re:Psyche, Secondhand Theatre at the Blue Theatre, June 23 - July 18

Secondhand Theatre's re:Psyche, playing at the Blue Theatre until July 18, reminds me of a Swiss circus.

In late spring and summer, medium-sized towns and villages in the Swiss mountains awaken to find a weathered Little Top has appeared on a vacant municipal lot, surrounded by a miscellany of campers and caravans. The troupe rarely numbers more than ten performers, perhaps with three or four musicians. Practised professionals, they are initiates in make-believe, gymnastics and glitter. They stay for a week or ten days, then fold their tent and disappear.

The seven actors in re:Psyche have the same mysterious resilience and commitment. Five of the actors and three of the tech staff established ties in UT's MFA programs for theatre arts, where Re:Psyche began as "an experiment in movement-based ensemble-created work." Jenny Connell's script with chracters from the legend of Psyche, that mortal woman who involuntarily enchanted Eros (Cupid), became an offering at the Mark Cohen New Play Festival in 2009, voted "Best of Fest." UT sponsored an additional staging in 2009, much appreciated.

Now, with further reworking, cast changes and the addition of eerie, effective music by Austin string minimalists Mother Falcon, the troupe has set up its metaphorical tent as Secondhand Theatre, at the Blue Theatre building, that odd patch behind the Goodwill warehouse at 916 Springdale Road.

I suggest that you get over there and take it in before the group disperses. These folks are serious, comic, and seriously entertaining.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

The Trojan Women, University of Texas, October 30 - November 8

I have puzzled and puzzled about this production. Meghan Kennedy and Kimber Lee preserve the approximate shape of Euripides' great tragedy. Their text rarely echoes his lines directly, but it includes scenes of sharp, cadenced prose or blank verse that evoke the terror and hopelessness of brutally widowed women left in tattered clothing, dirt and desperation.

In particular, Kate DeBuys as Hecuba is magnificent. She projects a stunned concentration in which only the steel of her aristocratic upbringing keeps her functioning.

Almost as good is Lesley Gurule as Andromache, widow to Paris and mother of the doomed infant Astyanax, even though the adapters have turned her into a stumbling drunk with bottle in hand, so blinded that she pays no attention to the child in the perambulator she is pushing. Was it a stage glitch that during her entering maneuver up and across a low platform she managed to dump the kid entirely? Little matter, because Kennedy and Lee have imagined a woman so insensible to motherhood that she and all the women in the huddled group don't hold the child but leave him bundled in the pram.

When you adapt a piece of this power, authority and antiquity, you are presumed to have a concept. What's going on here? Is the company trying to make The Trojan Women more relevant to today? To challenge the traditional relation by altering characters or relationships? Do those burned-out television sets hint at some psychological apocalypse? We really don't know.

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

Upcoming: The Trojan Women, University of Texas, October 30 - November 8

Found on-line:

The Trojan Women

A New Adaptation
by Meghan Kennedy & Kimber Lee
Directed by Halena Kays
University of Texas Department of Theatre and Dance, Oscar G. Brockett Theatre
October 30, 31 & November 3, 4, 5, 6 at 8:00 PM
October 31 & November 1, 8 at 2:00 PM

The war is over. A great city has fallen.

Among the rubble, women wait to hear their fate at the hands of the victorious army, struggling to survive, refusing to give in, and somehow finding hope in the most unexpected places.

Tickets: $20 adults, $17 UT faculty & staff, $15 students. Available online at www.utpac.org or by phone at 477-6060. Opening night reception immediately following the October 30 performance.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Black Snow, Tutto Theatre at the Salvage Vanguard, June 26 - July 12

UPDATE: Review by Avimaan Syam in Austin Chronicle, July 9

UPDATE: Profile of Dustin Wills and Tutto Theatre's mid-July performances in Rome, by Nicola Ferlei Brown in "The Roman Forum," July 8

UPDATE: Review by Dan Solomon on austinist.com, July 8

UPDATE: Review by Javier Sanchez in the UT Daily Texan On-line, July 7

UPDATE: Review by Sean Fuentes at Austin Theatre Review, July 1

UPDATE: from interview of director Dustin Wills, published by UT June 13 at the alumni profiles section:

Q. What's next for you?

A. The show I'm working on right now is called Black Snow. It's adapted by Keith Reddin and it's based on a theatrical novel by Mikhail Bulgakov who was a writer at the Moscow Art Theatre during the Stanislavski era. I really liked it I think because this is going to be the first play I've ever directed that I didn't write or have a hand in writing or was able to work with a new writer to be able to rewrite. I cannot cut it, cannot change genders – so this feels more new to me than anything right now.

Black Snow, featuring: Gabriel Luna, Smaranda Ciceu (MFA in Acting candidate), Francisco Rodriguez (BA '05), Amy Downing, Maarouf Naboulsi, Ron Weisberg (BA '07), Verity Branco (MFA in Acting candidate), Diego Larrea–Puemape (BA '08), and Kyle Lagunas; with Scene Design by Lisa Laratta (MFA '08), Lighting Design by Megan M. Reilly (MFA '07), and Costume Design by Kim H. Ngo (BA '07), runs June 26 to July 12, at Salvage Vanguard Theater. Visit TUTTOtheatre.org for details.

Found on-line:

Black Snow
by Mikhail Bulgakov
Adapted by Keith Reddin
Directed by Dustin Wills

26 June – 12 July 2009
Thursday – Sundays 8:00 p.m.
[No Performance July 4th]
Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Road
At the Door: $15 (Starving Artist Rate: $12 Starving Theatre Company Rate: $20)
Thursdays are Pay-What-You-CAN Name Your Own Price w/ Donation of Non-Perishable Canned Food Item(s) to benefit Hope Food Pantry at Trinity United Methodist Church [Price without donation is $12]

Featuring Gabriel Luna,Smaranda Ciceu, Francisco Rodriguez, Amy Downing, Maarouf Naboulsi, Ron Weisburg, Verity Branco, Diego Larrea-Puemape, & Kyle Lagunas. Scene Design by Lisa Laratta, Lighting Design by Megan Reilly, and Costume Design by Kim H. Ngo.

Sergei Maxudov, a proofreader for the Shipping Gazette, has written an awful palimpsest of a novel, entitled Black Snow, and decides to hang himself on account, that is until a strange visitor pounds on his door and offers to publish it. This is Sergei’s introduction to the outrageous world of publishing and from there, to the downward spiral of adapting one’s work for the stage.

Nine actors portray 54 characters, the often absurd, sometimes vicious employees of the famed Moscow Art Theatre, each poised to cut, slice, rip, edit, mutilate, and otherwise butcher his script in this tour-de-force performed at breakneck speed. See for yourself how hard it really is to develop a new play as Mikhail Bulgakov’s Black Snow savages the theatrical world of post-revolutionary Russia.

Director Bio
Press Release
BUY TICKETS NOW!
MAP TO SALVAGE VANGUARD

An Ideal Husband, Austin Shakespeare/UT Drama at Rollins Theatre, February 11 - March 1

The conventional staging of Oscar Wilde, within the frame of a proscenium, gives us a bright window into the highly mannered scene of London's Victorian upper classes.

For Austin Shakespeare's An Ideal Husband in the Long Center's Rollins Theatre, the audience surrounds the stage. This staging in-the-square gives us a visual kaleidoscope of witty epigrams, paradoxes, brilliant costumes and exquisitely good manners.

There's a technical challenge here, since at any given moment an actor will be standing with his or her back to a quarter of the audience. Anne Ciccolella's direction keeps the actors moving, in Copernican fashion, and the gifted young cast from the UT Theatre Department subtly adjusts position throughout.

Every spectator has a different view of the play, necessarily missing some portion of facial or corporal expression. But stage business is full, diction and accent are at a high level, and vocal characterizations are rich. No part of the audience is short changed.

Advocates of theatre in the round often assert that it creates a closer community of audience as spectator reactions are exchanged across the playing space. The playing space in the Rollins is broad, however, and I found little of that effect. Concentrating on Wilde's words and characters, one easily loses the spectator background.

Beneath the wit and banter of An Ideal Husband, deeply serious outcomes are at risk. Sir Robert Chiltern's political career is in the ascendent. His sister Miss Mabel has set her cap for the brilliant but still noncommittal Lord Goring. Goring's crotchety father Lord Caversham insists upon choosing a spouse for the young man. Into this world comes the amoral, enormously wealthy Mrs. Cheveley of Vienna, threatening the blackmail ruination of one promising aristocrat and the matrimonial ruination of another.

An Ideal Husband is a vivid portrait of a bygone world and age. Wilde, the son of an impoverished Irish aristocrat, an extravagant self-promoter, longed to secure a place in that world. Five years after the 1895 success of this play, he had been disgraced, judged, jailed and was dying at the age of 46, an exile in Paris. The brilliance of the idle life of the British upper classes was largely ended by the Great War of 1914 - 1918.

It's fun to psychoanalyze the piece, seeing it as Wilde's self-promoting joke on that beau monde. For example, the foppish Lord Goring, who is a patent stand-in for Wilde, proves wittier and more effective than any of the other characters. Director Anne Ciccolella recounted another insight in the Q&A after the preview night: much of the tension of the piece is created by the anguish of Sir Robert over a hidden crime in his youth that can alienate the affections of his morally absolutist, adoring wife, Lady Chiltern. Wilde himself had recently married well and was presumably concealing from his wife the homosexuality that would soon ruin him.

The plot is that of a relatively conventional London stage melodrama of the time, with much of the action revolving around letters sent, not destroyed, stolen or misdirected. Sir Robert (Mark Scheibmeir, left) and Lady Chiltern (Sydney Andrews, lead photo above), are a relatively unsurprising married pair, and his exemplary political career seems based more on championing of morality and principal rather than on eloquence.

Lord Caversham (Robert Tolaro, right), constantly annoyed by his son, and the sententious gossip Lady Markby (Janelle Buchanan) are relatively predictable caricatures of the blindly self-important upper class.

Shaun Patrick Tubbs (left) as the Wilde surrogate Lord Goring does not have the bulk or the drawling dismissiveness one might conventionally expect. Instead, he is a lithe, cocky smiling fellow ready to mimic and mock his absurd old Pater but also quick to prove steadfast concern both for his friend Robert and for Robert's lady wife.


Ah, but the villainesse! Verity Branco as the spider lady Mrs. Cheveley (center) is beautiful and coolly efficient. With high cheekbones, perfect diction and a decisiveness betrayed in a measured strut, she is the antithesis of the polite goody-goody world of society. She lives abroad for good reason -- having been expelled from boarding school for stealing, she went on to wed and use up two husbands before lanching into the dubious but highly successful collaboration with a now-deceased European baron. Branco's vigor is captivating and her diction is as precise as a stiletto.

At the opposite end of the female spectrum is the ingenue Miss Mabel. Marlane Barnes bubbles with flirtatious mischief. Her tippy-toeing rushes across the stage manifest a fine sense of physical comedy, all the more comic because of the constraints of society and corsets. Her exquisite nonsense suggests that she does, indeed, share Lord Goring's non-jaded joy for things fine; one can imagine that she will some day become exquisitely scandalous while loving him always to excess . . . a promise of Bloomsbury, a decade or more before those lovely libertines were to flourish.

Wilde has a message -- approximately, "We men adore women for their imperfections but you women will insist on putting your men on a pedestal, obliged to perfection."

Those intent on seeking modern day relevance might force the matter by referring to recent scandals of political life, but I would not take that reading of the tea leaves from this aromatic cup. An Ideal Husband succeeds for what it is -- a witty send-up of conventional melodrama and of the differences between men and women.

"Aielli Unleashed" program on KUT.org -- February 12 interview with director and cast members, including scenes and Michael McKelvey's incidental music (26 minutes)

Audio piece and photos at KUT.org

Promotional article on OutinAmerica.com

Review by KelseyK on Austinist.com, February 20

Review by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin on Statesman's Austin360 blog, February 22

Comment posted on van Ryzin's review, February 24: It is a unique opportunity to bring our performance work off-campus and into the Austin community. The experience for our students is rich and rare as they enjoy a three-week run in a classic play housed in the exquisite Long Center for the Performing Arts. This collaboration seems very right. Hook ‘em! Lucien Douglas, Associate Professor of Theatre & Dance

Review by Laura Clark in the Daily Texan Online, February 24

Review by Barry Pineo in the Austin Chronicle, February 26

A Midsummer Night's Dream, UT Department of Theatre, November 14 - 23

UT calls the Oscar G. Brockett Theatre an "intimate space." They are speaking Texas institutional intimacy here -- only 200 seats, arrayed about three sides of a huge square playing space under 40-foot ceiling rigged with lights, catwalks, hoists and other machinery. And with a built-in audience from those 50,000 UT students and 16,500 faculty and staff.

When I arrived, all but breathless, 15 minutes before curtain time, I had to stand in a line of at least 30 persons in order to get one of the last seats. I hurried into the theatre, spotted a vacant seat or two on the far side of the playing space, and started to cut across the floor. That drew gasps and warnings from the crowd.

Hardly an auspicious arrival. I looked down and realized that the production staff had set out on the floor an intricate mosaic of thousands of paper scraps, and I had started to walk across their art. Back I went, abashed, along the sidelines.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is just about everybody's favorite of Shakespeare's light comedies. Director Paul Mullins, in his sound bite with KUT FM, speaks about the challenge of that -- half the audience will know the play extremely well and the other half will have no idea of the plot.

Advice for that second half of the audience: the stories are simple, the characters are easy to track, the comedy is broad and the magical convergence of the three worlds is satisfying. There's no real desperation here -- except for the set-up, in which the full-of-himself father, Egeus, demands that Duke Theseus allow him to put to death his child the fair Hermia if she refuses to accept as her husband the noble youth Demetrius.

Oh, Dad! Get a grip. Your Hermia is in love with Lysander, and your insistence is going to drive them both to elope, at night, via the enchanted forest where all those fairies hang out! And when Demetrius goes searching for her, he'll be followed by Helena, that ugly duckling who's in love with him.

Equally quarrelsome are fairy king Oberon and the fairy queen Titania. He commands his magic messenger Puck, known as Robin Goodfellow; she is attended by a swarm of lesser fairies.

And in this, the third corner, are the (original) rude mechanicals, the untutored group of skilled laborers who have decided to practice and put on a play to celebrate the Duke's wedding with Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons.

Lovers + Fairies + Rude Mechanicals = lots of quarreling, clowning, enchantments, love potions, and eventually a happy ending.

The action flowed smoothly and in spectacular fashion. The UT technical staff really knows its stuff -- costumes and makeup are superb, particularly for the magical beings, and the director and tech folks devised a sort of rolling scaffold that served variously as palace stairs, enchanted hillside, and fairy waystation. Fairy King Oberon and his minister Puck repeatedly flew down to us from the darkness above the catwalks. Abstract plastic draping behind the players transformed shape according to venue. The stage lighting, with rank on rank of gel-clad fresnels, floods, and spots, could nail our attention at will to any point in that wide, high space.

As action unfolds, that paper mosaic spread on the floor is gradually dispersed, converting our Athenian palace appropriately into a leaf-strewn forest at night.

We all had a good time. The actors were confident and funny, and the scrambles through the enchanted forest provided much laughter.

By far the most accomplished (accomplishéd?) in Shakespearean diction were the principals of the magic world. Tom Truss as fairy king Oberon, Kate deBuys as Titania his queen, and Shaun Patrick Tubbs (left) as Puck have the physical presence and assurance of gymnists or dancers, and in their fairy guise they're all very good looking. And they all knew how to wrap their mouths around Shakespeare's lines, to deliver meaning, character and poetry.

Their only equal in that regard was Xochitl Romero (right) as the fair eloper, Hermia. Romero, as Hermia, is angered, excited, eloping, prudish, abandoned, distraught, elated but then bewildered, finally triumphant, and then captivated by the actions of the play of the rude mechs. The action of the play turns upon Hermia, and Romero keeps her believable and fresh at every point in the progression.

Director Paul Mullins chose a cast entirely of actresses to portray the artisans -- Nick Bottom the weaver, Peter Quince, and the others who clownishly elaborate the play about tragic lovers of legend Pyramis and Thisbe.

It's hard to imagine that there might be a shortage of males to take those parts. Mullins may have found the big, jovial La Tasha Stephens (left) so much larger than life that he decided to cast her as Bottom and to build around her. She was highly successful with the audience, giving the hearty, bossy, prating Bottom a kind of "Big Momma" treatment.

A thought experiment -- what if Mullins had instead cast her as Puck and Shaun Patrick Tubbs as Bottom? That might have stretched each of them.
There's a silliness in some of the directing that seems to be aimed directly at amusing a relatively young audience. Lysander's come-on to Hermia when they sleep in the woods was a smirking frat boy's approach to a hot date. And when the four lovers quarrel -- both men are magically entranced by plain-Jane Helena and scornful of the fair Hermia -- do we really need to have them all spitefully pulling off one another's clothing? Mind you, they are all beautiful in their underwear, and there's a funny moment when they're discovered asleep in a pile by Duke Theseus, the ultimate R.A.

A special recognition, accompanied by a carnation, to Verity Branco (right) in her tiny role as Snug, the mechanical picked to play the Lion. Branco is really, really funny and really, really guilelessly attentive, every moment that she's onstage in that character.

Both halves of the audience were well entertained. And anyone else who makes the trip to 23rd and San Jacinto can have the same satisfactions!

Review in the Daily Texan by Aboubacar N'Diaye, November 19