Twelfth Night, Scottish Rite Theatre

Twelfth Night, just opened at the convenient downtown location close to the Bob Bullock Texas History Museum, is a graceful, sprightly production of Shakespeare's comedy of parted twins, mistaken identities, and the merciless mocking of overweening ambition. This is the one in which the dour Malvolio, steward to Lady Olivia, is duped by two roysters into smiling, making love overtures to his lady, and appearing in yellow stockings, all cross gartered. And Viola, shipwrecked, masquerades as a boy in order to enter the service of Duke Orsino -- and falls in love with same.

Shannon Grounds as Olivia/"Cesario" (left) carries the action deftly. She undertakes her masquerade in a spirit of adventure but encounters earnest confusion as she falls for Orsino but Lady Olivia (Suzanne Balling, right) falls for her as "Cesario." Balling is diminutive, lively and a delight -- her growing fascination of Orsino's comely messenger "Cesario" moves her out of long mourning into hope and demure flirting.



This being a romantic comedy, Shakespeare gives her the ultimate chance for joy: the eventual just-in-time appearance of the male twin to "Cesario," the eligible bachelor Sebastian (Ryan Crowder). The sparkle in Olivia's eyes here is a hint of the sly delights of her performance. Outcome: Orsino and Olivia each wed a twin. The one of the opposite sex, of course.

Director (yclept "Master of Play" in the program) Beth Burns has just relocated to Austin from Los Angeles. She achieves with this talented and attractive ensemble a quick-paced, highly entertaining and almost too short evening of entertainment.

The evening takes as guidance the opening words of Orsino, If music be the food of love, play on. A four-member musical consort welcomes the public into the lobby with renaissance and pseudo-renaissance music. The group accompanies song and dance during the play and provides the jubilation for a curtain call done in dance.

The Scottish Rite theatre itself seemed to me a relatively strange performance space. On the one hand, the company had the use of beautifully painted backdrops and legs that created wonderfully detailed scenes. I am guessing that these were created over a long period for use by the Scottish Rite Children’s theatre. The multiple levels and the detailed tromp l’oeuil painting offer us enchanting perspectives within the proscenium. They recall the intricate mysteries of Victorian-era puppet shows. For example, before the action began:

The beach after the shipwreck:




The forest, as Maria the servant regales Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek:



and the Duke's chambers:


A wide flight of wooden steps connects that magic proscenium-framed world with the auditorium. The movable seating in the forefront of the 200-seat theatre was arranged so as to provide a wide, deep open space in the midst of the seating. This was the equivalent of a “thrust” stage – but it meant that those of us seated in front row, center, found ourselves at least thirty feet from the stage. The views above are all taken from front row, center.

I prefer to sit as close to the acting as possible. Can’t help it; it’s the addiction of an actor. In Shakespeare’s day, if I’d had the means, I probably would have been one of those lace-handkerchief would-be dandies leaning back on a chair at the edge of the stage itself. So I was disappointed to find that only rarely did director Beth Burns put the action out into that big empty space fronted and flanked by the audience. The most typical use of that thrust space was that signaled in the text by Exit (singular) or Exeunt (plural). Given the disposition of the seats, the actors always had to hustle – added to thirty feet of thrust was another thirty feet of aisle.

Twelfth Night offers a richness of fools. The official fool, Feste, is the least foolish of them. As personified by Justin Scalise, Feste is a sober, witty wraith with a fine singing voice. Far more farcical are Michael Mergin (right) playing rapscallion knight Sir Toby Belch and Judd Farris (left) as the earnest, stupid suitor Andrew Aguecheek (a fine study in slowly firing synapses).

And then there is Malvolio, the self-important steward who is so cruelly misled by Maria the serving woman (bravo to Jill K. Swanson for her twinkling mischief). She counterfeits the letter to Malvolio that prompts him to put on ridiculous attire, paint his face, and put on a smile almost painful to observe. The baiting and humiliation of Malvolio is the dark side of this comedy. It occurs relatively late in the action; the castle force and jester Feste imprison Malvolio and mock him further; and at the happy resolution of everyone else’s quandaries, the lovely Olivia perceives and explains the cruel trick. Shakespeare gives Malvolio a horrible exit line: “I will be revenged on the whole pack of you.”

So how does a company play that dark vein in this otherwise frothy, colorful confection? In Shakespeare’s day, Malvolio was probably a haughty, hissing horrible guy. After all, “mal voglio” in Italian is, roughly, “ill will.”

In this presentation, director Burns and actor Robert Matney are very delicate with Malvolio. He comes across as thoughtful and gently deluded, that sort of nice guy who is just, well, clueless. When he has no streak of mean, how do you handle his defeat? In this presentation, he kneels to Lady Olivia and tenders in resignation the chain that is his emblem of office. And you choreograph your curtain call as a sort of Morris dance, with Malvolio taking part, as if he didn’t really mean it with that final imprecation. This doesn’t really resolve the problem, but it does remind us that the evening is all in fun.

Elizabeth Cobbe's review in the Austin Chronicle, August 15

Spike Gillespie's review in the Austinist.com, August 14

Joey Seiler's comment (far short of a review) in the Austin Statesman, August 11

NOTE: Thanks and a tip of the hat to Gordon Kelso, Executive Director at the Scottish Rite Theatre, who kindly provided further information about the theatre and its scenery:

"The scenery you enjoyed throughout the production was painted in 1882...and installed in our space in 1910... Our old theatre was built in 1869 (3 years after Scholz's Garten) by the German community as the Turn Verein...a German opera house and activity center [locally referred to in those days as Turner Hall]...naturally, there was beer served...lots of it, because the entire block qualified as the beer garten. The Sangerunde Singers were formed there and, believing they needed their own space for rehearsal and entertainment, they moved down the hill to Scholz's, purchased the adjacent property and built their space along with a bowling alley (the lintel still reads 1879)...it, too, is still in use!...a tribute to Austin's early German influence."

The Merry Wives of Windsor by the Weird Sisters Collective

Turnabout is fair play might be the theme for The Merry Wives of Windsor. Penurious, lascivious Sir John Falstaff is out for “cony catching” throughout the play but he just can’t learn his lesson. Falstaff (Courtney Brown) aims to trick and seduce the merry wives of the title: Mistress Margaret Page (Leslie Guerrero, left) and Mistress Alice Ford (Christa French, right).

Highly amused by his presumptions, the good ladies entice the lecher to assignations three times, and each time they set him up. Hiding in a clothes basket, Falstaff is carried offstage to be dumped into the muck; cowering before discovery by a maddened husband, he disguises himself and flees as a witchy old crone; and finally, in an apparently enchanted glade, Sir Jack is pinched and pursued by townspeople disguised as fairies.

In fact, you could imagine Turnabout is fair play would be a pretty good heraldic device for the Weird Sisters Women’s Theatre Collective. This is the fourth full-length presentation by a group of women whose manifesto celebrates “the company of powerful, adventurous, wise women, with whom we foster strong, deep relationships.” They use the collective to express themselves, free of gender oppression.

As in their earlier presentations, the Sisters assemble an all-female cast. After all, Shakespeare’s company was all male, wasn’t it? This casting strategy works perfectly well in theatrical space, where the audience is happily complicit in the willing suspension of disbelief.

This is not one of Shakespeare’s better comedies, but theatrical legend excuses that in part by asserting that he wrote it in a rush at the request of Queen Elizabeth I, who wanted to see the hugely comic Falstaff in a romantic comedy.

Falstaff here has none of the canny skills of his pickled, cajoling, irate persona in the Henry IV plays. Out in Windsor, he is a clown and slave to all his appetites, fit to be gull’d and mocked. Sir Jack is a bigger, bolder, caricature version of the merry wives’ own husbands (and by implication, a stand-in for all that’s gross about the male gender).



No wonder the cast takes such enthusiastic delight in the bawdy allusions to cocks, erections, horns and cuckoos.

Director Susan Todd sets the play in the fictional town of Windsor, Texas in the mid-1950’s. She and the collective must have had fun assembling the slide show of ads and snapshots from that time, which amuses us 21st century folk with the gender stereotypes from back then. Before the action begins, we hear Elvis, Patsy Cline, and contemporary recordings of ads and music from a radio station in Midland.

The costumes for female characters are a colorful, corny gala of middle class fashion of the time (love those Capri pants, Anne Page!).


Shakespeare’s language in broad Texas accents? It works! That makes it all the funnier. As the aged Justice Shallow, Chris Humphrey is a cantankerous Texas justice of the peace to the life. Loquacious and brassy in the person of Mistress Quickly, Hollie Baker is part Dolly Parton, part Goldie Hawn.

Courtney Brown is a hoot as Jack Falstaff, visiting star of a broken down rock band. Wrapped in Elvis pompadour and sideburns, she delivers her role with shameless assurance.

This troupe has good fun addressing the audience. Silly quarrels between silly prospective suitors to young Anne Page entertain us. The rivalries of the inept make them foils to Falstaff’s less scrupulous intentions of seduction.

Shakespeare was showcasing Falstaff, in a sort of Fat Jack III. But in this presentation, with the original text essentially intact, director Todd succeeds in focusing instead on the journey of Frank Ford, husband to one of the merry wives.

Ford’s counterpart Page (Penny Smith) is not at all discomfited when they learn of the curious, identical love letters Falstaff has sent to the ladies. But Ford (Vicki Yoder) torments himself with jealousy and uncertainty over the virtue of his wife.

So of course, he makes things worse. He insinuates himself into Falstaff’s company under the guise of “Master Brook” (Brook – Ford – get it?) and suborns the knight with a packet of cash to seduce Mistress Ford so as to make her available for conquest. Sir Jack is happy to take money for the job he’s already got underway.

Falstaff’s succeeding accounts and assurances drive Ford further around the bend, so that he grows more disturbed and more comic with each succeeding incident.But at the finale, with doubt resolved and virtue rewarded, Ford reveals that his alter ego “Brook” does, after all, have the prospect of sleeping with Mistress Ford.

Vicki Yoder is so impressive in the role of Ford/Brook that during the intermission I was wondering whether she might have been better cast as Falstaff, the lord of misrule. She has the presence, expression and physical stature to have handled that interpretation.

But then, this is the Weird Sisters Collective. It is appropriate that Sir Jack remain smooth and mostly unrepentant, because would-be seducers are always out there. The better choice was to invest an actor/actress of Yoder's depth in a character who comes to redemption.

There is a lovely non-Shakespeare moment in the second half when Miss Anne Page (Johnson) is dancing in a darkened hall with her true beloved, Master Fenton (Martina Ohlhauser). She snuggles close, surprising the awkward Fenton, and kisses him. Then as they rotate in dreamland, that self-assured daughter reaches down and with one hand takes possession of his rump. Fade out. We know that there will be no one else in her future, once the plots get untangled.

Most of the other characters are silly quarrelers with impossibly funny accents or henchmen (henchpersons). But in passing, a couple of special tips of the hat: to Aména Moïnfar as the unsurprised servant to the French physician and to Brooks Louton as servant Peter Simple, stammeringly intimidated.

No curtain call for this cast! They exited from the dénouement straight out to the Vortex café, where they received friends and supporters streaming out from the theatre.

Bio and background of Director Susan Todd
posted alphabetically at UT's program for
"Performance in Public Practice"

Taming of the Shrew, City Theatre

This presentation of Taming of the Shrew is a gem.

So I was baffled to find that on Friday night this company of a dozen talented and attractive actors was performing before an audience totaling only 16 persons.

Why hasn't the word gone out? This is the second weekend of five, and given the quality of the show, the place should be packed. I spent $25 for the "reserved' seats, even though tix are regularly $15 and $20 (only $12 for students). And I was embarrassed to find that our two seats in the middle of the second row were the only ones with the "reserved" hoods on them. Made me feel like a Viceroy or Bwana Jim.

This is only the group's second season, granted. And they're not easy to find -- we were driving around for a while in the vicinity of Manor Road and Airport Road before we finally spotted them, in that obscure little row of storefronts up behind the Shell station. And maybe that photo of the muzzled Kate is suggesting not a good time, but a rather a scary film.

No matter. If you like Shakespeare, if you enjoy a knockabout farce with personable young actors, if you want to see new opportunities for this promising company, GO. See this show!

The Taming of the Shrew, with its 400-year-old attitudes toward conflicts between the sexes, arranged marriages, and humilliation by slapstick, can be a guilty pleasure.

As early as 1897, George Bernard Shaw wrote, “No man with any decency of feeling can sit [The Taming of the Shrew] out in the company of a woman without being extremely ashamed of the lord-of-creation moral implied in the wager and the speech put into the woman’s own mouth.”

The City Theatre acknowledges this in the stage notes: ". . .modern interpretation of the play is sometimes complicated by the centrality to the play of issues that are hotly debated in our own time -- in particular, the question of what roles men and women can and should play in society and in relation to each other. Is Petruchio a loving husband who teaches his maladjusted bride to find happiness in marriage, or is he a clever bully who forces her to bow to his will?" [Three more rhetorical questions follow.]"Our own answers to these questions may have less to do with the play iteself than with our attiudes towards the issues and ideas it explores."

End of discussion. Talk about begging the question!

So director Jeff Hinkle of Concordia University and his cast make no apology for giving us a bang-up comedy that avoids the politically correct. They offer us a vividly credible curs'd Kate (Dawn Erin) and her tamer Petruchio (David Meissner), set off by straight romantics sister Bianca (Kristen Bowden) and her suitor-disguised-as-tutor Lucentio (Benjamin Right). They are accompanied by a full gallery of cartoonish characters.

For example, totally over the top: Petruchio's man Grumio (Jason Marlett) bounds in, making nutty martial arts moves that recall Keito, the madcap manservant of Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther. Rival suitors to Bianca are Gremio (Marcus Lorenzo) as a dimwitted sincere "homeboy" and Hortensio (Marco Bazan), lean, mobile-faced and pouty -- much of the time in a Rapunzel-blonde wig.

We can go with the concept, especially since Petruchio (Meissner) comes across not as a lout, but as a cheery, talkative muscular guy who could be a college quarterback. He employs against Kate primarily his wit, charm and decisiveness, rather than violence. His restraint with her is underlined by his very physical cartoon-style mistreatment of serving man Grumio.

The cast brings us very close to the action. When themembers of the audience take their seats, they find themselves in the courtyard of "Baptista's Burgers," with a five-star menu tucked in the program. The sisters, as yet undifferentiated for us, ask us for our orders, informing us that despite the elaborate menu, only cheeseburgers are available. Some of us begged off ("just ate, sorry") and others took the bait.

"Cheeseburger!" call out the sisters. "Cheeseburger! Cheeseburger!" Through a window in the set the portly Baptista (Robert Dietz) yells back, "Cheeseburger!" each time. He produces, one after another, saucers with silver-dollar sized cheeseburgers. The tattooed Kate and the demure Bianca deliver them to the audience. This clever gambit breaks down the separation between actor and audience. It leaves us momentarily disconcerted and then very amused, even before the action begins.

What terrific mastery of language these players give us! They speak the speeches with clarity, precision and ease. Without an exception they deliver their lines with whip-sharp timing. The comedy bounds and rebounds.

Special recognition goes to Robert Deike as Baptista the father, a monument of befuddled calm amid all this movement.

Dawn Erin as Katerina is a pleasure throughout. She is tough, angry, distrustful, frustrated, and ultimately triumphant. Though she bends to Petruchio's will, we have no sense that her spirit has been subdued. She sizzles. . . initially with anger and later with passion for her husband Petruchio.

Perfectly understandable for an actress whose resume lists under special skills, "English and Western horseback riding, professional saddleseat horse show groom, Ashtanga yoga, registered Massage Therapist, blues and torch singer, drive stick shift, beginner level pistol shooting."

Austin Chronicle review by Avimaan Syan, August 7

Elizabeth Cobbe's summary of City Theatre's first season, 2006-2007

NOTE. The Shakespeare Company in Washington DC presented The Taming of the Shrew in late 2007. Their website includes several articles relevant for consideration of that presentation and this one, as well as a podcast:

• Barbara Hodgson's discussion of "the shrew" in English drama
• History of the play, which was not presented in the First Folio text until well into the 1880's
• Critics' comments on the play, drawn from throughout its history
  
• Director Bayla Taichman's remarks to the cast at the first rehearsal on September 10, 2007
• Podcast of Taichman's remarks