Upcoming: A Lie of the Mind by Sam Shepard, Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward's University, November 10 - 20

Received directly:

presents

A Lie of the Mind

by Sam Shepard

directed by Jared J. Stein

November 10 – 20

Thursday – Saturday evenings at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m.

Added performance on Wednesday, November 16at 7:30 PM

Mary Moody Northen Theatre

St Edward’s University, 3001 South Congress Avenue (click for map)

$18 Advance ($15 Students, Seniors, SEU Community), $20 at the door

Available through the MMNT Box Office, (512) 448-8484

Box Office Hours are M -F 1- 5 p.m.

Special student discount night on Friday, November 11. Student tickets $7 with ID.

A Lie of the Mind is recommended from mature audiences. The play contains strong language and adult situations.

“[A] savage love ballad...of black anomie and blacker humor.” — New York Theatre

From Pulitzer Prize-winner Sam Shepard (Buried Child) comes a searing examination of family relationships and the illusory nature of redemptive love. Two families united by the marriage of their children are ripped apart when a man violently beats his wife and leaves her for dead. The long road to healing serves as a vehicle for a deep, haunting and darkly humorous exploration of love and loss in the American landscape. Winner of the 1986 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, A Lie of the Mind features Equity guests Sheila Gordon, Bernadette Nason and Rod Porter (The West Wing).

About Mary Moody Northen Theatre Through the Mary Moody Northen Theatre, students work alongside professional actors, directors and designers to explore all facets of theatrical production, create vibrant productions and earn points towards membership in Actor’s Equity Association, the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States. This program is one of only three in the country that offer Equity member candidacy within an undergraduate-only curriculum. MMNT operates under an AEA U/RTA contract and is a member of Theatre Communications Group. For more information, contact the theatre program at 512-448-8487 or visit us online at www.stedwards.edu/theatre.

About St. Edward's University Founded by the Congregation of Holy Cross, St. Edward's University is named among the top five "Up-and-Coming Universities" in the Western Region by its academic peers in a 2011 U.S. News & World Report survey. For eight consecutive years St. Edward's has been recognized as one of "America's Best Colleges" by U.S. News & World Report. St. Edwards' has also been named one of "America's Best Colleges" by Forbes and the Center for College Affordability. St. Edward's is a private, Catholic, liberal arts university of more than 5,400 students located in Austin, Texas. For more information on St. Edward's University, visit www.stedwards.edu.

One Venus Hour by Sheila Gordon, FronteraFest LF, January 20, 23, 25, 29

Equity actor Shela M. Gordon took the opportunity of FronteraFest 2011 to do a solo turn showing friends, the general public and her students at St. Ed's that she's endowed both with an actor's shape shifting wiles and with a warm and thoughtful writer's imagination.

Gordon developed this piece with support from Scriptworks, here in Austin. Her One Venus Hour is not about the goddess or even about the planet. It's about time, the final arc of a life, and the deep uneasiness of children facing the failing of a father. Gordon uses a projected starfield and audio of a quietly authoritative female voice explaining dispassionately the faraway eruptions of stars. Both voice and text are Gordon's, in a subtle parody of the ethereal meditations read by Sandy Wood on the McDonald Observatory's radio spot Stardate.

Our neighboring planet Venus spins on its axis in the opposite direction from that of the Earth and ever so slowly, turning on itself once in 243 of our days. One Venus Hour is ten days in earth time.

Beneath that vast firmament and its incomprehensible realities, Gordon acts all roles in a simple, almost banal family story. The widowed or divorced father, retired alone in Florida, with the querelous mutter and collapsed world of an aged New Yorker, pushes back at his daughter's pained, well-intentioned ministrations. Her brother, his son, cannot face the old man's decline.

Gordon lightens the tone by assuming the cocky persona of a real estate auctioneer, enlisting us for a trial exercise in bidding. She's glib, rythmic and solemnly funny, playing both the chief auctioneer and both of his assistants. This was the firm that sold them the previously foreclosed property in which the father now lives.

The story arc is short -- one Venus hour or a bit more -- but the feeling is deep. The old man suffers a stroke. Gordon captures the slur of his speech and his deep frustration, as well as the bright "we" chatter of the speech therapist who, without thinking, treats him as if he were mentally handicapped. Gordon provides a short portrait of the brother but brings most of our attention to the quandry of the daughter. The auctioneer comes back on and challenges us to bid, this time for the house that the old man was living in -- "this time for real, folks!" and we do. The night I was there Gordon as the crisp, disengaged auctioneer pushed the bids right up to $150,000 in mythical dollars to be used by the wistful, lonely woman as she arranged the final managed care of her father, the leftover from another time.

EXTRA

Click to view program sheet of One Venus Hour by Sheila Gordon

Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen, Mary Moody Northern Theatre, St. Edward's University, February 12 - 21

You might get lost in the tidy space of St. Ed's Mary Moody Northern Theatre if you haven't done your homework before you get to the theatre. Peer Gynt is not your dependable old social realism from Ibsen. This story is a wild ride of fable, myth and allegory that takes you across the world and through an entire prankish life, written by a young dramatist who had escaped bleak Norway for the dazzling sunscapes of Italy.

The attractive printed program given to you has a full page on the august poet and translator Robert Bly, but no synopsis of the action, other than a list of the locales of the 34 scenes, ranging from "the farm" to Morocco to Cairo and back to the mountains of Norway. For more than that, see the ALT profile of the drama, "The Wild Striving of Peer Gynt," published here on February 8.

Peer Gynt, both the play and the character played by Jacob Trussell, moves at speed, between a canter and a gallop throughout.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Profile: The Wild Striving of Peer Gynt, Mary Moody Northern Theatre, St. Edward's University, February 11 - 21

Peer Gynt is one of those great, impossible works of literature. It's a masterwork of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, one that is totally different from the new 19th century realistic dramas of social concern for which he became famous. This is the playwright who later gave us A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts, An Enemy of the People and Hedda Gabler.

Well before that, after a penurious career as a creative director and producer at Norwegian state theatres in Bergen and in Cristiana (Oslo), in 1864 while in his mid-thirties this self-taught artist left Norway with his wife and child for self-exile in sunny Italy. He continued to write. A five-act verse play Brand succeeded in Stockholm in 1866. The following year Ibsen had his five-act verse play Peer Gynt published in Copenhagen.

Almost ten years passed before the piece appeared on stage, in the Norwegian capital. And no wonder -- Ibsen himself wrote without a thought for the constraints of conventional staging, which he knew well. Peer Gynt is an exalted narrative of Peer's whole life, leaping in space and time. He seduces and runs off with the intended bride of a rival, then abandons her. Act II places the cheeky young Peer in a troll world, contemplating marriage to the daughter of the troll who rules the mountain (the scene for which composer Edvard Grieg wrote the comic but menacing incidental music "In The Hall of the Mountain King"). The action moves from upcountry Norway to Morocco to the Saharan wastes to a lunatic asylum in Egypt to a storm-wracked sailing ship and, finally, back to rural Norway. Upon his return Peer encounters his former neighbors, the devil in the shape of a parson, and the grim reaper in the guise of a button maker.

Because of the unrestrained length of the piece, a conventional static reading from a lectern would take more than six hours. In rhymed couplets. In Norwegian.

The first American production of this epic was in 1907. I had the good fortune to see a 1998 production by the Washington DC Shakespeare Theatre. In the early 1980's the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis did a five-hour version; in 2008 they again produced Peer Gynt, using a new stage-version translation by Minnesota poet Robert Bly, starring Shakespeare veteran Mark Rylance. Bly had the Minnesota Norwegian whimsy to mimic Ibsen by crafting about half of his text in rhyming verse, especially for comic scenes such as the dialogue in which the King of the Trolls seeks to convince Peer to stay in his kingdom. Bly cut and tailored the action so that the play ran about three hours.

St. Ed's assistant professor of theatre Ev Lunning, Jr., is using Bly's translation and has cut it further. He cast St. Ed's senior Jacob Trussell as Peer. You've had plenty of opportunities over the last couple of years to see Trussell. He was nominated for the B. Iden Payne awards each of the last two years for musical theatre leads in Sweeney Todd and Bat-Boy, The Musical. Last season at St. Ed's Mary Moody Northern Theatre he was in Cloud 9, Cyrano de Bergerac and Pajama Game. He appeared in The Fantasticks for Austin Playhouse and Leave It To Beverley for the DA! Theatre Collective.

Continuing its long tradition of casting Equity actors alongside its students, St. Ed's has Sheila Gordon in the key role of Peer's mother and Ben Wolfe in a variety of roles, including that of the big puppet-headed Troll King.

Peer Gynt is a remarkable work. Ibsen's source was a collection of Norwegian folktales with the opening legends of Peer's conquering a magic flying stag and striving against an unseen monster known as the Bøyg. Add to those Paul Bunyan exaggerations the fact that Peer's a bouncing, bounding braggart and flirt, obliged to abandon his true love Solveig because of his entanglements with the trolls. The story has elements of a Bildungsroman (a tale of growing up), a resemblance to the picaresque novel (a rascal's adventures), and withering portrayals of 19th century mercantilism and capitalism. Peer wants to become the Emperor of the World.

All in all, and throughout, Peer is on a search to find his Self: "One must be oneself; for oneself and one’s own/one must do one’s best, both in great and in small things./If the luck goes against you, at least you’ve the honour/of a life carried through in accordance with principle."

Yet for all his inventiveness and egotism he has no concept of that Self. In the Egyptian lunatic asylum, confronted by a desperate madman who imagines himself to be a Pen, Peer calls himself "a blank sheet of paper." In the fifth and final act as Peer is facing imminent death he peels an onion, imagining it to represent himself -- peeling away his many roles and adventures, eventually to find nothing in the middle. Because Death threatens to melt down Peer's soul with other imperfectly realized lives, Peer seeks frantically for some witness, any witness, to assert that his life was not entirely futile.

This is a huge, demanding text. Last Monday, the final full run through at the Mary Moody Northern Theatre before tech sessions ran smoothly and swiftly, giving promise of a dramatic, gripping evening of theatre. Jacob Trussell was self assured, emphatic and energetic in all of Peer's many permutations.

This is Peer's life story, from adolescence to near the grave, and Trussell's appearance and makeup will reflect that. The 2008 Guthrie version, according to the 48-year-old Mark Rylance while playing Peer, was a survey of Gynt's life retro and avant from the perspective of middle age. The St Ed's production, inevitably, because of the university setting and the predominantly young cast, will imply a young man's look forward into that feckless adventurer's life.

Trussell with his rough good looks and devotion to the thespian calling is mounting that legendary stag, about to ride forward into his future. Director Ev Lunning, Jr., both an academic and a seasoned member of Actor's Equity, represents for me a Peer who's somewhere along about the end of Act III in his own five-act Gyntian adventure. That combination, along with Gordon, Wolfe, Lainey Murphy as Peer's beloved but abandoned Solveig, Nathan Brockett and other talented company members, promises a full and challenging evening of classic theatre.

EXTRAS

American Theatre magazine interview of Mark Rylance about the Guthrie's 2008 Peer Gynt, Feb. 2008 (.pdf)

Upcoming: Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen, Mary Moody Northern Theatre, St. Edward's University, February 11 - 21

Received directly:

In its 37th season,
the Mary Moody Northern Theatre
at St Edward's University presents

Peer Gynt

by Henrik Ibsen
directed by Ev Lunning, Jr.
February 11 - 21
Thursday–Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m.

Out of the gentle genius of Henrik Ibsen comes a stunning theatrical travelogue exploring one man’s journey of self-discovery from impetuous boyhood to penitent old age.

A fantastical voyage filled with puppetry, music and wonder in the tradition of the great Norwegian fairy tales, Peer Gynt races, stumbles, fights, meanders and crashes, alternately, around the world and back again in this new translation by Minnesota poet laureate Robert Bly. Featuring Equity guest artists Sheila M. Gordon and Ben Wolfe.

Mary Moody Northern Theatre
St. Edward’s University, 3001 South Congress Avenue, Austin
Click to view campus map

Tickets available through the MMNT box office at 448-8484.
Reserved Seating. Advance sales: general admission $15 ($12 students, seniors, St. Edward’s community) All tickets $18 at the door.
Box office is open 1-5 p.m. Monday–Friday and 1 hour prior to curtain.
SPECIAL STUDENT NIGHT: Friday, Feb. 12 at 7:30 p.m., all student tickets $6 with ID

[image adapted from the website of the Norwegian Embassy in Hanoi]

About St. Edward's University
Founded by the Congregation of Holy Cross, St. Edward's University is named among the top five "Up-and-Coming Universities" in the Western Region by its academic peers in a 2010 U.S. News & World Report survey. For seven consecutive years St. Edward's has been recognized as one of "America's Best Colleges" by U.S. News & World Report and this year by Forbes and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. St. Edward's is a private, Catholic, liberal arts university of nearly 5,300 students located in Austin, Texas. For more information on St. Edward’s University, visit www.stedwards.edu.

The Three Sisters, Chekhov, Mary Moody Northern Theatre, November 13 - 23

St Edward’s Mary Moody Northern Theatre with its current production of The Three Sisters of Chekhov has again realized a fine synergy by adding two professional actors to an admirable cast of undergraduates.

The quality and success of university productions in the Austin area is almost depressing – so much talent and energy! This is a great boon for those of us who take the time to explore it, but it seems strange to have all that star power flaring hot out there and yet largely unrecognized.

The three Prozorov sisters and their brother Andrei reside in a distant Russian province but cherish memories of life in Moscow with their late father, a brigadier general. Their yearning for escape from the stifling provinces is much discussed, and a common interpretation of the play is that the entire movement is the effort to get to Moscow, a half-imagined magic circle of sophistication and light.

This lyric production is anchored by Marc Pouhé as a talkative middle-aged lieutenant colonel, saddled with an unbalanced termagant wife but wistfully in love with the only married sister, Masha, and by Ev Lunning, Jr., as the 60ish bibulous military doctor Chebutykin, regretful, ill-educated and gone to seed but deeply attached to the Prozorovs.

Cribbing from my own recent comments about the Nina Variations: “Chekhov’s plays always give us a large cast of characters. Family members, friends, local officials, servants and others spend much of their time in desultory talk with and about one another. The trivial mixes with the transcendent. There is a slow overall movement through his plays, but just as in real life, the present moment is the most important. And the present moment is often filled with longing, with banter, with philosophizing, with small absurdities.”

Or, better, quoting the author himself as cited by Robert Brustein, “Let the things that happen onstage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal at table, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up."

Act I of The Three Sisters gives us the celebration for the youngest sister, Irina, on her saint’s day, much of which takes place about a central table. Lt. Col. Vershinin (Pouhé) makes his first call; the vulgar local girl Natasha attends as well and captures the attention of the brother, Andrei. Act II, 18 months later, shows us Natasha, now married to Andrei, inexorably extending her influence over the household, as the same group of military officers young and old gathers to socialize and to court the sisters; Natasha puts an end to the evening by prohibiting the scheduled visit of Mardi Gras musicians.

Act III, two years further along, is set late during a summer night as all are dealing with the aftermath of a catastrophic fire in the village. And Act IV, that autumn, gives us the definitive reassignment of the artillery brigade, Irina’s decision to marry, and an offstage quarrel and duel.

Throughout the play the vulgar Natasha extends her influence and expropriates the sisters; the sisters seek work, affection and pleasure that is never completed; and Dr. Chebutykin hums, grumbles, resumes his drinking, and mutters again and again, “It’s all one. . . .” Moscow and the dream of escape fade into impossibility.

In the midst of disaster, in the closing lines Olga tries to reassure her sisters: ”Oh, dear sisters, our life is not over yet. We shall live! The music is so gay, so joyous, it seems as if just a little more and we shall know why we live, why we suffer. . . If only we knew, if only we knew!”

Sounds like a downer, doesn’t it? But no, it isn’t at all – Chekhov draws each of the characters vividly and director Sheila Gordon keeps her actors bouncing off one another, taking the greatest possible advantage of the remarkable, large “theatre in a square” that is the Mary Moody Northern Theatre. At one point the dinner party at stage center goes into silent, animated slow motion as the thoughtful and sincere first lieutenant Baron Tuzenbach (Nathan Osburn) relentlessly courts Irina, who keeps backing away from him.

The pace of the first two acts is intense and in fact almost too fast – for example, as Irina, Steffanie Ngo-Hatchie is charming and expressive but moves and speaks with the accelerated metabolism of a bird trying to escape from a cage. Act II and the first half of the production conclude with an unscripted, choreographed house invasion by the Mardi Gras musicians, who swirl around Irina and sweep her away.

It would not be fair to pick favorites, since this is such an ensemble piece and each character and actor achieves at least one intensely memorable scene. Guest artists Pouhé and Lunning are sympathetic and give fully realized portraits of decent men in impossible situations. Masha (Dorothy Ann Bond), the unhappily married sister who falls for Lt. Col. Vershinin, is sharp tongued, trapped and eloquent. Her brief, intense farewell to him shows both hearts breaking.

Olga (Julia Trinidad), who gives way to the inevitability of becoming a school teacher, has to listen to her brother’s rambling confession and complaints late at night after the fire in Act III. Her silent reaction to him, sitting stock still, speaks a world of emotion and meaning, far more than his blathering.

The eccentric, snarky Captain Solyony (Nathan Brockett) is in turns generous, offensive, pitiable, and threatening. . . . Et j’en passe, as the French say – there’s too much for me to recount. This Three Sisters is a memorable evening, one with characters and actors who will stay with you.

Hannah Kenah's strongly positive review in the Austin Chronicle, November 19

Leila Bela's review on Austinist.com