Upcoming: Locked In The Arms Of A Crazy Life: poems by Charles Bukovski, Austin Community College, October 4 - 13

presents
 

LOCKED IN THE ARMS OF A CRAZY LIFE: poems by Charles Bukowski
 

Directed by ACC Drama Artistic Director, Shelby Brammer

American poet, novelist and short story writer Charles Bukowski was influenced by his home city of Los Angeles, and his work reflects the ordinary day to day existence of people on the lower rungs of society, combining “the confessional poet’s promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero."


Opens on Thursday, Oct. 4^th, runs Oct. 5^thand 6^th, and Oct. 11^th, 12^th and 13^th (Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays) at 8pm, ACC Mainstage Theater.

223-3240 for more info. 2^nd floor, 1212 Rio Grande.

(image via Austin Community College)

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

The Lucky Spot by Beth Henley, Austin Community College, November 4 - 13

by Michael Meigs

These pralines come in a very handsome box. Peter Sukovaty's design for the interior of the Lucky Spot dance hall in rural 1930's Lousiana is graceful and meticulously detailed, the lighting is rich and subtle, and the music that accompanies and accentuates the action includes dance music and even a couple of Hank Williams numbers. It's just before Christmas, but you can almost smell the Louisiana marshes when those doors at deep center stage swing open.

Playwright Henley creates a pair of strong opposed egos at the heart of her piece: short-spoken tough-guy gambler Reed Hooker who won this dubious property in a card game and Sue Jack Tiller at Angola Penitentiary, his wife, set for early holiday release from her sentence of three years for throwing downstairs the woman she caught in Hooker's bed. James Hawkins as Hooker is a brooding presence, a rock out of place in the marshland. Yesenia Garcia as Sue Jack is the vital force of this piece of theatre, creating a complex, attractive character bruised by life and indifference but capable of warmth and joy. Henley tantalizes us with these two and the grim gap that subsists between them. Call 'em angels with dirty faces; we know that they've been living hard lives and we want to see the grand opening bring them together again and make them happy.

Click to read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Video: The Lucky Spot by Beth Henley, Austin Community College, November 4 - 12

Received directly:

Austin Community College Drama Department

presents

The Lucky Spot

by Beth Henley
directed by Shelby Brammer

November 4th, 5th and 6th & Nov. 11th, 12th and 13th, Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm and Sundays at 2pm

Admission: $5 for Students, $10 for General Audience.

ACC Mainstage Theater, Rio Grande Campus, 1212 Rio Grande (click for map)

[Apple users: can't see the video? Cick to go to YouTube]

Set 60 miles west of New Orleans on Christmas Eve in 1934, The Lucky Spot follows a band of down on their luck ne’er-do-wells (including a charismatic gambler and his estranged wife, a passionate beauty just released from the penitentiary) and their desperate dreams to turn an old house into the hottest new taxi-dancing emporium in Louisiana. A charming, tender and very funny play by Beth Henley, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her previous play, Crimes of the Heart.

Upcoming: The Lucky Spot by Beth Henley, Austin Community College, November 4 - 13

Found on-line:

Austin Community College Drama Department

presents

The Lucky Spot

by Beth Henley
directed by Shelby Brammer

November 4th, 5th and 6th & Nov. 11th, 12th and 13th, Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm and Sundays at 2pm

Admission: $5 for Students, $10 for General Audience.

ACC Mainstage Theater, Rio Grande Campus, 1212 Rio Grande (click for map)

Set 60 miles west of New Orleans on Christmas Eve in 1934, The Lucky Spot follows a band of down on their luck ne’er-do-wells (including a charismatic gambler and his estranged wife, a passionate beauty just released from the penitentiary) and their desperate dreams to turn an old house into the hottest new taxi-dancing emporium in Louisiana. A charming, tender and very funny play by Beth Henley, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her previous play, Crimes of the Heart.

Upcoming: In2 The West, Austin Community College, April 28 - 30

Found on-line:

In2 The West
directed by Amparo Garcia-Crow and Shelby Brammer

April 28-April 30, 8 p.m.

Austin Community College Rio Grande Campus, 1212 Rio Grande (click for map)
Tickets: $10 donations are suggested to help support the ACC Drama Department scholarship fund.

The Creative Writing and Drama Departments of Austin Community College present their 2011 production of IN 2 THE WEST, continuing a 20+ year tradition of presenting captivating original monologue portraits of people who live in the West.

IN 2 THE WEST features new regional performance literature written and performed by ACC creative writing students and student actors in a compelling and provocative showcase each spring. The growing collection of insightful monologue portraits of ordinary people who live in or who have come to the West is a unique collaboration between emerging literary and theatrical voices working with guest professionals. The showcase is an interdisciplinary effort of the ACC Creative Writing Department and Drama Department.

Mauritius by Theresa Rebeck, Austin Community College, October 8 - 17

Theresa Rebeck's Mauritius is in many aspects a well-made play, fitting neatly into the 19th- and early-20th century tradition in the United Kingdom and in France (there, as une pièce bien faite). Cribbing quickly from Wikipedia, that Cliff's Notes of the Internet, one gets the reminder that the well-made play

has a strong neoclassical flavour, involving a very tight plot and a climax that takes place very close to the end of the story, with most of the story taking place before the action of the play; much of the information regarding such previous action would be revealed through thinly veiled exposition. Following that would be a series of causally-related plot complications. . . . [Plot twists may] bring about an unexpected reversal of fortune. . . . The reversal will allow for a quick dénouement, and a return to order, at which point the curtain falls.

Sound familiar? The well-made play has long been the framework for television drama and for motion pictures. Viewers, like spectators, like to have a story sharply defined, characters first viewed in full motion, a puzzle or two, an unexpected revelation and a satisfactory outcome. Mauritius is that sort of story.

The audience accepts the premises of the story, a suspension of disbelief that may in fact be considerable. In Rebeck's tale, you are required to believe that a New York tough guy with dubious connections and lots of cash is passionately enamored of philately. He has such a vast knowledge of stamp collecting that he's immediately lured and later enthused by two vanishingly rare mid-19th century stamps issued by the British colonial officials in Mauritius. Where did those rarities come from? Some girl off the street carried them into Phil's Philately Shop in a single stamp album that Phil refused to examine. Dennis, the guy lounging in the shop for no apparent reason, recognizes their worth and is off like a lighting bolt to work a with tough guy Sterling.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Under the Gaslight, Austin Community College, October 30 - November 8

Ever wonder about the melodrama scene where the dastardly villain ties his victim to the railroad tracks? No, it didn't originate with Snidley Whiplash and Dudley Dooright, though that may be where you first saw it. Jay Ward was copying it out of a long tradition of silent movie serials that drew on saloon theatricals.

Credit for the notion goes to New York theatre empresario Augustin Daly, in his 1867 production of this play, Under The Gaslight, which he wrote. And the railway scene is a bonafide thrilling moment in that sentimental drama, especially when the cast directed by Shelby Brammer plays it all absolutely straight, without a whisper of irony. Perhaps you'll be surprised to find that the victim is not the innocent maiden -- in fact, the innocent maiden is clever and plucky enough to free the prisoner just before the express train comes tearing through for New York City.

Austin Community College students step back 140 years for this one, mightily aided by pro actors David Yeakle, Paul Mitchell Wright and Arthur Adair.

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

Upcoming: In 2 the West, Molière, & Muntu, Austin Community College, April 3 - 4

As part of its spring festival Carnival ah!, Austin Community College offers several dramatic pieces on April 3 and 4 at its Rio Grande campus. From ACC announcements:

Theater – Run through an actor's warm-up, or try your skill in an improvisation workshop. Or just sit back and enjoy two plays, including special performances of the Austin classic "In 2 the West" and "Moliere 2009: A French Classic Reloaded." Natalie Marlena Goodnow will present her one-woman show "Muntu."


Read More. . . .

Proof, Austin Community College, October 10-19

This is a beautifully engineered production with a high level of acting, and it deserves to be seen beyond the purely internal circuit of Austin Community College.

It plays this weekend and next at the tiny third-floor Gallery Theatre at ACC’s Rio Grande campus, in the building that once upon a time was Stephen F. Austin High School.

It occurred to me as I watched the play unfold on opening night that I was probably the only one in the room who didn’t know how the story was going to turn out.

Proof by young playwright David Auburn was performed in New York in 2000, where it won Tony awards for best play and for best leading actress. In 2005 it was done as a motion picture with Gwyneth Paltrow in the lead. Anthony Hopkins and Jake Gyllenhall were in the cast.

But I was serving in the Caribbean at the time, and the local cinemas generally didn’t get up to that level of Hollywood culture.

In my capacity as a truly naïve test audience, I was properly intrigued by the story of 23-year-old Catherine, who has devoted the last four years of her life to caring for her increasingly psychotic father, Robert (Paul Mitchell Wright),a fiftyish University of Chicago mathematician known for revolutionary discoveries at an early age.

It’s a coming of age story, with the sharp, despairing Catherine (Hailey Tuck) doing battle with her father and with his ghost, with an admiring young assistant professor (Dusty Doering), and with her take-charge sister Claire (Emily Robinson).

My instinct suggested to me that this was going to come together by the close as a well-built play in which our heroine would come through reinforced and justified, which she did.

Both of my offspring have been undergraduates at the University of Chicago. That’s why I was the only one who laughed aloud at certain of the references or the digs (“Northwestern – but that’s so far away!”). But never mind that -- the play transplants well.

The set designed and lit by Peter Sukovaty is gorgeous. The meticulous craftsmanship, atmosphere and lighting are superior by far to most of Austin’s productions, with the possible exception of some of those at the Zach Scott theatre.


Above, for the opening the night time scene is done in a luscious blue light with shadows of imaginary trees. The bay window is a nice touch; the exterior walls of the house and the garden wall are carefully worked and textured to suggest real stone.

Later in the production another night scene gives one the opportunity to appreciate the grayed-out bicycle and wicker table, as well as the evocation of trees and street beyond the wall. At one point the police are called, sirens are heard and those trees are lit from below by a rotating red beacon to suggest the arriving patrol car.



Sound design and costuming are equally high quality supports to the action.















The leads here are Catherine the devoted daughter,who has a gift for math but is unable to continue her education, and her father Robert, whose presence in the opening scene is revealed to be that of a hallucination appearing to his daughter in the days following his death.

Hailey Tuck has fine command of her role. Given Catherine’s legitimate discontents and her angry repudiations in the first act, it would be all too easy to make her a frankly disagreeable character. Tuck softens Catherine, giving her at times the self-absorbed lassitude of the truly lost. We never share her expressed apprehension that she might be tipping over into madness, as her father did; her behavior and speeches don’t suggest such a falling away.

Catherine is sharpest with her older sister Claire (Emily Robinson) but that can be read as legitimate annoyance and the mutual goading of siblings. Robinson plays Claire with a curiously flat tone throughout, as if her younger sister had inherited all the emotional range in the family.





Dusty Doering carries well his role as the nice guy admirer of Robert and, gradually, of Catherine. He doesn’t have quite the heft of a 26-year-old academic, but that’s no fault of his. His is a fairly vanilla role, a necessary mechanism in the plot as Catherine pulls free of her father and moves to establish herself. We like him and we understand why Catherine turns to him.

Paul Mitchell Wright as the distracted father, Robert, modulates between extremes -- on the one hand, the affectless intellectual unable to express his affection directly, and on the other, the recovered schizophrenic who realizes with patent horror that he is tipping back into the abyss.

Wright teases us a bit in his program bio, challenging us with a word problem involving tearing and stacking sheets of paper (let’s see, that would be, um, .003 inches to the 51st power, wouldn’t it?). He says that he’s a professor of mathematics (like the character he plays). What he doesn’t reveal is that he’s an actor based in Austin with a lengthy resumé including TV work and theatre acting at most of the town’s principal venues.

This is real theatre, worth a whole lot more than the $6 price of admission to the general public. Thanks to director Shelby Brammer for bringing together this cast and crew.

It prompts me to look forward to ACC’s next undertaking, the November 14 – 23 production of Euripides’ last work The Bacchae, a study of the extremes of religious intoxication that one critic has called “rich, strange, and in places horrifying.” Now, THAT will be an interesting stretch!

PROOF Background --

John Simon review of original production, New York magazine, May 29, 2000

Playwright Profile: “David Auburn’s Burden of Proof” by Zachery Pincus-Roth in NY Times, March 21, 2004

Proof (the 2005 movie) at Internet Movie Database