Images by Bret Brookshire: Humble Boy, Different Stages at City Theatre, January 7 - 29

Images by Bret Brooksire, found on-line:

Different Stages presents

Humble Boy

by Charlotte Jones

January 7 – January 29, 2011
City Theater, 3823 Airport Suite D ^map
Thursdays – Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m.
Pick your Price Tickets: $15, $20, $25, $30
** Reservations: 474–8497 **

Different Stages continues its 2010 – 2011 season with the Austin premier of Charlotte Jones' Humble Boy, winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, the Critics' Circle Best New Play Award and the People's Choice Best New Play Award.

Felix Humble, theoretical physicist, has left Cambridge and his search for a unified "Theory of Everything", to attend his beekeeper father's funeral –– but finds himself in the middle of a hornet's nest instead. His overbearing mother Flora has exiled the bees, and taken the boorish next–door neighbor as her lover. Add a mousy family friend, a dutiful gardener, and a visitor from his own romantic past, and like the bees, Felix bumbles to find order amid the chaos.

Directed by Jonathan Urso (Butterflies Are Free) Humble Boy features Jennifer Underwood (Morning's at Seven) as Flora and Tom Stephan (Mary Stuart) as Felix. Playing Flora's long suffering friend Mercy is Susan Roberts (Shards). George Pye and his daughter Rosie are played by Mike Gerecke (The Laramie Project) and Suzanne Balling (Dead White Males) And playing the gardener is Norman Blumensaadt (Eurydice).

Click to view additional images at AustinLiveTheatre.com. . . .

Dead White Males by William Missouri Downs, Sustainable Theatre Project, August 19 - September 11

Fascism isn't funny but it offers huge targets for satire.

The premise is familiar: an eager novice takes up a new calling, infused with idealism, and finds that not only is the actual day-to-day work grueling but the authorities are self-serving, hypocritical and exploitative.

Dead White Males is a valentine to those teacher-victims and a savage attack on administrators of educational systems. The Sustainable Theatre Project stretches a bit by linking the play to recent battles over the Texas education curriculum, but that wouldn't bother the likely audience in Austin for this staging. In fact, the company gave the intro an Alamo Drafthouse feel by running news clips and cartoons for the twenty minutes or so before the start of the live action.

Downs sets the tone from the very first moments, with a trio of evaluators sitting in on one of the first classes of tender, earnest Janet, a newly recruited teacher. Janet (Molly Fonseca) struggles to maintain discipline in the class from hell as the administrators interrupt her with impossible, smarmy instructions and corrections. Our villains are a useless Ph.Ed named Dr. Ozzy Mandias (flashing neon sign here! cf. Shelley's poem of the same name about the statue of an ancient, vanished mighty king), a sycophantic "master teacher" Woods (Beth Burroughs) and non-committal Principal Pettlogg (Dennis Kelleher Bailey). The lesson is a fiasco, mostly because poor Janet never gets the opportunity to present it.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .