Nursery Crimes by Greg Klein, Last Act Theatre Company at Dougherty Arts Center, November 8 - 24, 2013

by Michael Meigs

Sara Cormier, David Boss (photo: Will Hollis Snider)

David Boss with his resonant baritone and weary dead-pan styling makes a fine Philip Marlowe, or, in acknowledgment of the film noir inspiration for playwright Greg Klein and the company, a good Bogey. 

Klein's play is an homage to that very distinctive style, so much so that the first half of the Kickstarter promo video was a 1940s-style dramatization with first-person narration, video-recorded in stark black and white by director Will Hollis Snider.

You could write a straight film noir play script and make it work; you could even do a parody version that could amuse both film buffs and the casual public. 

Klein's choice is different. He's soberly respectful of the genre as he mines his Mother Goose for characters. The protagonist sleuth is Jack Horner, and he's certainly sitting in his corner while his good-natured seen-it-all secretary Donna (presumably Mother) Hubbard (Peggy Schott) laboriously types his reports and answers his phone.


Sara Cormier is the attractive bad news that comes his way, asking for help. She's Bo Peep, and her sheep have disappeared. Her father's the farmer Old MacDonald (Travs Bedard). We run across some baddies, Jack (D. Heath Thompson) and Jill (Elena Weinberg), who use the cheerful dolt Humphrey aka Humpty (Bobby DiPasquale) for some of their bad business. Peggy Schott checks in also as Marjorie Daw; Bedard as the gruff avuncular cop Guy Blue; DiPasquale as Peter Piper; and Mary quite contrary (Weinberg) is hopelessly dependent upon her drug dealer boyfriend King Cole (Thompson). While the sleuth's nosing around through the underworld he runs across the three blind mice (DiPasquale, Thompson and Bedard). Double crosses, bad temper, murder, the big shadowy metropolis. You know. The city that never sleeps and kept hick middle-class America on the edge of its cinema seats.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

NURSERY CRIMES by Greg Klein, Last Act Theatre Company at the Dougherty Arts Center, November 8 - 24, 2013

presents

Nursery Crimes

Sara Cormier, David Boss (poster photo: Will Hollis Snider)

Written by Greg Klein

Directed by Will Hollis Snider

November 8 - 24

Thursdays - Saturdays at 8:00 p.m, Sundays at 2:00 p.m.

*Saturday, Nov. 9 and Friday, Nov. 15 are artist benefit nights. All ticket and concession sales go to the cast, crew and other artists who made this show possible.
*Thursday, Nov. 14 and Sunday, Nov. 17 are “pay what you can” shows.

Dougherty Arts Center, 1110 Barton Springs Road, Austin, TX 78704

Tickets are $15. Student tickets are $12 with valid student ID. Tickets can be purchased online at https://secure.buyplaytix.com/lastacttheatre/reserve/nursery_crimes.html and at the door. Attendees can also reserve seats online and still pay at the door. Last Act Theatre Company accepts all major credit cards, cash and 

 checks.

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep and she doesn’t know where to find them. So, she turns to private eye Jack Horner to crack the case. But will it turn out to be more than he bargained for?

Quick dialogue moves this story full of childhood characters from what seems to be a humble beginning through a series of twists and turns, in a grown-up tale of murder, deceit and mystery.

Cast
David Boss - Jack Horner
Sara Cormier - Bo Peep
Peggy Schott - Donna Hubbard and Marjorie Daw
Elena Weinberg - Jill and Mary Contrary
Travis Bedard - Thomas McDonald, Guy Blue and Blind Mouse
Heath Thompson – Jack, Cole Kingsley and Blind Mouse
Bobby DiPasquale - Humpty Dumpty, Peter Piper and Blind Mouse

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

THE HEAD by Connor Hopkins, Trouble Puppet Theatre Company at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, September 26 - October 12, 2013

[resident at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, 2803 Manor Rd. -- click for map]

presents

 
 The Head: A Trouble Puppet Show

by Connor Hopkins
Sept. 26–Oct. 12, 2013, 8 pm
Thursdays – Saturdays, 6pm Sundays

Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Road, Austin, TX 78722 - click for map

ASL interpretation offered on selected nights. Group sales welcome. Director/cast talkbacks available for groups of five or more.
**This show contains content and copious amounts of language not suitable for children.** 

Tickets$10–$20 at the door or via






Trouble Puppet Theater Co. presents The Head, a darkly hilarious original work of puppet theater for grown-ups. Inside the Man's head, an overworked Mechanic struggles with faulty machinery and the head's other residents, the Personal Demons, to navigate through the day.

The Mechanic maintains and operates the machinery that makes it possible for The Man to get out of bed, go to work, have conversations, and otherwise live daily life. The Man's issues, poor judgment, and bad habits chronically make the little Mechanic's job more difficult. When the Personal Demons climb out of the shadows of the Limbic Lobe, all hell breaks loose inside and outside the Head.

Trouble Puppet's bunraku-style tabletop puppets are each manipulated by as many as 3 puppeteers and are designed and built by Connor Hopkins, our assistant builder, and invited guest builders from out of town. The puppets, the set, and the show are a visually and technically remarkable spectacle, with a gorgeous original score.

A completely original work by the company who brought Austin award-winning productions of The Jungle, Frankenstein, Riddley Walker, Toil & Trouble, and The Cruel Circus. Written and directed by Artistic Director Connor Hopkins (winner of B. Iden Payne Awards for Outstanding Direction of a Drama as well as Outstanding Original Script and The Austin Examiner's Best New Play Written by an Austinite), The Head features music by Justin Sherburn, lighting by Megan Reilly, sound design by K. Eliot Haynes, costume design by Monica Gibson, graphic design by Chris Owen. Performers: Jose Villarreal, Noel Gaulin, Rachel Wiese, Parker Dority, David Higgins, Travis Bedard, Kim Adams, Nathan Lahay, Elyce Lahay, Chris Gibson.

Trouble Puppet Theater Company: Founded in 2004, Trouble Puppet is dedicated to the creation of exceptional works of puppet theater, to the promotion of the art of puppetry, and to the support of its practitioners. We reach as far as we can into the possibilities that puppetry offers, in its many forms and styles, and seek to balance risk and exploration with a drive for excellent craft and technique. Our work is inspired not only by our artistic passion but by our social, political, and human convictions: that there can be no end to the struggle for knowledge and compassion, against injustice and intolerance . . . and boring theater.

Trouble Puppet is a sponsored project of Salvage Vanguard Theater. This production is supported by the Jim Henson Foundation.

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh, 7 Towers Theatre Company at Dougherty Arts Center, July 12 - 28, 2013

by Michael Meigs

The Pillowman takes place in a dark, eerie world that Martin McDonagh created back in 2003 when he moved away from his dark Irish ethnic plays The Beauty Queen of Leenan and The Lieutenant of Inishmore. The Hyde Park Theatre staged this piece in 2007, winning Ken Webster a B. Iden Payne for direction and critics' table awards for actors Jude Hickey and Kenneth Wayne Bradley. Both Southwestern University and the UT University Theatre Guild staged The Pillowman in 2011, and the Woodlawn Theatre in San Antonio did it last year.

But I hadn't seen it. Had no idea about it, in fact. so I was a tender and willing victim for the twists and ironies of McDonagh's brothers caught in a grim fairy tale.

The Anglo-Irish playwright combined two epic horror traditions: folk tales, such as those recorded by the Brothers Grimm, that elaborated upon basic primal fears of violence and death, and twentieth-century totalitarian practices that accorded state authorities absolute discretion in use of violence and summary execution. The Pillowman portrays the interrogation and investigation of the oddly named Katurian K. Katurian (the middle initial stands for Katurian), a baffled and accommodating writer obsessed with creating modern-day equivalents of those folk tales. They're vivid, thought-provoking and -- with one exception -- they all end with the deaths of the protagonists.

Travid Bedard, Aaron Black (photo: 7 Towers Theatre)

Crimes have been committed, and they mirror Katurian's black whimseys.

The piece could be interpreted as a fable about the suppression of creativity and imagination, but the macabre nature of Katurian's imaginings and other details revealed during harrowing confrontations in this nameless prison lead in a different direction. McDonagh's horror story is really about the lasting damage inflicted upon children by callous, exploitative adults. Standing in the middle of the story and the dilemma is Katurian's mentally and emotionally handicapped brother Michael, also arrested, a childlike man incapable of understanding any of these nuances.

This action is intense, brimming with suspense, and Director Christina Gutierrez chose some of Austin's most muscularly intellectual actors to create the piece. Travis Bedard's Katurian is earnest, eloquent and sly; Aaron Black endows brother Michael with vulnerability, effusive reactions and innocence. The emotional links between the two resonate, and we understand Katurian's determination to protect Michael. The cops are just as vividly drawn -- David Boss as Detective Tupolski, the senior of the two, dapper and bloody minded, and Stephen Price as Detective Ariel, all fire and scarcely contained violence.

The country is unnamed and the time is undefined -- this is the blank landscape of nightmare. Names are vaguely eastern European, but this cast speaks in varieties of Irish accent. Tupolski's is the more sophisticated, perhaps suggesting higher education somewhere privileged, while Price's rhythm and vowels seem rural and perhaps underclass. It seems odd initially that Bedard as Katurian uses only the lightest lilt, while the speech of his brother, played by Black, is much more markedly Irish.

The company illustrates Katurian's fables with shadow puppetry by Katie Rose Pipkin and Lindsay McKenna. Simple, relatively rigid figures appear in rectangles of light projected from behind the walls of the box set, symbolizing the fugue states of Katurian's imagination without suggesting any possibility of escape from misery or menace. This is an adroit touch, and it relieves somewhat the claustrophobic appearance of the stark setting.

The Dougherty Arts Center seemed an awkward space for this piece, for it has a wide apron and a ten- or twelve-foot expanse of flooring in front of the first row of seats. Given the intensity of the piece, I would have preferred to bring the whole set forward and perhaps even to locate much of the action on the floor in front of the stage. These are ex-post reflections, however, for as the story unfolded I was transfixed by the language, the several myths being spun before us, the inevitable but unpredicable climax that was coming, and the transformed appearances and characters of actors I'd seen a number of times.

Travis Bedard, puppetry by Katie Rose Pipkin (photo: 7 Towers Theatre)

The cast took The Pillowman out to Winedale on Monday evening and performed before the 17-member UT troupe currently running three Shakespeare plays in repertory. The old barn's relatively shallow stage and close seating almost certainly provided an even more intensely satisfying experience that the one offered at the Dougherty over the last two weekends . But I admit that I'm a propiniquity junkie, almost always to be found in the front row, and the audience was scattered all about the Dougherty seating space.

7 Towers performs The Pillowman three more times, Friday through Sunday at 8 p.m. Go, experience it. It won't make much difference where your seat is located; you'll be holding onto it tight.

Review by Bob Kinney at his Wordpress blog, July 13 - with images

Review by Adam Roberts for the Austin Chronicle, July 19

Review by Jeff Davis at www.austin.broadwayworld.com, July 24 


EXTRA
Click to view program for The Pillowman

Video Promo: The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh, 7 Towers Theatre Company, July 12 - 28, 2013

Travis Bedard prepares you for the










production of




The Pillowman

by Martin McDonaugh

Directed by Christina Gutierrez
Puppetry Design by Katie Rose Pipkin
Featuring Travis Bedard, David Boss, Stephen Price, and Aaron Black

July 12-28, 2013
Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, 8:00 p.m.
Dougherty Arts Center, 1110 Barton Springs Rd. - click for map

Tickets available at https://www.wepay.com/events/the-pillowman
or visit www.7TowersTheatre.com for more info

The 7 Towers Theatre Company continues its second season with Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, the story of a writer who is suspected of a series of murders that seem to be based on his dark fairy tales. As the play unfolds, the writer tells a number of his stories as he is interrogated by two increasingly brutal and violent police officers. The Pillowman, set in an unidentified totalitarian police state, asks difficult questions about freedom of speech and expression, and about the use of torture and force in police interrogations. Despite its violence, however, the play is darkly beautiful, ultimately arguing for the redemptive nature of the human spirit. 


(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

THE PILLOWMAN by Martin McDonaugh, 7 Towers Theatre at Dougherty Arts Center, July 12 - 28, 2013

presents

The Pillowman
by Martin McDonaugh
July 12-28, 2013
Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, 8:00 p.m.
Dougherty Arts Center, 1110 Barton Springs Rd. - click for map

Tickets available at https://www.wepay.com/events/the-pillowman
or visit www.7TowersTheatre.com for more info!

The 7 Towers Theatre Company continues its second season with Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, the story of a writer who is suspected of a series of murders that seem to be based on his dark fairy tales. As the play unfolds, the writer tells a number of his stories as he is interrogated by two increasingly brutal and violent police officers. The Pillowman, set in an unidentified totalitarian police state, asks difficult questions about freedom of speech and expression, and about the use of torture and force in police interrogations. Despite its violence, however, the play is darkly beautiful, ultimately arguing for the redemptive nature of the human spirit.

7 Towers is thrilled to partner with Austin-based visual artist Katie Rose Pipkin to bring the writer’s stories to life on stage. Katie Rose has created stunning characters and landscapes which transform the interrogation room in which the play takes place into a canvas for the writer’s imagination.

Puppetry Design by Katie Rose Pipkin
Starring Travis Bedard, David Boss, Stephen Price, and Aaron Black

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Fundraiser: The Pillowman by Martin McDonaugh, 7 Towers Theatre Company at the Dougherty Arts Center, July 12 - 28, 2013

Christina Gutierrez and Aaron Black ask for contributions through
 





to assist in raising $1500 for the

production of  
The Pillowman  
by Martin McDonaugh

featuring Travis Bedard
July 12 - 28, 2013
at the Dougherty Arts Center
1110 Barton Springs Rd. - click for map

The 7 Towers Theatre Company continues its second season with Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, the story of a writer who is suspected of a series of murders that seem to be based on his dark fairy tales. As the play unfolds, the writer tells a number of his stories as he is interrogated by two increasingly brutal and violent police officers. The Pillowman, set in an unidentified totalitarian police state, asks difficult questions about freedom of speech and expression, about the use of torture and force in police interrogations, and, perhaps most importantly, about the power of storytelling. 


Despite its violence, the play is darkly beautiful, ultimately arguing for the redemptive nature of the human spirit. We are beyond thrilled to partner with Austin-based visual artist Katie Rose Pipkin to bring the writer’s stories to life on stage. Katie Rose has created stunning characters and landscapes which transform the interrogation room in which the play takes place into a canvas for the writer’s imagination. 7 Towers’ collaboration with Katie Rose marks a new investment in visual storytelling and spectacle for the theatre company, and an opportunity to work within the vibrant visual arts community in Austin. 

Click here to go to the IndieGoGo page for further information and to contribute.


Your donations go directly toward paying for our space and paying our stunningly talented team. The Pillowman marks a shift from 7 Towers' previous focus on found and site-specific spaces, and we need your help to offset the cost of space rental. In addition, we've assembled a team of professional actors and designers whom we'd like to compensate for their commitment, artistry, and passion. 

That team includes Katy Billik (producer, costume design) of Chick and a Dude Productions, Derek Kollouri (set design) of Theatre en Bloc, Amy Lewis (lighting design) of The Loaded Gun Theory, and Amanda Gass (stage management) of Cambiare Productions, as well as well-known Austin actors Aaron Black, Travis Bedard, David J. Boss, and Stephen Price.

Photos by Stephen Pruitt for The Cruel Circus by Connor Hopkins, Trouble Puppet Theatre Company at the Salvage Vanguard, May 8 - 25, 2013

Performance photos by Stephen Pruitt for the








production of

The Cruel Circus
by Connor Hopkins
May 9–May 25, 2013 (8 pm Thursdays – Saturdays, 6pm Sundays.)
Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Road, Austin, TX 78722 - click for map
Arrive early (at least 15 min. before showtime) for preshow music by Cami Alys!

Tickets: $10-$20 at at the door or on-line via

(photo: Stephen Pruitt)

(photo: Stephen Pruitt)

 Frankenstein meets the island of misfit toys . . . and goes to the circus. A mysterious tinkerer brings to life an entire world of strange circus performers — some polished and complete, some clumsy and misshapen — then disappears, leaving them to make sense of who they are and what they are made for.

A new work of dark whimsy from the company who brought Austin award-winning productions of The Jungle, Frankenstein, Riddley Walker, and most recently, Toil & Trouble. Trouble Puppet deploys bunraku-style tabletop puppets to create graceful, lifelike, compelling drama for adults. This production features beautiful, complex puppets of remarkable design, by Connor Hopkins. Come see the handwalker, unicyclist, lion-tamer, acrobats, human cannonball, and fuselier!


Click to view additional performance photos by Stephen Pruitt at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Opinion: Travis Bedard on Austin as a 'Maker Town' -- Why You Might Want to Make Theatre Here, Howlround.com, April 14

Published at www.howlround.com:

Call a Thing by Its Proper Name

Travis Bedard

April 14, 2013

When opening up a line of conversation about a field as fractured and pasted together as the American theater the first challenge is finding a vocabulary, a framework, a context to hold the conversation together. Artists resist labels at all costs. Terms of art like “devised work” or “immersive theater” get derided as cliché and meaningless before the general population has even become aware of them. Cross-contamination of grant application and business jargon leads to word salad. Trying to define anything is like cleaning up a mercury spill on the tilt-a-whirl.

Add the feral competitiveness of a population believing that they are in a dog-eat-dog zero-sum industry and trying to get a spin-free picture of any location as an “arts city” would seem to be a lost cause. Producing such a snapshot would seem to be a fool’s errand.

I’ll be playing the fool.

The hidden piece though is the audiences. They are surprisingly resilient. They'll show for anything. Not necessarily thousands of them. Not enough to quit your day job. But they're game.

There are basic pitfalls for any fool attempting to assay a city’s arts climate or character. The easiest to fall into is finding and using the first common denominator between yourself and the audience…in theater that first denominator is always the industrial theater of New York. The trap of course is that there is no gestalt level commonality between any city and New York—not in terms of scale, industry or intent. So let’s dispense with the New York mad libs, the idea that somehow East Austin is like Williamsburg with fewer strollers and better boots. Hyde Park isn’t [Name of neighborhood] with [hokey Texas metaphor]. The exercise attempts to borrow big brother’s clothes and just sort of demeans everyone involved.

The second trap is one I am particularly prone to. Austin is every inch a college town with every college town’s native transience. When you try to describe such a place you grab a moment in time out of that river of people and ideas, hold it up to the light and then try to make the truth of that moment and those people the truth for a place rather than a moment.

When you hold yourself out as an advocate for a place, folks come to you when they’re thinking of moving to that town. I get asked a lot about the pros and cons of moving to Austin. As someone who was supposed to leave five years ago but got caught up making things—I am decidedly pro-Austin, but when trying to put together a viewbook of why artists should join your community the impulse is to showcase finished product, big name artists, and world class resources and I have a hard time doing that. I have a list of folks I want you to work with several miles long and shows I’ve loved with my whole being. Shows that have changed my whole being. But you don’t know them, they’re not going to bring you here and moving to Austin isn’t going to get you any more paid than where you are.

For years I‘ve held Austin up as a hothouse for new plays and as a node of the #newplay network. I took what I saw in my first four years in town and extrapolated what was produced as being the environment that produced it. As my tenure lengthened, I began to be a little confused when the new plays started slowing down and classics began to proliferate. Devised work companies went on hiatus or focused on other things and the product no longer fit the narrative. I was, as it turned out, a little shortsighted and frankly selling the town short.

Because well, here's the thing—Austin isn’t a theater town.

So why in the world would I recommend you move to Austin, or extended-visit Austin, or not leave Austin?

Because Austin is a maker town.

If you are interested in making inroads into the existing theater industry this isn’t a straight-line stop on your journey. If you would like to figure out what you want to make, learn how to make it yourself, or if you want to work outside the industry, pull up a chair—there’s plenty of table.

Click 'Read more' to continue at AustinLiveTheatre.com or click here to go to the article at www.howlround.com

THE CRUEL CIRCUS, Trouble Puppet Theatre Company at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, May 2 - 25, 2013

[workshopping and performing at Salvage Vanguard Theatre, 2803 Manor Rd. -- click for map]

presents an original play:

The Cruel Circus
written and directed by Connor Hopkins

May 9 - 25, Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 6 p.m.

 A mysterious tinkerer brings to life an entire world of strange circus performers some polished and complete, some clumsy and misshapen then disappears, leaving them to make sense of who they are and what they are made for.

A new work of dark whimsy from the company who brought Austin award-winning productions of The Jungle, Frankenstein, Riddley Walker, and most recently, Toil & Trouble.

Featuring performances by Zac Crofford, Travis Bedard, Seth White, Rob Jacques, Jose Villarreal, Gricelda Silva, Ellie McBride, Caroline Reck, and Brock England

Preshow music by Cami Alys; Music by Justin Sherburn; Sound Design by K. Eliot Haynes and Bernard Klinke; Lighting Design by Stephen Pruitt; Costume Design by Monica Gibson (with Lucie Cunningham)

ASL interpretation available for selected performances by Parker Dority and Shelby Mitchusson.

Made for adults. But children 10 and up, accompanied by adults, are welcome.
Tickets: Sliding scale, $10 - $50, available now through





(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Richard II by William Shakespeare, Poor Shadows of Elysium at the Curtain theatre, February 21 - March 9, 2013

by Michael Meigs


This company, the Poor Shadows of Elysium, is newly established but its principals and associates are well known to the curious collection of Shakespeare enthusiasts in Austin. After appearing in recent years as Oberon, Prospero, Mercutio, and Marcus of Titus Andronicus, Kevin Gates surrendered to the lure of Renaissance drama and enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Texas State. His partner and executive producer Bridget Farias has been running the EmilyAnn Theatre in Wimberley with summer "Shakespeare under the Stars" for young persons and an annual Shakespeare play by adult actors in the fall.


Aaron Black has played Austin stages as Hamlet and as Brutus since his arrival here several years ago. Director Christina Gutierrez had done dramatugy for Austin Shakespeare and others, co-founded the 7 Towers Theatre Company, directed John Ford's Tis Pity She's a Whore at the Cathedral of Junk, and has just turned in her Ph.D. thesis for UT's Program of Performance as Public Practice.

(Kevin Gates, Aaron Black, Stephen Price (rear)(photo: Shawn McHorse)

This Richard II is additionally garlanded with Austin acting regulars Suzanne Balling, Travis Bedard, David Boss, Robert Deike and D. Heath Thompson, so if you've seen any Shakespeare at all in this town outside of the 40 acres or other educational confines, you'll probably see some familiar faces on these chilly evenings at Richard Garriott's reduced-scale Elizabethan-style theatre on the north shore of Lake Austin.


The company's title suggests the degree of its devotion to the bard and to the craft. Kevin Gates is an adamant advocate of fidelity to the texts as a way of realizing the intents of the playwrights, so perhaps it's appropriate to search out the phrase, which comes from Act IV of Cymbeline, within a deus-ex-machina scene rare for Shakespeare.

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

RICHARD II by William Shakespeare, Poor Shadows of Elysium at the Curtain Theatre, February 22 - March 9

Poor Shadows of Elysium
presents

William Shakespeare's

Richard II

Directed by Christina Gutierrez
 February 21st- March 9th
Thursdays, Friday, Saturdays- 8pm
To be performed at the Curtain Theatre-7400 Coldwater Canyon Drive Austin,TX 78730

Kevin Gates and Aaron Black will play Richard and Bolingbroke, but which actor plays which part will be determined by an onstage coin toss at the start of each performance.


Tickets $16.52 via


 



(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Theatre Thinker - Profile of Travis Bedard by Dan Solomon, Austin Chronicle

Theatre Thinker


In the online dialogue about the art of the stage, Travis Bedard is a star

By Dan Solomon, Fri., Jan. 18, 2013

If you're reading this at two o'clock in the morning, there's a good chance that Travis Bedard is awake and on the Internet.


He's probably poring over a vast assortment of theatre blogs from around the world, but he might be on Twitter. If he is, he's either telling the more than 2,500 theatremakers who follow @TravisBedard about the best things he's read on those blogs or treating them to cranky, pithy bon mots framed as advice. ("Approaching what you do as though it's holy can be the beginnings of beauty. Forcing others to do the same never is.") Or he could be preparing a post for 2amtheatre.com, the theatre discussion blog for which he serves as managing editor. But it's a safe bet that, if it's the middle of the night, Travis Bedard is awake, online, and thinking about theatre.


The amount of time that Bedard spends thinking – and talking – about theatre has built him a not-insubstantial international following.


Read more at the Austin Chronicle on-line. . . .

Upcoming: Quills by Doug Wright, Different Stages at the City Theatre, January 4 - 26

presents

Quills

by Doug Wright

City Theatre, 3823 Airport Blvd, Ste D map
January 4 – 26, 2013
Thursdays – Saturdays at 8pm
Sundays at 5:30pm

Purchase Advance Tickets: https://secure.buyplaytix.com/diffstages/

Pick-Your-Price Tickets: $15, $20, $25, or $30
Tickets purchased by credit card online or at the theatre may be subject to a small service charge.

Different Stages continues its 2011-2012 season with Doug Wright's Quills. Sex. Perversion. Violence. These are the themes of the tales that drip from the ink-laden quills of the notoriously irreverent Marquis de Sade in this Obie Award winning play. Confined to the Charenton Asylum for the Insane for the outlandish escapades he'd committed during the Napoleonic Era, the Marquis continues to pen his stories to the delight of the young seamstress, Madeleine, and to the scorn of Charenton's devout Abbe de Coulmeir. When the Abbe attempts to silence the Marquis by taking his quills, his ink, and his paper, something intriguing occurs: the Marquis still finds a way to voice his scandalous yarns. As the Abbe's religious devotion clashes with the Marquis's dedication to freedom of expression, the audience is treated to a tale of wit, irony, blasphemy, philosophy, and the struggle for power told partly as a blend of comedy of manners and Grand Guignol with a dash of grotesque exaggeration and a soupcon of gore.

Directed by Norman Blumensaadt (Is Life Worth Living?) Quills features Craig Kanne (You Can't Take it with You) as the Marquis de Sade and Jean Budney (Is Life Worth Living?) as his wife Renee Pelagie. Travis Bedard (Doctor Faustus) plays the director of Charenton Asylum. Joe Hartman (Vampire Lesbians of Sodom) plays the Abbe de Coulmier, a priest at the asylum. Melissa Vogt-Patterson (Humpty) plays the seamstress, Madeleine. Tony Salinas (You Can't Take it with You) plays the architect.

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, Last Act Theatre Company, October 12 - 28

by Michael Meigs

Faustus, why do you torment me so? This production of the work of the mercurial Christopher Marlowe, an exact contemporary of Shakespeare, stabbed to death in a tavern at the age of 29, held me at an uneasy distance despite its robust verse and stark dilemma.


Austin's Last Act Theatre Company, just over a year old, demonstrates its art and vaunting ambition in daring to take on this text. Their productions for love of the art have been low-budget stagings in a succession of found locales around town. Doctor Faustus is presented, appropriately enough, behind a tavern -- the Pour House on Burnett Road -- in an edifice in stone that must have been used as a garage, judging from the stout girders, chains and decommissioned hoist overhead. Lengths of black curtain mask the corners. The audience is seated in the depth of the room and the principal entrances are through the same wide doorway that gave spectators access to the space. Props are few and simple; director Kevin Gates relies on his cast of 13 to create this work in the style that it would have been done in a tavern courtyard or a church portico.

Karen Alvarado, Ben McLemore (image: Jim McKay)

In theme and presentation Doctor Faustus is directly in the tradition of the medieval mystery plays. Few texts of them are extant. Those works may have been largely improvised, but both the French and English manuscripts that remain confirm the traditions of staging Bible pageants to communicate to the people the stories mostly sealed up in the impenetrable Latin of Jerome's Vulgate. The struggle to translate the Bible into vernacular languages didn't really begin until the mid-1500's. 


Marlowe wrote this text, his second drama, in about 1588 (before Shakespeare had produced anything he could put his name to). It was probably based upon a German text of about that date, registered in English translation only in 1592. To complicate matters further, Marlowe's work exists in two variants, the first printed in 1604 and the second printed in 1616. Theatre entrepreneur Philip Henslowe recorded in his account book for 1602 that he had paid two dramatists for additional scenes to be added to Doctor Faustus. The drama continued to be produced up until 1642, shortly before Cromwell and the Puritans closed the theatres.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .
 

'Tis Pity She's A Whore by John Ford, 7 Towers Theatre Company at the Cathedral of Junk

(image: 7 Towers Theatre via Facebook)

by Michael Meigs


At the intermission beneath the giant writhing oak tree behind the Cathedral of Junk my wife leaned over and whispered. "These actors are really good."


John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's A Whore is a tangled skein, for sure, and it builds inexorably from a canter to a gallop to a thundering bloody finish that's if anything bloodier and more devastating than that of Shakespeare's Hamlet, staged some thirty years earlier. 'Tis Pity does not reach Shakespeare's heights but the thump of its meaty iambics and the hair-raising central intrigues of incest, betrayal, duplicity and murder deliver a spectacle from which you cannot divert your eyes, as much as sometimes you might wish to do so.


It's also a tour de force for the recently founded 7 Towers Theatre Company, the second smashing artistic success in its eight-month existence. This gives it so far the sort of clean sweep that World War II submarine crews would celebrate by hoisting a broom over the conning tower as they sailed back into port.


Director Christina Gutierrez and Aaron Black as her second chose to concentrate this explosive stuff into a small cast, assigning two and three roles to all except Kevin Gates, playing the obsessed and rabidly jealous brother Giovanni and to newcomer Sara Cormier as Annabella, the sister who cedes in docile, almost wooden fashion to his entreaties.


The rest of those on stage slip in, out and through the remaining characters with shifts of costume, altered stances, changed voices, and above all visible and highly credible changes of presence and motivation.

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

Opinion: Travis Bedard on Repeats, Theatre and the Rude Mechanicals, 2amtheatre.com, June 12

Repeats

posted by Travis Bedard
at 2amtheatre.com, June 12

No matter how deeply you bury yourself in new plays and new play creation and theory, theatre remains largely a reflection of where we’ve been (check your local listings). Right now I’m in two shows that combined are more than 800 years old. So the tone of this Culturebot article is bizarre to me.

The linked blurb seems to ask what some of our best modern art makers are thinking putting up chestnuts like Dionysus in 69 or Einstein on the Beach. To answer Culturebot’s open question: what this says about the health of the field is that the best companies in the country are humble enough to know that they are following a path and that someone created that path. If you want to break new ground anywhere it’s imperative to know (really know) how others have done it.

Dionysus in 69 was a turning point for performance art, and what the Rude Mechs have done (and are continuing to do) is mine the history of their field to illustrate for their audience what has come before. This interleaved retrospective adds depth (and context) to the form defying work, such as the recently closed genre jumble NOW NOW OH NOW, that they are creating.

The Rude Mechs (and the also-mentioned Gob Squad) don’t stop making the new to reflect on their past. The Mechs loving, deliberate recreation (not reinterpretation) of the Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69 as well as Mabou Mines’ B.Beaver Animations wasn’t in lieu of The Method Gun or I’ve Never Been So Happy or NOW NOW OH NOW, they were simply part of the delirious stew they have cooking at the Off Center.

Read more at 2amtheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: 'Tis Pity She's A Whore by John Ford, 7 Towers Theatre Company, June 22 - July 15

presents

'Tis Pity She's A Whore

by John Ford

directed by Christina Gutierrez

June 22 - July 15, Fridays - Sundays at 7:30 p.m.

No performance on Sunday, June 24

at the Cathedral of Junk, 4422 Lareina St. (click for map)

Join us for 7 Towers' first site-specific verse play: A late Renaissance play about incest, revenge, and destruction.

Following the success of last December's Burn This, 7 Towers' first season continues with our first classical verse play.

John Ford's late Renaissance revenge tragedy 'Tis Pity She's a Whore is a story of forbidden love and the disastrous consequences of a society that attempts to legislate morality. A play in which an incestuous relationship between a brother and sister stands out as honest and pure, 'Tis Pity is hyper-modern in its skewed explorations of love, gender, taboo, faith, and corruption.

We will be staging 'Tis Pity at Austin's own Cathedral of Junk (4422 Lareina Drive), a space whose very construction similarly forces visitors to adjust their ideas and perceptions of reality.

Eight talented Austin actors portray 19 characters in this fast-paced tragedy, interlaced with moments of tenderness, high comedy, and passion.

Friday-Sunday nights June 22-July 15
(no show Sunday, June 24)
All shows at 7:30

$15 suggested donation.
Seating is limited, and can be reserved in advance with a $15 donation at www.wepay.com/events/tispity
Otherwise, seating is first-come, first-served

Directed by Christina Gutierrez
Assistant director/Set Design: Aaron Black
Costume Design: Sally Ziegler
Dramaturgy: Eleanor Owicki

Kevin Gates as Giovanni
Sara Cormier as Annabella
Travis Bedard as Friar/Bergetto/Cardinal
David Boss as Florio/Poggio
Devin Finn as Grimaldi/Officer/Banditto
Nathan Lahay as Vasquez/Richardetto
Sam Mercer as Soranzo/Donado
Megan Rabuse as Putanna/Hippolyta