Laughter on the 23rd Floor by Neil Simon, Austin Playhouse, February 25 - March 27

Neil Simon's set-up for Laughter on the 23rd Floor is simple and classic, if you can abstract from the biographic aspects of it. A newcomer enthusing about his new job discovers that his work colleagues are eccentrics, each more bizarre and devastatingly verbal than the previous one. Their employer, initially unseen, has enormous stature with the public, but they all know that he is a generous, distracted borderline psycho. Set 'em ricocheting off one another, bring the boss in, interrupt it from time to time as the newcomer addresses the audience with a rueful smile. Eventually, toward the middle of the second half, pressures from craven commercialism and the indifference to genius of the unwashed bring about the disbanding of the work unit, with much sentiment among its members and the megalomaniac disbelief of the boss.

With slight adjustments and a naval theme, you could be on board ship with Mr. Roberts or with Captain Queeg or with William Bligh. Or before Agincourt with Henry V. These few, this band of brothers, they bind together and then disappear into memory, greater and even more eccentric than they really were. This particular ship is an office in a New York skyscraper where the eccentrics are comedy sketch writers, the boss is a neurotic comedy star on live television in the early 1950's, and the newcomer is a surrogate for the playwright, Neil Simon.

Simon and his brother Danny did indeed write for live television before Simon embarked on his series of sweet and often nostalgic comedies. Sid Caesar saw a review they'd put together in a Catskills resort and hired them to write for his Show of Shows with a team that included the most successful writers, comedians and writer-comedians of the time. The Wikipedia article on this piece offers a table linking Simon's eccentrics with the real live eccentrics who probably inspired them, including Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbard, Carl Reiner and more.

Images by Christopher Loveless: Laughter on the 23rd Floor by Neil Simon, Austin Playhouse, February 25 - March 27

Images by Christopher Loveless, received directly:

Laughter on the 23rd Floor

by Neil Simon

directed by Don Toner

Feb. 25 - March 27

Austin Playhouse Main Stage, Penn Field, 3601 S. Congress (click for map)

Tickets are $26 Thursday and Friday and $28 Saturday and Sunday.

All student tickets are half price!

For Tickets, Call (512) 476-0084 or click here to order tickets online.

Hot on the heels of our most successful show ever, we're thrilled to bring theatrical legend Neil Simon's nostalgic comedy Laughter on the 23rd Floor to the stage! Set in 1953, Laughter recalls Simon's days as a young writer on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows. The play is a fast-paced and very fun comic romp through the behind-the-scenes antics in the writers' room.

Laughter features an all star cast including Kimberly Barrow, Brian Coughlin,Huck Huckaby, Jenny Larson, Jason Newman, Steve Shearer, Blake Adam Smith, David Stahl, and David Stokey!

Directed by Don Toner, Costume Design by Buffy Manners, Lighting Design by Don Day, and Sound Design by the Gunn Brothers.

Click to view additional images by Christopher Loveless at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Laughter on the 23rd Floor, Austin Playhouse, February 25 - March 27

Received directly:

Laughter on the 23rd Floor

by Neil Simon

directed by Don Toner

Feb. 25 - March 27

Austin Playhouse Main Stage, Penn Field, 3601 S. Congress (click for map)

Tickets are $26 Thursday and Friday and $28 Saturday and Sunday.

All student tickets are half price!

For Tickets, Call (512) 476-0084 or click here to order tickets online.

Hot on the heels of our most successful show ever, we're thrilled to bring theatrical legend Neil Simon's nostalgic comedy Laughter on the 23rd Floor to the stage! Set in 1953, Laughter recalls Simon's days as a young writer on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows. The play is a fast-paced and very fun comic romp through the behind-the-scenes antics in the writers' room.

Laughter features an all star cast including Kimberly Barrow, Brian Coughlin,Huck Huckaby, Jenny Larson, Jason Newman, Steve Shearer, Blake Adam Smith, David Stahl, and David Stokey!

For more information, visit our website!

The Tempest, Austin Shakespeare at the Rollins Theatre, Long Center, September 9 - 26

Prospero's kingdom is an enchanted isle, suggested by the wide circle marked out on the floor of the Rollins Theatre. As did Shakespeare, Ann Ciccolella invites the audience to create that world by participating with their imaginations. The scenery is minimal -- little more than towering dark blue flats at the back of the playing area, an unassuming balcony or elevation at stage right, rear, and a couple of rickety bushes on platforms pushed onstage as needed.

One needs little more than that, augmented by the rich suggestiveness of Jason Amato's lighting. The dense artificial haze generated as the play begins is superfluous and somewhat distracting.

The waves of the opening tempest are evoked by the stage hands holding long, wide muslim bands across the playing area downstage and deepstage, raising and agitating them so that their billows suggest the increasing fury of the storm. The crew despairs of salvation, the members of the noble retinue returning to Naples from Carthage are aghast. Above them on the island's lookout, gentle Miranda and her father Prospero look on.

The Tempest was probably Shakespeare's last work, and it's easy to interpret it as his farewell to the stage. A studious magician in a magic isle is wrapping up loose ends -- preparing to renounce his magic and to drown his books, righting wrongs done against himself and his daughter, rebuking the guilty and preparing to leave and to reassume his dukedom. Prospero's a man of wisdom, a master of the isle and the spirits upon it, endowed with powers sufficient to command the elements. Many an actor plays him with sweep and rhetoric and high authority, like Charleston Heston doing Moses in the Ten Commandments.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Images by Kirk R. Tuck: The Tempest, Austin Shakespeare, September 8 - 26

Photographer Kirk R. Tuck posts on his blog The Visual Science Lab a selection of preview night performance images of The Tempest, playing at the Rollins Theatre, Long Center, September 8 - 26, along with his comments about equipment and about the challenges of low-light photography.

Steve Shearer as Prospero

Click to view additional images by Kirk R. Tuck from Austin Shakespeare's The Tempest

See Kirk's full article at The Visual Science Lab. . . .

Profile: Austin Shakespeare Prepares The Tempest

This week Austin Shakespeare opens The Tempest at the Rollins Theatre, Long Center.

Theatre is a collaborative art, coordinated in the best stagings by a precise schedule, time consuming preparation, and an accelerating rhythm as performance day comes near. The actors will fix our attention but the piece depends also upon decisions and actions of those we never see. For The Tempest the company and artistic director Ann Ciccolella are supported -- some might even say carried -- by the work of the stage manager, the dramaturg, designers, dressers, props handlers and stage hands.

A theatre buff finds it fascinating to watch those contributions coming together in final rehearsals. Last Friday after an escorted trip through the labyrinthine basement of the Long Center, ALT got to sit in the Rollins Theatre for the first melding of those arts. Lighting designer Jason Amato worked his light plot and plan through a full rehearsal.

The cast hardly missed a syllable, even as colors changed, pools of light materialized and then disappeared, and sometimes the action went forward in a penumbra. Shakespeare's intelligence and wit were embodied by the cast, many of them dressed as yet in temporary costume; Prospero's magic isle was defined by a simple wide circle with provisional backdrops. Much of the music was ready, either recorded or played live, but projected video effects for the fairy isle would not be included until the weekend.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Dancing at Lughnasa, Austin Playhouse, January 23 - March 1

Ah, sweet Jesu, the Irish! A gifted lot, you know, close to the earth; fine women and, o' course, those charmin' but useless men of theirs. Think back with me, now, to the early days, and by that I mean, say, 1936, when the Mundy sisters had just gotten their radio, which back then they called a "Marconi. . . "

An ensemble piece for five women actors, Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa gives us an Ireland that is now mythic. Inside the memory space of the Playhouse stage and under the influence of the now-grown narrator Michael, played with soothing persuasiveness by Huck Huckaby, the five unmarried Mundy sisters live a simple but rich existence in their rural cottage.

We do not really know why none of these women ever married. The visible male characters cannot match them in character, intelligence or dedication. In the moment of this telling, Michael is just a boy, their indulged young man child. Father Jack, their uncle, has returned, bewildered and mildly heretical after 30 years of missionary work in Uganda, and he wanders through the cottage not always recognizing them. Gerry, the useless twinkling-eyed perpetual suitor to Chrissie, got young Michael upon her six years earlier but has no thought of them in his dreams of traveling salesman success and service in the International Brigade in Spain.

The warm, safe space of cottage and family is threatened and will eventually be destroyed by outside forces, narrator Michael reveals to us. The market for the handicrafts made by youngest sisters Agnes and Rose disappears when a glove factory opens nearby. The school dismisses Kate, the principal breadwinner, on the pretense that the school population is waning, but almost certainly because of the scandal wafting after Father Jack. That useless Gerry disappears, eventually, back to his native Wales, with ne'er a thought for the Mundy sisters.

But within that threatened household, what a vivid, emotional and supportive circle those sisters make! Babs George as Kate (rightmost, below) is the voice of propriety, bastion against the heathen carrying on of the semi-pagan Irish and their dance over bonfires on the ancient rite of Lughnasa. The Marconi fitfully erupts in a fiddle tune that enchants the sisters including Kate into stepping, whirling and jigs, until Kate with effort shuts down that celebration.

Michael's mother Chrissie (Lara Toner, in gray sweater) dotes upon him, as does his brash aunt Maggie (Cyndi Williams, far left). Chrissie's heart remains with gallant, useless Gerry although her conscience resolutely says "no" to his flattering and dancin'; her sister Agnes (Rebecca Robinson, in brown sweater) is plainly pining away for the same man, or any man, or any hope of love. And sister Rose (Margaret Hoard, in checked sweater), perhaps the youngest, certainly the simplest and most headstrong, just will not give up going out in the countryside with that married man.

The grown Michael recounts the fates of each of his aunts -- except, unless memory fails me, that of Aunt Maggie, the liveliest and most solid of them all. Cyndi Williams in this role gives us a woman of good appetite and great humor, with an emblematic moment in which a deep puff on a cigarette transforms her, says she, from sadness to happiness.

This is the melancholy, nostalgic side of the Irish -- not the wake, but the dirge. Director Don Toner and the female principals have created the feel of a continuous rapport among the sisters. The women reveal their vulnerabilities in words, subtle gesture and body language, and in their scrupulous attention to one another onstage. The unselfconscious Father Jack (right) is the sacred fool for this bunch - - Steve Shearer plays him with both openness and restraint, the calm voice of a reason unimaginable and unacceptable in this milieu. Brian Coughlin as Gerry is the bane of Irish womankind -- sunny, plausible and confidently attractive.

Set design by Don Toner, costumes by Buffy Manners, Irish dance choreographed by the impressively Gaelic Eimer Ni Mhaoiledidigh-Donnellan, and lighting by the Gunn brothers -- all contribute strongly to the creation of the protected space of memory.

Toner directed Dancing at Lughnasa at Austin's Live Oak Theatre in 1993 with Babs George as Kate, the same role. There is another point of continuity -- Steve Shearer was the merry Gerry in that production and he has now become Father Jack. Those facts offer the opportunity to speculate about theatre, memory, and transformation, just as the Playhouse is moving into its 2009 campaign in hopes of raising capital for a new home.

Robert Faires' review in the Austin Chronicle of January 29: ". . .Don Toner's staging here . . .did make me appreciate anew Friel's lyrical, stirring script and the preciousness and power of memory."