Upcoming: FREEDOM FIGHTER by Philip Kreyche, Dougherty Arts Center, August 23 - September 8

Freedom Fighter by Philip Kreyche, Dougherty Arts Center, August 23 - September 8

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Ryan Manning as Theodore Roosevelt

Samson Pleasant as David Fagen

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Siyâvash, adapted by Philip Kreyche, Wit's End Theatre Project, October 14 - 17

That Philip Kreyche is a dab hand at theatre, a young man with imagination and a taste for the exotic. His earlier piece Love Me was an expressionist treatment of incidents in the life of the Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka. He staged it first at a summer workshop at Austin Community College and then brought it back for FronteraFest.

I hadn't heard of Kokoschka. Kreyche's piece prompted me to do some research -- which means, these days, hitting Google and musing over the reduced-size images of the weird and wonderful portraits for which Kokoschka is famous. And during the summer while wandering in Stockholm's Moderna Museet, I came face-to-face with Kokoschka's larger than life size portrait of Joseph de Montesquiou-Fezensac. It was an eerie, satisfying moment, one that I owe to Kreyche's reach beyond the ordinary.

Kreyche and friends staged his second original script earlier this month at the woods at the southwest corner of Dittmar and South First, 'way south in Austin. Company member and colleague to Kreyche Ryan Manning explained that their Wit's End Theatre Project takes its name from that piece of ground: Witt's End, formerly a stopping point and campground for visitors to Austin.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: B-Sides from the A-List, short absurdist plays, Austin Community College, April 16 - 24

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Austin Community College Drama Department presents

B-Sides from the A-List
absurdist short plays by Ionesco, Beckett, Albee, and Pinter

April 16 - 17, April 23 at 8 p.m.
Sunday, April 18 and Saturday, April 24 at 2 p.m.
Suggested donation of $5 for students, $10 for general admission, to benefit the Drama and Dance Scholarship Fund.

The Austin Community College Drama Department will open and close the upcoming Carnival ah! arts fest with B-Sides from the A-List, absurdist short plays by Ionesco, Beckett, Albee, and Pinter.

Professor Shelby Brammer, chair of the Drama Department, comments, “These playwrights changed the theatre as we knew it during the 1950s through the 1960s, and their effects are still profoundly felt in the theatre and in the culture-at-large – witness the phenomena of Lady Gaga. They are dark, funny, and often distill existence to its very essence.”

B-Sides will play at the Rio Grande Mainstage Theater (located on the second floor of the campus). The short plays include Salutations, directed by Ryan Manning; Rough for Theatre I, Act Without Words I, and Act Without Words II,directed by Jodi Jinks; The Sandbox, directed by W.T. Bryant; and Silence,directed by Arthur Adair.

Carnival ah! is an ACC Arts & Humanities festival showcasing live music, dance, theater, film, literature, and art. The events run April 16-24 at the Rio Grande Campus (1212 Rio Grande St. in downtown Austin).

For additional image see AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

The Men from Mars & Careful as Mice, ACC Experimental Student Performance Lab, July 15 - 25

Ryan Manning provided a lot of the energy for the Austin Community College Experimental Student Performance Lab. This summer 2009 enterprise put on four pieces, all student-written and student-directed, all performed by ACC students. Manning wrote three of them and performed in three. Whatever ESPL show was up there, Manning was part of it, somehow.

Bravo for that energy and engagement.

Austin Live Theatre published a review of Manning's "Beckett" piece An Empty Stage on July 25. The Manning canon is filled out with this double bill of his goofy-but-fun The Men from Mars and his "Pinter/Sam Shephard" work Careful as Mice.

Austin Community College students can whoop it up as well as anyone, and the intimate Gallery Theatre on the third floor of the Rio Grande campus was a fine place to do so. Think of every space opera you've ever seen, from Star Wars to Star Trek to Battlestar Galactica, put them in a blender and dress up your actors with intentionally campy outfits and attitudes. That was The Men from Mars. We whooped right along with them in the electronic music as those creepy Martians with stockings over their faces came attacking our noble troops, who were Good Guy Macho stereotypes from every war movie you've ever seen.

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

Love Me and An Empty Stage, ACC Experimental Student Performance Lab, July 15 - 25

Austin Community College's summer 2009 Experimental Student Performance Lab got off to a good start for me with Philip Kreyche's expressionistic two-act work Love Me, preceded by Ryan Manning's whimsical curtain-raiser The Empty Stage.

Manning's short piece gives us Dani Miller as "Pye, the Man with No Memory," and Manning himself as "Que, The Man Who Reminds Him." Imagine Estragon and Vladimir, respectively, except that instead of waiting for Godot, they're trying to construct a story for themselves. Author Manning awards himself the smarter of the two roles, in which he impatiently corrects and cues Pye while cadging cigarettes from him.

They eventually concoct lightweight fantasies, enlivened by the appearance of Sally Ziegler, Ariel-like, as "the beautiful girl" and "the Spanish princess," and by Phillip Kreyche as "the last man of high moral character." Our two tramps wind up paddling an invisible canoe up the center aisle, finishing their dialogue behind us, and after a pause the action begins for the two-act production.

In the Q&A afterward an audience member confessed to being confused by the fact that the company made no explicit demarcation between the two pieces. The casts overlapped, but each piece was announced separately in the program.

Kreyche's two-act Love Me is triply impressive. He dug deep into German literary history to find the source documents, including especially an eerie quasi-autobiography by the Viennese painter Oskar Kokoschka describing the artist's self-destructive infatuation with Alma Mahler, wife of the composer. He wrote a piece that is starkly expressionistic in style, using incidents from Kokoschka's life and portraying them with a mixture of narrative and mad illusion. And he played the principal character, Kokoschka, with stage presence, palpable emotion, and style.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Summer Play Festival, Austin Community College, July 15 - 25

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Austin Community College
Experimental Student Performance Lab Summer Play Festival
Rio Grande Campus Mainstage/Gallery Theaters

Careful As Mice
Chasing the America Dream is the backdrop for this dark comedy homage to mid-centruy exploitation films, set in a crumbling boarding house. Written by Ryan Manning, directed by Sally Zeigler. Careful As Mice plays in the Mainstage Theatre Wednesday July 15th, Friday July 17th, and Thursday July 23rd at 7 p.m. and Saturday July 25th at 1 p.m.

Love Me
A descent into madness, chronicling the life of German Expressionist artist, Okskar Kokoshcka and his obession with Alma Mahler, wife of the composer Gustav Mahler. Written by Philip Kreyche, Directed by Ryan Manning. Love Me plays in the Mainstage Theatre Thursday July 16th, Wednesday July 22nd, and Friday July 24th at 7 p.m. and Saturday July 18th at 1 p.m.

The Men From Mars
features epic theatre gone awry amidst a Martian takeover, with live soundscape. Written by Ryan Manning, Directed by Michael Gonzalez and Dani Miller. The Men From Mars plays in the Gallery Theatre Wednesday July 15th, Friday July 17th, and Thursday July 23rd at 8:30 p.m. and Saturday July 25th at 2:30 p.m.

FREE ADMISSION