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 Stageon 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 . . . .
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.
