off his elder daughter Angelina (Michelle Elisabeth Brandt) to a physician so that he'll have free medical care, but she has already fallen in love with another (Cléanthe, played by Jon Wayne Martin).

Robichaux has lots of grumpy one-liners, mostly insults. His perpetual antagonist is Toinette, the servant, but he also gets into it with physician Thomas Diablo (Robert Faires), with Cléanthe, and with his brother (also played by Faires). In contrast and to our great amusement, the hypochondriac goes all goo-goo eyes with wife Nastya and gets entirely panicked by the rages of his principal physician Dr. Defecato (Meredith Montgomery).

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . .

Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen, Mary Moody Northern Theatre, St. Edward's University, February 12 - 21

You might get lost in the tidy space of St. Ed's Mary Moody Northern Theatre if you haven't done your homework before you get to the theatre. Peer Gynt is not your dependable old social realism from Ibsen. This story is a wild ride of fable, myth and allegory that takes you across the world and through an entire prankish life, written by a young dramatist who had escaped bleak Norway for the dazzling sunscapes of Italy.

The attractive printed program given to you has a full page on the august poet and translator Robert Bly, but no synopsis of the action, other than a list of the locales of the 34 scenes, ranging from "the farm" to Morocco to Cairo and back to the mountains of Norway. For more than that, see the ALT profile of the drama, "The Wild Striving of Peer Gynt," published here on February 8.

Peer Gynt, both the play and the character played by Jacob Trussell, moves at speed, between a canter and a gallop throughout.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Profile: The Wild Striving of Peer Gynt, Mary Moody Northern Theatre, St. Edward's University, February 11 - 21

Peer Gynt is one of those great, impossible works of literature. It's a masterwork of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, one that is totally different from the new 19th century realistic dramas of social concern for which he became famous. This is the playwright who later gave us A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts, An Enemy of the People and Hedda Gabler.

Well before that, after a penurious career as a creative director and producer at Norwegian state theatres in Bergen and in Cristiana (Oslo), in 1864 while in his mid-thirties this self-taught artist left Norway with his wife and child for self-exile in sunny Italy. He continued to write. A five-act verse play Brand succeeded in Stockholm in 1866. The following year Ibsen had his five-act verse play Peer Gynt published in Copenhagen.

Almost ten years passed before the piece appeared on stage, in the Norwegian capital. And no wonder -- Ibsen himself wrote without a thought for the constraints of conventional staging, which he knew well. Peer Gynt is an exalted narrative of Peer's whole life, leaping in space and time. He seduces and runs off with the intended bride of a rival, then abandons her. Act II places the cheeky young Peer in a troll world, contemplating marriage to the daughter of the troll who rules the mountain (the scene for which composer Edvard Grieg wrote the comic but menacing incidental music "In The Hall of the Mountain King"). The action moves from upcountry Norway to Morocco to the Saharan wastes to a lunatic asylum in Egypt to a storm-wracked sailing ship and, finally, back to rural Norway. Upon his return Peer encounters his former neighbors, the devil in the shape of a parson, and the grim reaper in the guise of a button maker.

Because of the unrestrained length of the piece, a conventional static reading from a lectern would take more than six hours. In rhymed couplets. In Norwegian.

The first American production of this epic was in 1907. I had the good fortune to see a 1998 production by the Washington DC Shakespeare Theatre. In the early 1980's the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis did a five-hour version; in 2008 they again produced Peer Gynt, using a new stage-version translation by Minnesota poet Robert Bly, starring Shakespeare veteran Mark Rylance. Bly had the Minnesota Norwegian whimsy to mimic Ibsen by crafting about half of his text in rhyming verse, especially for comic scenes such as the dialogue in which the King of the Trolls seeks to convince Peer to stay in his kingdom. Bly cut and tailored the action so that the play ran about three hours.

St. Ed's assistant professor of theatre Ev Lunning, Jr., is using Bly's translation and has cut it further. He cast St. Ed's senior Jacob Trussell as Peer. You've had plenty of opportunities over the last couple of years to see Trussell. He was nominated for the B. Iden Payne awards each of the last two years for musical theatre leads in Sweeney Todd and Bat-Boy, The Musical. Last season at St. Ed's Mary Moody Northern Theatre he was in Cloud 9, Cyrano de Bergerac and Pajama Game. He appeared in The Fantasticks for Austin Playhouse and Leave It To Beverley for the DA! Theatre Collective.

Continuing its long tradition of casting Equity actors alongside its students, St. Ed's has Sheila Gordon in the key role of Peer's mother and Ben Wolfe in a variety of roles, including that of the big puppet-headed Troll King.

Peer Gynt is a remarkable work. Ibsen's source was a collection of Norwegian folktales with the opening legends of Peer's conquering a magic flying stag and striving against an unseen monster known as the Bøyg. Add to those Paul Bunyan exaggerations the fact that Peer's a bouncing, bounding braggart and flirt, obliged to abandon his true love Solveig because of his entanglements with the trolls. The story has elements of a Bildungsroman (a tale of growing up), a resemblance to the picaresque novel (a rascal's adventures), and withering portrayals of 19th century mercantilism and capitalism. Peer wants to become the Emperor of the World.

All in all, and throughout, Peer is on a search to find his Self: "One must be oneself; for oneself and one’s own/one must do one’s best, both in great and in small things./If the luck goes against you, at least you’ve the honour/of a life carried through in accordance with principle."

Yet for all his inventiveness and egotism he has no concept of that Self. In the Egyptian lunatic asylum, confronted by a desperate madman who imagines himself to be a Pen, Peer calls himself "a blank sheet of paper." In the fifth and final act as Peer is facing imminent death he peels an onion, imagining it to represent himself -- peeling away his many roles and adventures, eventually to find nothing in the middle. Because Death threatens to melt down Peer's soul with other imperfectly realized lives, Peer seeks frantically for some witness, any witness, to assert that his life was not entirely futile.

This is a huge, demanding text. Last Monday, the final full run through at the Mary Moody Northern Theatre before tech sessions ran smoothly and swiftly, giving promise of a dramatic, gripping evening of theatre. Jacob Trussell was self assured, emphatic and energetic in all of Peer's many permutations.

This is Peer's life story, from adolescence to near the grave, and Trussell's appearance and makeup will reflect that. The 2008 Guthrie version, according to the 48-year-old Mark Rylance while playing Peer, was a survey of Gynt's life retro and avant from the perspective of middle age. The St Ed's production, inevitably, because of the university setting and the predominantly young cast, will imply a young man's look forward into that feckless adventurer's life.

Trussell with his rough good looks and devotion to the thespian calling is mounting that legendary stag, about to ride forward into his future. Director Ev Lunning, Jr., both an academic and a seasoned member of Actor's Equity, represents for me a Peer who's somewhere along about the end of Act III in his own five-act Gyntian adventure. That combination, along with Gordon, Wolfe, Lainey Murphy as Peer's beloved but abandoned Solveig, Nathan Brockett and other talented company members, promises a full and challenging evening of classic theatre.

EXTRAS

American Theatre magazine interview of Mark Rylance about the Guthrie's 2008 Peer Gynt, Feb. 2008 (.pdf)

The Life of Galileo, Mary Moody Northern Theatre, St. Edward's University, November 12 -22

A lot is going on in Brecht's The Life of Galileo, and not just onstage. The program notes at the Mary Moody Northern Theatre will help you some, with a tidy summary of the historical figures, the heliocentric Ptolemaic model of the universe, and the heretical but accurate Copernican revision of it, and some of the elements of the plot.

With that crib sheet you can comfortably follow the depiction of that impatient and skeptical scientist's lifetime tussle with the Catholic Church. Director Michelle Polgar, three Actors' Equity members and the student cast and crew will give you the story, unrolling it much of the time in a design of curiously reduced lighting, as if the dark ages were lingering, literally, in the period 1610 - 1634.

You will not get much of a sense of the intensely brainy Bertolt Brecht or his reasons for fastening upon those 400-year-old events. Study of any of the several texts that Brecht crafted between 1938 and 1955 would show you that ideas and apprehension -- Angst -- are fundamental to the work.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

bobrauschenbergamerica, Mary Moody Northern Theatre at St Edward's University, September 17 - 27

Don't go looking for Robert Rauschenberg the 20th century modern artist in this grab bag. This is homage purely by reference.

Playwright/facilitator Charles Mee is frank in his admission that the piece is a collage of ideas and random bits that had as their starting points some of the images that appear in Rauschenberg's work.

Mee and others free associated about those images. They collected texts and images and other random bits to share in theatre workshops. Mee says that he told his collaborators, "Anyone can steal anything I brought in to make whatever piece they might want to make, and I could steal whatever they brought in."

He sifted through the material, workshopped it again, threw half of the results away and worked the rest up with the SITI Theatre in New York in 2001. We Austinites can think of that ensemble theatre company as the Rude Mechs of New York City.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Sweeney Todd, SummerStock Austin at Rollins Theatre, July 30 - August 8

The demon barber who slits his clients' throats is an urban myth celebrated in print first as a "penny dreadful," or serialized story of scandal and murder, in London in 1845. The razor and the strop continued to hold a fascination, at least until the technological advance of Mr. Gillette's safety razor put them at some remove. That wicked barber had figured in 13 earlier versions on radio stage and screen before this 1979 piece by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler. They adapted British dramatist Christopher Bond's 1973 stage play, which had reimagined Todd as the wronged party, bent on revenge.

SummerStock Austin gives us their vivid imagining of Sweeney Todd's world. It's a London of grotesques and dog-eat-dog, corresponding to that which Thomas Hobbes imagined as pre-dating civil society: "a war of all against all " where lives are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

The self-assured Judge Turpin and his agent the unctuous Beadle Banford represent the genteel classes who oppress the poor and regard them as little more than animals. Into this morass and degradation comes Sweeney Todd, unjustly condemned many years before and now escaped from a penal colony. Pie baker Mrs. Lovett tells him that his beautiful wife has died and that his infant daughter Johanna is a ward of the Judge. Mrs. Lovett restores to him his case of razors -- Todd's "little friends" -- and the elaborate revenge plot begins.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .