Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca, Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward's University, November 14 -24, 2013

by Michael Meigs

Federico García Lorca's Bodas de Sangre takes places in the stark and arid landscape of the mind. The setting is rural Spain, somewhere far out in the countryside, and the characters are peasant families. They have no names, with the single exception of Leonardo, the angry and frustrated young farmer who precipitates the tragedy.

García Lorca identifies the others by role: the intended groom (novio), the bride (novia), the mother, the neighbor, the father of the bride. The story is simple: the confident young novio goes courting and fixes upon an eligible young woman related to men who killed his father and his brother. We watch the courting and attend the wedding; we also witness the anger of Leonardo, who still burns with a passion for the novia even though their acquaintance was broken years ago when Leonardo married the novia's cousin.

Jose Antonio Rodriguez, Anna C. Shultz (photo: Bret Brookshire)

Blood will have blood, despite all efforts to forget, to reconcile and to wash lives clean.

García Lorca had already achieved renown as a lyric poet when this, his first great success, was staged in Madrid for the first time in 1933. He doesn't fill these characters' mouths with abstractions or self-indulgent speculations, however; dialogue in the first half of the play is quick, sentences are short, and speech is often staccato. The early dialogue is sharp and cutting, much like the "little knife" that the novio's mother laments -- "A knife is such a simple object but it can take away the life of a man."

Contrasting with this energy are songs with imagery as lyrical as any of the author's poetry. In the second scene, Leonardo's wife and mother-in-law sing a cryptic lullabye about a mythic horse that refuses to drink; during the act two wedding preparations both servants and guests join in song, each offering a line or couplet.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

LOVE, LOSS AND WHAT I WORE by Delia Ephron and Nora Ephron, Hourglass Productions at Galaxy Dance Studio, September 14 - 28, 2013

presents




Love, Loss and What I Wore is a play of monologues and ensemble pieces about women, clothes, and memory covering all the important subjects--mothers, prom dresses, mothers, buying bras, mothers, hating purses and why we love wearing black. Based on the best selling book by Ilene Beckerman.


Directed by Robert Tolaro. Starring Johanna Whitmore, Cindy Vining, Amy McAndrew, Carla Nickerson and Briana McKeague


"Funny, compelling...Brought down the house..."
The New York Times


Saturdays, September 14, 21, and 28 2013, 8 PM

Tickets $10 at the door.

Click to reserve and purchase tickets via buyplaytix.com

The production runs at the Galaxy Dance Studio, 1700 South Lamar Blvd, Suite 338; Austin TX -- click for map

Galaxy Dance Studio is located in Central South Austin at 1700 South Lamar Blvd, Suite 338--just one mile South of the Colorado River. The cross street is Collier, and they are located in the South Lamar Business Park with plenty of secure free parking. Look for the blue and white "Galaxy" sign in the stack of business signs on the west side of Lamar (YogaYoga is also one of the businesses.)

Different Stages Announces Its 2012-2013 Season

announces its 2012-2013 season:

You Can’t Take It With You

by George Kaufman and Moss Hart

November - December 2012

The Vortex, 2307 Manor Rd

Director-Mick Darcy

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this comedy introduces us to the Sycamores, a family that delights in eccentricity.  They may seem mad, but they show us that those who pursue convention for its own sake and who need to conform to society’s conventions are the maddest of us all.  This play about living life to the fullest, following your own dreams, and daring to be unconventional has been a perennial since its debut in 1936. 

Quills

by Douglas Wright

January 2013,

City Theater, 3823 Airport, Suite D

Director-Norman Blumensaadt 

Sex. Perversion. Violence.  These are the themes of the tales that drip from the ink-laden quills of the notoriously irreverent Marquis de Sade in this Obie Award winning play. Confined to the Charneton Asylum for the Insane for the outlandish escapades he’d committed during the Napoleonic Era, the Marquis continues to pen his stories to the delight of the young seamstress, Madeleine, and to the scorn of Charenton’s devout Abbe DuCoulmeir.  When the Abbe attempts to silence the Marquis by taking his quills, his ink, and his paper, something intriguing occurs: the Marquis still finds a way to voice his scandalous yarns.  As the Abbe’s religious devotion clashes with the Marquis’s dedication to freedom of expression, the audience is treated to a tale of wit, irony, blasphemy, philosophy, and the struggle for power told partly as a blend of comedy of manners and Grand Guignol with a dash of grotesque exaggeration and a soupcon of gore.

Good People

by David Lindsay-Abaire

April – May; City Theate

3823 Airport, Suite D

Director-Karen Jambon 

With humor and pathos, Good People, explores the struggles, shifting loyalties, and unshakeable hopes that come with having next to nothing in America.  Set in Boston’s Southie neighborhood, where a night on the town means a rousing night of bingo, where this month’s paycheck barely covers last month’s bills, we meet Margaret Walsh.  Margaret has lost her job, is facing eviction, and scrambling to catch a break.  When she re-acquaints with a friend from the old neighborhood, someone who is now a very successful doctor, she attempts to use their childhood acquaintance as a ticket to turning her life around.  Good People is tough and tender and explores the tension of class in America.  Pending availability of performance rights.

Child’s Play

by  Robert Marasco

June – July

The Vortex,  2307 Manor Rd

Director-Bob Tolaro 

Something is amiss in a Catholic boys’ boarding school.  The students have become sinister, furtive, and conspiratorial as they steal up and down staircases after hours.  The menace erupts in savagery as the students torture one of their members and then another and then….  What is the disease that has settled in their souls?  Who is torturing the crotchety classics professor by sending obscene photographs to his dying mother?  And why? - The answer is hate in its devilish forms of pride, envy, and jealousy- a hate so perverse that is has infested the students and the staff.  The New York Times called this play “a powerful melodrama the will thrill audiences for a long time to come.” Pending availability of performance rights. 

 

ALL PLAYS, LOCATIONS AND DATES SUBJECT TO CHANGE.

Upcoming: Shakespeare, Politics and Shylock: A Political Forum, Austin Shakespeare, March 24 and 26

Received directly from www.austinshakespeare.org:

Shakespeare, Politics, and Shylock: A Political Forum

Directed by Ann Ciccolella.

Austin Shakespeare will offer scenes and discussion about “Shakespeare, Politics & Shyock”; speakers include: UT professor Dr. Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, Dr. Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute and on Thursday only: Dr. James Loehlin, Shakespeare at Winedale Regents Professor.

Jewish Community Center, 7300 Hart Lane (click for map), 8 p.m. Thurs., March 24 and

Curtain Theater, 7400 Coldwater Canyon Dr. (click for directions and map), 8 p.m., Sat., March 26

Jewish Community Center of Austin, 7300 Hart Lane, Austin, 78731

TICKETS: $35–$15; $15 for students, all performances. $10 seniors JCC.

Tickets are on sale now at nowplayingaustin.com or by calling (512) 474-8497.

Delicious Kosher treats and refreshments will be on sale at the JCC.

For Sat. March 26, Special pre-show champagne reception with speakers and actors at 7 pm.

or follow on Twitter: @austinshakes

Austin Shakespeare will offer scenes and discussion about “Shakespeare, Politics & Shyock” at both the Austin Jewish Community Center and at Richard Garriott’s Curtain Theater, which is a replica of an Elizabethan theater. Speakers include UT professor Dr. Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, Dr. Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute and, on Thursday only, Dr. James Loehlin, Shakespeare at Winedale Regents Professor.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

A Number by Caryl Churchill, Different Stages, April 23 - May 10

The concept of human cloning is profoundly unsettling.

We like the fact each of us is unique. Individuality situates us in the universe and in our own skins. Each of us might fantasize a different reality or our self as a different individual, but we intuit that even those avatars, if realized, would be unique.

The existence of fraternal twins or triplets is nature's benevolent random trick that reinforces our faith in our own individuality. Nature has made each of us.

But suppose that nature took a backseat in the process?

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

An Ideal Husband, Austin Shakespeare/UT Drama at Rollins Theatre, February 11 - March 1

The conventional staging of Oscar Wilde, within the frame of a proscenium, gives us a bright window into the highly mannered scene of London's Victorian upper classes.

For Austin Shakespeare's An Ideal Husband in the Long Center's Rollins Theatre, the audience surrounds the stage. This staging in-the-square gives us a visual kaleidoscope of witty epigrams, paradoxes, brilliant costumes and exquisitely good manners.

There's a technical challenge here, since at any given moment an actor will be standing with his or her back to a quarter of the audience. Anne Ciccolella's direction keeps the actors moving, in Copernican fashion, and the gifted young cast from the UT Theatre Department subtly adjusts position throughout.

Every spectator has a different view of the play, necessarily missing some portion of facial or corporal expression. But stage business is full, diction and accent are at a high level, and vocal characterizations are rich. No part of the audience is short changed.

Advocates of theatre in the round often assert that it creates a closer community of audience as spectator reactions are exchanged across the playing space. The playing space in the Rollins is broad, however, and I found little of that effect. Concentrating on Wilde's words and characters, one easily loses the spectator background.

Beneath the wit and banter of An Ideal Husband, deeply serious outcomes are at risk. Sir Robert Chiltern's political career is in the ascendent. His sister Miss Mabel has set her cap for the brilliant but still noncommittal Lord Goring. Goring's crotchety father Lord Caversham insists upon choosing a spouse for the young man. Into this world comes the amoral, enormously wealthy Mrs. Cheveley of Vienna, threatening the blackmail ruination of one promising aristocrat and the matrimonial ruination of another.

An Ideal Husband is a vivid portrait of a bygone world and age. Wilde, the son of an impoverished Irish aristocrat, an extravagant self-promoter, longed to secure a place in that world. Five years after the 1895 success of this play, he had been disgraced, judged, jailed and was dying at the age of 46, an exile in Paris. The brilliance of the idle life of the British upper classes was largely ended by the Great War of 1914 - 1918.

It's fun to psychoanalyze the piece, seeing it as Wilde's self-promoting joke on that beau monde. For example, the foppish Lord Goring, who is a patent stand-in for Wilde, proves wittier and more effective than any of the other characters. Director Anne Ciccolella recounted another insight in the Q&A after the preview night: much of the tension of the piece is created by the anguish of Sir Robert over a hidden crime in his youth that can alienate the affections of his morally absolutist, adoring wife, Lady Chiltern. Wilde himself had recently married well and was presumably concealing from his wife the homosexuality that would soon ruin him.

The plot is that of a relatively conventional London stage melodrama of the time, with much of the action revolving around letters sent, not destroyed, stolen or misdirected. Sir Robert (Mark Scheibmeir, left) and Lady Chiltern (Sydney Andrews, lead photo above), are a relatively unsurprising married pair, and his exemplary political career seems based more on championing of morality and principal rather than on eloquence.

Lord Caversham (Robert Tolaro, right), constantly annoyed by his son, and the sententious gossip Lady Markby (Janelle Buchanan) are relatively predictable caricatures of the blindly self-important upper class.

Shaun Patrick Tubbs (left) as the Wilde surrogate Lord Goring does not have the bulk or the drawling dismissiveness one might conventionally expect. Instead, he is a lithe, cocky smiling fellow ready to mimic and mock his absurd old Pater but also quick to prove steadfast concern both for his friend Robert and for Robert's lady wife.


Ah, but the villainesse! Verity Branco as the spider lady Mrs. Cheveley (center) is beautiful and coolly efficient. With high cheekbones, perfect diction and a decisiveness betrayed in a measured strut, she is the antithesis of the polite goody-goody world of society. She lives abroad for good reason -- having been expelled from boarding school for stealing, she went on to wed and use up two husbands before lanching into the dubious but highly successful collaboration with a now-deceased European baron. Branco's vigor is captivating and her diction is as precise as a stiletto.

At the opposite end of the female spectrum is the ingenue Miss Mabel. Marlane Barnes bubbles with flirtatious mischief. Her tippy-toeing rushes across the stage manifest a fine sense of physical comedy, all the more comic because of the constraints of society and corsets. Her exquisite nonsense suggests that she does, indeed, share Lord Goring's non-jaded joy for things fine; one can imagine that she will some day become exquisitely scandalous while loving him always to excess . . . a promise of Bloomsbury, a decade or more before those lovely libertines were to flourish.

Wilde has a message -- approximately, "We men adore women for their imperfections but you women will insist on putting your men on a pedestal, obliged to perfection."

Those intent on seeking modern day relevance might force the matter by referring to recent scandals of political life, but I would not take that reading of the tea leaves from this aromatic cup. An Ideal Husband succeeds for what it is -- a witty send-up of conventional melodrama and of the differences between men and women.

"Aielli Unleashed" program on KUT.org -- February 12 interview with director and cast members, including scenes and Michael McKelvey's incidental music (26 minutes)

Audio piece and photos at KUT.org

Promotional article on OutinAmerica.com

Review by KelseyK on Austinist.com, February 20

Review by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin on Statesman's Austin360 blog, February 22

Comment posted on van Ryzin's review, February 24: It is a unique opportunity to bring our performance work off-campus and into the Austin community. The experience for our students is rich and rare as they enjoy a three-week run in a classic play housed in the exquisite Long Center for the Performing Arts. This collaboration seems very right. Hook ‘em! Lucien Douglas, Associate Professor of Theatre & Dance

Review by Laura Clark in the Daily Texan Online, February 24

Review by Barry Pineo in the Austin Chronicle, February 26