Upcoming: Night of the Living Dead, Weird City Theatre Company at Dougherty Arts Center, October 13 - 29

Received directly:

presents

George Romero's

Night of the Living Dead

October 13 - October 29, Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.

Dougherty Arts Center 1110 Barton Springs Rd (click for map)

Thursday Nights are “Pay What You Wish” at the door. For all other performances, tickets are $20.00 for adults and $15.00 for seniors and students (with ID), and group rates are available. Tickets can be purchased at our website, www.weirdcitytheatre.com.

*There is a limited number of tickets available for each performance and reservations are highly encouraged.*

Weird City Theatre Company announces the premiere of the audience favorite Night of the Living Dead, newly adapted & directed by WCT Artistic Director, John F. Carroll. George Romero & John Russo's classic zombie film is brought back from the dead in a new adaptation of WCT's 2008 hit [click for ALT review of November 7, 2008]. The cast includes WCT familiar faces Patti Neff-Tiven, Kevin Gouldthorpe, Michael Covey, Sarah Covey, Emily Hampton, LeRoy Beck, Jenni Bauer, Nick Orzech, Robert Berry, Bethany Harbaugh,Chris Romani, Javier Smith, Justin Hampton, and introducing Elisabeth Giminiani.


Weird City Theatre's mission is to encourage the growth of the artist and represent the uniqueness and vitality of Austin through re-envisioned classics and original works. Keeping a child-like sense of play, we focus on the process of the actor and we are playing our part to keep Austin weird! Weird City Theatre is a sponsored project of the Greater Austin Creative Alliance, a nonprofit performing arts service organization.

The Servant Girl Annihilator, Weird City Theatre Company, October 28 - November 6

For Halloween and for the following weekend your friends at the Weird City Theatre Company take you on a ghost tour. In the program they express special thanks to Monica Ballard and the Austin Ghost Tours for help with research on the late night attacks and rapes of 1884-1885 recalled in the piece.

The title is taken from a comment in a letter written by the 23-year-old William Sydney Porter -- O. Henry -- who had recently relocated from the Northeast to Texas for health reasons: "Town is fearfully dull, except for the frequent raids of the Servant Girl Annihilators, who make things lively during the dead hours of the night."

Weird City shows you a murky movie to set the atmosphere and then shepherds your limited group through a series of experiences. Not a tour of the sites of the attacks, but, rather, a series of encounters with the ghosts of the victims and of the spectre of one very worried marshal. Your guide is the very contained Sarah Griffin-Covey, who conducts you to the western entrance to backstage and moves your group from one to another of the stations established on the stage itself. White lines on the floor mark the "no-go" areas, so participants shift about in a sort of Brownian motion in order to find their vantage points. Lighting is minimal but carefully coordinated and directed, both for atmosphere and for visibility.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Curse of the House of Usher, Weird City Theatre Company, February 18 - 28

Weird City Theatre Company specializes in the creepy, the spooky and the haunting. Their sense of "weird" shares something with the scruffy, quirky laid-back attitude of the now clichéd slogan "Keep Austin Weird," in that they are working on a shoestring and a vision. But they are really embracing a different notion of Austin creativity: the idea of translating otherworldly out-of-copyright works into evening séances to give us suspense, a shiver and a release.

Patti Neff-Tiven's set and Philip B. Richard's lighting provide plenty of atmosphere. That's particularly important for a piece in which Poe immediately establishes the crumbling Usher mansion as a character in its own right. In the first paragraph of the short story as he arrives on the scene, the unnamed narrator stops to examine that manse:

What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble. [. . . ] I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodeled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

Poe's language goes on like that through his twenty atmospheric pages, as the narrator seeks to renew the childhood friendship and draw Roderick Usher from black depression and acutely painful reactions to sound and sensation.

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