Penfold Theatre Profile by Abilene Christian University,

From the website of

The Penfold Theatre Company | Austin, Texas

ACU alumni trio Nathan Jerkins, Sean Martin and Ryan Crowder have made a big splash in the Austin arts scene this year. As the Penfold Theatre Company, they've sold out shows, piqued the interest of the rapidly growing Austin suburb of Round Rock and swept the Austin Critics Circle Awards. This year they received awards for Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and their show, Jon and Jen, captured the award for Best Musical.

In every title that we choose, in every choice that we make, we're trying to connect to an audience and not just put on a play. Yes, we have quality standards, but it's about telling stories that inspire and impact people. - Sean Martin

The timing of Penfold Theatre could not have been better. The year before they began this company, an arts council was formed and a professional symphony came to the Round Rock area. So by the time they got there, a foundation for the arts had already been created.

Perfect timing

"It was great because there's already a stream going that way, and we've stepped into that stream," said Sean. "Round Rock is really well positioned, because it's a city in its own right, but it's also at the intersection of several other growing suburbs." The population of Round Rock combined with surrounding suburbs is nearing 400,000 people.

The city council of Round Rock came to see Penfold's second show, The Last Five Years. "Then they called us up, took us to lunch and basically sat us down and said, 'What can we do to make you in our town?' " said Ryan.

Read more at www.acu.edu . . . .

Mary Stuart, Austin Shakespeare at the Rollins Theatre, Long Center, February 11 - 28

Mary Stuart in Austin Shakespeare's staging at the Rollins Theatre provides a powerful, cathartic experience for the spectator. Schiller's drama gives us two sixteenth-century queens, each with a claim to the English throne, wrapped in tangled interests of state and church, trapped together like scorpions in a bottle and surrounded by plotters, counselors, and mendacity.

This Mary Stuart plays like Shakespeare, with actors in stylized Elizabethan garb moving in a long court laid between ranks of spectators. Director Ann Ciccolella assembled a cast worthy of the aim, none more so than Helen Merino as the imprisoned Mary Stuart and Pamela Christian as Elizabeth I. The confrontation between them in the mid-point of the action is epic, a careful duet of encounter, reason, flaring passion and, ultimately, disaster for the prisoner, disguised as triumph .

The images and intrigues suggest that Shakespeare could have written this text.

Except, of course, he could never have touched this subject. These events were hot, recent realities in Shakespeare's time. He wrote and performed his first plays five years or less after Mary Stuart's execution in 1587, which occurred the same year as the publication of Holinshed's Chronicles, a major source for his plays. Shakespeare flourished under Elizabeth's reign, but the second half of his career was under the reign of James I, the son of of Mary Stuart.

There's a lot of background and history in this piece, virtually all of which takes place off stage. Schiller is remarkably adept in giving you a sense of it, including the scandals and sins of Mary's youth, Catholic plots against Elizabeth the Protestant queen, the formal hearing and trial of Mary Stuart by 42 peers of the realm, the machinations and courting of Elizabeth by the French royal family, the conflicting advice to Elizabeth once Mary had been convicted, and Elizabeth's ambiguous instructions once she had signed the death warrant.

You could study all that. Or you could go with the action, which alternates between Mary in her prison and Elizabeth at the court, equally a prison.

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

Images: Mary Stuart, Austin Shakespeare at the Rollins Theatre, Long Center, February 10 - 28

Click for ALT review, February 15

Received directly: photos by Kimberley Mead of Austin Shakespeare's Mary Stuart, playing until February 28 at the Rollins Theatre, Long Center.

The confrontation. Queen Elizabeth condescends to meet her imprisoned half-sister Mary Stuart, deposed queen of Scotland and unwilling inspiration for Catholic anti-Elizabethan plotters. (Pamela Christian, Helen Merino.)

In a brief, deceptive moment of liberation, Mary Stuart and her nurse Hanna Kennedy find themselves free to walk about the gardens of Castle Fotheringhay. (Helen Merino, Karen Jambon)






Lord Mortimer, plotter to free Mary by violence, seizes her in a fit of passion. (Sean Martin, behind Helen Merino.)




See additional images at AustinLiveTheatre.com. . .

Upcoming: Mary Stuart by Schiller, Austin Shakespeare at the Rollins Theatre, Long Center, February 11 - 28

Click for ALT review, February 15

UPDATE: Review by Clare Carnavan at Statesman A360 "Seeing Things" blog, February 11

UPDATE: Unsigned review at AustinOnStage, February 11

Received directly:







is the first company in the Southwest to stage the new adaptation of

Mary Stuart

a dramatic portrait of royal rivalry between
Mary, Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth of England

February 11 - 28 at the Rollins Theatre, Long Center
Tickets available now online or by telephone at (512) 474 - LONG

Now in its 25th anniversary season, Austin Shakespeare is proud to be the first theater in the Southwest to be awarded the rights to produce the new suspenseful adaptation of Schiller's Mary Stuart by British poet/playwright Peter Oswald, nominated in 2009 for 7 Tony Awards for the Broadway production.

Austin Shakespeare will transform the Long Center's Rollins Theater into a runway with audience on two sides, designed for a modern-day take on the Elizabethan era as they perform history’s illustrious high-stakes Tudor love triangle opening on Valentine’s Day weekend.

“This new version brings the clash between these charismatic women to life on the stage with language that is true to Schiller's emotional romantic play,” said Ann Ciccolella, artistic director of Austin Shakespeare. “The masterwork drives to reach a confrontation scene that never took place in history.”

The play is based on the story of Mary Stuart, the passionate and beautiful Queen of Scotland, as she struggles to gain freedom from her rival cousin, Elizabeth, the powerful Queen of England. Each woman uses the same man as lover and protector. Peter Oswald's new, energetic adaptation draws striking parallels to contemporary society.

As in the real-life story, Mary Queen of Scots has quite a resume. She murders her husband, marries his murderer, gets thrown out by the Scots as their Queen and conspires to bring about several murders. Schiller brilliantly condensed her story, beginning the action in the days before her execution.

[photo by Kimberley Mead]

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Three Days of Rain, Penfold Theatre Company at the Hideout Theatre, September 17 - October 3

This play by Penfold Theatre is a gem. Coming after their play The Last Five Years in January of this year, it confirms that the Penfold company has a vision and a talent for choosing and staging pieces that fit it.

Richard Greenberg's Three Days of Rain might just as well have been titled Two Generations or Hopes and Enigmas, because those three days are mentioned only in a scribbled note in a diary. They become emblematic after the death of the man who wrote them, a famous and successful New York architect, when his children realize that those were the same three days of a family catastrophe from which they have never recovered.

Through the grace of theatre we discover this story in displaced time -- somewhat as was the case in The Last Five Years. Here, the voyage is in only two steps. The first act occurs in a disused apartment in 1995. Walker and Nan, a brother and sister in their early 30s, meet there before the reading of their father's will. They encounter their childhood friend Pip, the son of their father's partner. The second act gives us their parents at the same age -- two aspiring male architects Ned and Theo, and Lila, the woman who became the mother of Walker and Nan.

Greenberg's text is rich in image and imagination. He creates a small world of gifted but vulnerable and uncertain characters in both generations. The younger ones are backward looking, seeking explanations; the older generation, in act two, strives with anxiety and apprehension toward the future. Greenberg gives us the elements of a solution, but in such a way as to remind us that there is really no single simple story or solution for the thirty-five years of events separating these scenes. Causes are inchoate; personal history arises amidst unexpected events; we are left to formulate our own explanations and myths.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

The Frog Prince, Scottish Rite Children's Theatre, June 27 - August 2

Concerning children's theatre, let me come clean in the first lines. By the time I was 18 I had performed as a pasha, a pirate and a king for a children's theatre in north Alabama. I was star-struck for life. That particular community children's theatre is entering its 49th season.

The Scottish Rite Children's Theatre (SRCT) is much younger than that but it is much more richly endowed. Established in 2004 through the efforts of the Kelso family, this non-profit institution received from Texas Masons the deed to the historic Turnhalle at 18th and Lavaca. The building was constructed in 1869 for use as a German community center and gymnasium. It served as the site for music events, theatre and opera. The gorgeous scenic backdrops regularly used in today's productions were painted in 1882. An article in the spring, 2007 issue of the magazine of the League of Historic Theatres profiled The SRCT, the history of the Turnhalle, and the Kelsos' approach to children's theatre.

The Frog Prince as adapted by SRCT follows the Kelsos' guidelines. The excited children gather in the wide carpeted space just before the low stage. Andrea Smith as the exuberant Penelope the Party Pooper (a stock character for the SRCT) and Jose Villareal as the King exuberantly greet the audience and tell them what to expect.

"Get up! Get up! Now wave your hands behind you! They're covered with 'bottom glue.," Pat your bottom! Now when you sit down on the floor, you won't be able to move!"

Penelope then instructs parents and other adults to stand, put one hand on the head and the other on the tummy and repeat a pledge. Among other things, we promised to turn off cell phones and not to use flash photography.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Macbeth, Austin Shakespeare, Sept. 10-21

Austin Shakespeare converts the Rollins Theatre into a vast haunted playing space for its scary, hopped-up version of Macbeth, playing only this weekend and next. Shakespeare’s play of visions, equivocation and relentless, destroying time is in this production a gorgeously imagined vision, one that with its disjunct setting plays on some of America’s deepest fears.

Macbeth – A Global Perspective is the tag. Dressed in contemporary combat fatigues and moving through a capacious stage space defined by curtains of twisting ribbons of transparent plastic, the company suggests any of many scenes of bloody combat brought relentlessly into our living rooms – Rwanda, Srebrenica, Colombia, Chechnya, just to name a few.

A confession: I was deeply suspicious of this approach. Wouldn’t it be too facile to push off this murderous story to the unclean corners of the Third World? I expected a nasty sort of cultural voyeurism, comforting us with our own sense of comity and civilization.

But it works. Director Ann Ciccolella maintains the integrity of the text, with all references to Scotland and England, thanes and lords; the attacking army indeed approaches through Birnham Wood instead of through the jungle or veldt or rainforest. The play’s “globalization” is largely visual, dressed out with some occasional clever bits of staging taking advantage of cell phones, text messaging, bottles of potent little pills, an imagined troop transport and the horrific assassination of Banquo with a plastic bag over the head.

These anachronisms do not fundamentally disturb the aggressive momentum of the play. Some of them did create stirs of recognition or surprised laughter from the mostly young audience at Wednesday’s opening.

Ciccolella and the strong cast give us the shivers by establishing with these touches that dissemblers, equivocators and violence are just as present in our day as in the early 15th century. The use of bamboo poles for the murky wood and the forest of Dunsinane may evoke the FARC in Colombia or the destroyers of Sierra Leon, but the battle dress both irregular and formal could equally suggest U.S. forces in Vietnam or the Texas National Guard today.

Sharron Bower as Lady Macbeth sets the intensity and speed of the play. And “speed” it is – this pill-popping, text-messaging, sex-hungry, vital woman is a scarier witch than any of the three weird sisters. She seizes their auguries as guarantees for any bloody business and stampedes Macbeth into the murder of Duncan. She is so hot for her man that their brief discussion of the murder plot is all but lost in embraces before she hauls him offstage by the belt buckle. Lust becomes blood lust.

Marc Pouhé as Macbeth, enamored of the witches’ promises, is a formidable presence. In other productions, your Macbeth pauses to express apprehension about the conflict between duty and ambition. Aflame for his Lady, this Thane doesn’t much question the undertaking.

Pouhé delivers the first key soliloquy on that dilemma (“If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well/ It were done quickly”) as a declaration of intent, with moral considerations appended as an executive summary. He does not so much bend to Lady Macbeth’s immediate challenge to his manhood as wrap himself around her. Similarly, he does not dawdle or stop for thought when he sees the imaginary dagger before him – the mid-passage of that soliloquy (“Thou marshal'st me the way that I was going/And such an instrument I was to use”) is the driving theme to the speech, a brief preliminary to bloody action.

Regret does not appear until it is too late, when Macbeth emerges from Duncan’s quarters, holding a bloody dagger in either hand.

With his muscular magnetism, Pouhé makes us complicit with Macbeth. He delivers key soliloquies directly to the audience, usually downstage center a scant yard from the first row of spectators. Another proof of his leadership is the scene of his recruitment and instruction of the murderers. They stiffen into military attention before him, and he tongue lashes them with the intimate verbal violence of a Marine drill sergeant. But once he reads in their souls terror and resentment toward Banquo, Macbeth relents, considers, and gathers them into a close, quiet huddle to explain the urgency of exterminating Banquo and his son Fleance.

At this first appearance before a full and unsuspecting audience, the cast for this fast-moving, hopped-up epic may have had its nerves stretched one notch too tight. Soldiers and captains on stage tended to jump in over-sudden fashion upon seeing unannounced visits (“Who comes here?” & etc.). In Acts III and IV as action accelerated, so did speech, with some loss of intelligibility.

The visual design of this show is superb, including both the minimalist setting and the lighting. Costumes for the weird sisters were hallucinatory, suggesting materials scavaged from a dump, patched and worn as deteriorating shrouds. They writhed across the deadly space of the stage. Opening the second half of the play, their dance and the accompanying aria of Hecate were a special treat.

Also of special note:

The banquet scene, initially played with Banquo as an invisible presence, gave us the view of the alarmed guests, who see Macbeth twitch and fret as in a fit; Ciccolella then switches perspective on us, as if putting us into Macbeth’s eyes by bringing on the bloody Banquo, invisible to the others. (I see one point of contention for the staging of this scene. Although in his first speech Macbeth tells his officers to sit, not even in the imagined hell-world of this play would they remain seated as their king, afoot, went through a lengthy seizure with hallucinations.)

Ben Wolfe as Macduff (right) plays the full range of emotion in the sequence in Act IV, Scene III as Malcolm tests his integrity with false self-accusations and then Ross arrives to deliver news of the murder of Macduff’s family. Wolfe was in fine, credible control of extremes that other actors might have turned into scenery-chewing. All his visage wanned, tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, a broken voice, and his whole form suiting with forms to his conceit.

The fight scenes showed us actors at their most agile but had enough ballet and visible one-two-three to require some indulgence. Significantly better than those multiple engagements was the final set-to between Macbeth and Macduff.

Sean Martin made the most of his role as the drunken porter awakened by knocking at the fatal hour of Duncan’s murder. This is a jester’s role, comic relief for an apprehensive audience, and he got into our faces (and into one of our laps!).

In her sleepwalking scene Shannon Bower as Lady Macbeth wrung our hearts. This was no mere mumbling and hand washing. This highly emotive actress, staring blindly into the audience, relived Duncan’s death in stunned psychotic fervor.

Austin Shakespeare is no cavalier purveyor of spectacle. The company has announced presentations on Shakespeare and related topics to take place in advance of each performance. After each presentation, the cast and staff gather for Q&A and exchanges with those audience members who will linger the 5 minutes or so needed to change out of costumes.

At Wednesday night’s post-play discussion, one spectator commented on the “cinema-like” quality of the staging. Upon reflection, I think she put her finger on exactly the point for which I would both praise this production and castigate it.

Like contemporary cinema or, God help us, broadcast news, this Macbeth was swift, spectacular and non-reflective. Great entertainment. And behind that glistening surface there are so many, many themes and moral questions unexplored, leaped over in the dash to the finale.

Highly recommended. Both for the ride and as food for thought.

Afterwards.


Review by Ronni, September 14, from Ronni's Rants, Blogspot.com, September 14

Review by Spike Gillespie at Austinist.com, September 16

Review by Avimaan Syam in the Austin Chronicle, September 18

Kimberly Mead's dress rehearsal photos, published in the Austin Statesman

Full-stage photos posted at AustinShakespeare.org

Click for the sketchbook of costume designs for Macbeth

Austin Shakespeare article on Shannon Brower as Lady Macbeth

Full cast list

Jeanne Claire van Ryzin's interview with Ann Ciccolella, published September 7

Hanna Kenah's account in the Austin Chronicle of Ann Ciccolella's changes at Austin Shakespeare