The Twelfth Labor by Leegrid Stevens, Tutto Theatre at MacTheatre black box, August 10 - September 1

(www.tuttotheatre.org)

by Michael Meigs

If you arrive at the MacTheatre Black Box with happy memories of Leegrid Stevens' The Dudleys as staged last year by Tutto Theatre -- winner of eight of Austin's B. Iden Payne theatre awards -- you may well be disconcerted. The Twelfth Labor, behind its enigmatic title, is as far from the hectic world of 8-bit video games as, say, Eugene O'Neil or William Faulkner.

Tutto has mounted a gorgeously moody, intellectually challenging piece, comprised of Steven's four-part suite in the stark isolation of a farmhouse somewhere out on an alien landscape of the mind. Designer Ia Ensterä again creates a wrap-around environment in weathered wood, a falling-down barn and a two-story farmhouse.

Erin Treadway, Rebecca Robinson (image: Kimberley Meade)

Stevens' script is densely conceptual, a virtual Cirque de Soleil of intellectual performance, but the story is much less complicated than his working and reworking of it. This Idaho farm family lives in harsh rural deprivation in 1949.

Rebecca Robinson plays Esther the grim matriarch, trying to hold together her own existence and those of the four variously handicapped or rebellious children of the family. The father of this beleaguered family disappeared into Japanese prisoner-of-war camps in the Pacific eight years before and has never returned.

The program lists the labors of Hercules, the last of which is his wrestling with Cerberus, the monster guarding the Underworld. But there's no obvious or easy parallel here -- in fact, pattern-makers might find that with the absent father, a couple of suitors, and the strong matriarch could track the late passages of the Odyssey just as well; the father does eventually return.

Cleo the oldest daughter is severely dyslexic and mentally handicapped -- an earnest, striving young woman old before her time, bewildered by language that twists and turns on her mind the way a live snake might. In this role Erin Treadway delivers a performance that will break your heart, first to last, certainly one of the year's most impressive dramatic performances.

(Click 'to read continuation and view performance photos at www.AustinLiveTheatre.com)

Buried Child by Sam Shepard, City Theatre, February 4 - 21

Tom Waits’ discordant, sardonic music is a perfect match for Sam Shepard’s Buried Child. The program doesn't credit anyone, but City's artistic director Andy Berkovsky tells me director Caleb Straus made the choice. Like Tom Waits, Shepard brings us into a world of discord and grotesque despair. He creates a distorted vision of the all American rural idyll.

Think you’ve had a tough time visiting the prospective in-laws? Forget it. Shepard topped your experience, all the way back in 1978, just as Waits was stumbling into alcoholic stardom.

Vince and Shelly take a road trip, heading through Illinois, the heart of America, on their way to New Mexico for an unannounced visit on Vince’s dad. Shelly puts up with Vince’s enthusiasms and anecdotes about this school, that playground and his other narcissistic memories, and then they pull into the drive of a ramshackle farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Into the middle of a very bad dream.

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

Upcoming: Buried Child by Sam Shepard, City Theatre, February 4 - 21

Click for ALT review, February 9

Received directly:

The City Theatre Company digs deep to present
Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning drama

Buried Child

February 4 - 21
Thursdays – Saturdays at 8 p.m. Sundays at 5:30 p.m.
No show on Saturday, February 6
The City Theatre is at 3823 Airport Blvd. – east corner of Airport Blvd. and 38 ½ Street, behind the Shell station.
Reservations 512-524-2870 or info@citytheatreaustin.org
Tickets $15 - $20. Guaranteed Front Row Reserved Seats $25. Students $12. Group discounts are available. Thursdays, all seats $10.

Sam Shepard's Buried Child is an American masterpiece by one of the most successful counter-culture playwrights of our generation. This darkly comic tale of a Midwestern family with a terrible secret achieved national recognition as an instant classic, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 and garnering outstanding critical acclaim.

Like many of Shepard's plays, Buried Child is characterized by a poetic sensibility and offbeat sense of humor, as well as startling imagery that conjures up the decline of the great American West. This production will run from February 4 – 21.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Tartuffe, City Theatre, July 23 - August 16

Molière was appalled and distressed when he learned that although Louis XIV had enjoyed the court performance of Tartuffe on May 12, 1664 the "Sun King" had listened to pious advisers and had forbidden any further presentations of the play.

This great comic tale of religious hypocrisy was in trouble from the start. The dramatist had produced a farce in elegant verse featuring a "holy man" intent on seduction, theft and exploitation, an adroit manipulator of religious concepts and of religious language. The court advisers were probably scandalized at the playwright's witty undermining of religiosity and some of them may have felt directly targeted.

Molière's eloquent protests went unheeded and the revised version he presented publicly three years later was immediately shut down. Not until 1669, after a delay of five years, was Tartuffe performed, apparently with the King's permission. It became the most successful and most profitable of Molière's plays.

Charles P. Stites serves as something of a Molière for the City Theatre's production of Tartuffe. He drafted this text, directed it and stars as Tartuffe.

And what better setting for religious hypocrisy (via tele-evangelism) than modern Central Texas?

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

Upcoming: Tartuffe, City Theatre, July 23 - August 16

UPDATE: Click for ALT review, July 27



PDATE: Sean Fuentes interviews director Charles P. Stites at Austin Theatre Review.com

Received directly:

Hypocrisy. Seduction. Greed. Betrayal.

The best of Moliere’s comedy with

Tartuffe

at City Theatre this summer July 23 – August 16


If it's hypocrisy, greed, and seduction you’re looking for this summer, look no further than Molière’s most famous farce, Tartuffe.

Under the cloak of religious piety, the lecherous, menacing, arch-hypocrite title character schemes to marry his benefactor’s daughter, seduce his wife, then defraud him of all he possesses. Does the scoundrel succeed? Take your seat and find out in this new and exciting adaptation of one of the world’s greatest comedies.

The production runs July 23 – August 16 at The City Theatre. It is directed by Charles P. Stites and features City Theatre company members Wray Crawford, Fiona Rene, D. Heath Thompson, and MacArthur Moore.

Molière’s masterpiece was written over three hundred years ago, but the classic has found a fresh reinvention at City Theatre with a modern staging that is even more immediate, identifiable, and hilarious. Rather than a classic that can be translated to a modern setting, Molière's play seems more of a contemporary play that just happens to have been written a few centuries ago.

Tartuffe and Texas were made for each other.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Glengarry, Glenn Ross, City Theatre, October 2 - 26

The title doesn’t tell you what to expect.

The grim black and white poster image of bound hands is purely symbolic, because you aren‘t going to see anyone tied up or physically abused in this play.

The violence here is verbal and psychic, couched in strong male language common in everyday life but raw and powerful on stage. Mamet gives us a world of men locked in economic competition, where unscrupulous winners get privileges and hard-pressed losers use ruses, take risks and break laws in the effort to make sales and commissions.

This is an ensemble piece, setting up the six principal characters for us two-by-two in the first half and then bringing them into the equivalent of a locked-room puzzle in the second.

All are involved in a sleazy real estate firm that pits them against one another with an explicit competition in sales closings, with the winner getting not only a Cadillac but preferential access to the best sales leads, virtually guaranteeing he will prevail in cutthroat competition.

Those “leads,” coming from who knows where, are the McGuffin of the piece. They’re the principal target of a burglary that takes place in the intermission between Act I and Act II.

Solving the mystery of the burglary is only one part of the action. Mamet’s greater interest is in studying the extent to which brutal personal competition undermines ethics, morals, friendship and the rule of law.

One can read Glengarry Glen Ross on several levels. There’s a socio-economic analysis. These men are exploited and corrupted by the unseen owners of this office and by their equally invisible rival who wants access to those “leads,” the passkeys to sales, money and power. Each salesman is locked in a cynical zero-sum game, creating nothing of real value and enriching the absent owners.

There’s the tribal approach – the four middle-aged salesmen trapped in a declining real estate market are bound by rivalries, hatreds and an angry, suspicious form of friendship, particularly when facing outsiders such as the long-suffering office manager, the duped client, and the investigating policeman.

The easiest approach: the four salesmen and their manager are Mamet’s conjugations of The American Salesman. He makes them unsentimental, foul-mouthed avatars of Willy Loman, achieving various degrees of sales success.

Or leave the intellectualizing until afterwards and just let these characters happen to you, with all the aggressive energy of a gladiator fight.

The “two” scenes – three of them – in the first act take place sequentially in a Chinese restaurant near the office. Unkempt, blustering salesman Shelley Levene (Wray Crawford, left) is on the skids, desperate to get access to quality leads. Over whiskey he berates office manager John Williamson (Bryan Headrick, right), first trying to bully his way into preferred access to “leads” and eventually resorting to an attempt at bribery.

Subsequently at another table in the restaurant smooth-talking Dave Moss (Conrad Gonzales) grouses to fellow salesman George Aaronow (Gil Austin), maneuvering him toward the idea of breaking into the office to steal the leads and sell them to a leading rival. And then we see two guys at the bar. One of them, tired, loquacious and adamant in bar room philosophizing, turns out to be Ricky Roma, the salesman leading in the competition. His reticent, tongue-tied new acquaintance is James Lingk (David Christopher). Ending the scene in a flourish of bonhomie, Roma pulls out a real estate prospectus.

Act Two takes place in the trashed real estate office, with an irascible police detective (Heath Thompson, left) hauling staff and salesmen offstage one by one for interrogation about the overnight burglary that left the place a mess.


In fast-moving abrasive encounters the various Act One threads get tangled and then unwound for us. Ricky Roma (Stites, in the red tie) claims the top spot in the competition and the Cadillac that goes with it. Shelley Levene (Crawford, seated) arrives tremendously pumped because he has just made an $82,000 sale on a cold call without using a lead. Aaronow (Austin, right) is flustered and upset by interrogation. Moss is arrogant in his assertion of innocence.

Into this mess comes Roma’s new client Lingk (David Christopher), intent on escaping from a real estate commitment before the expiration of his statutory three days for reconsideration.

Roma plays him like a toreador, with misdirection, lies and cameraderie. Teaming up with the portly, elated Shelley Levene, he quickly has Lingk completely bewildered. Roma repeatedly dismisses the increasingly angered Detective Baylen as Roma and Levene go for the metaphorical kill.

Noxious winner Roma and the over-the-hill Levene, seeking a comeback, are Janus faces of the American Salesman.


They match one another in this act in self-assurance and bombast, and for a time we can believe that in the midst of this spiritually murderous world we are witnessing friendship for the first time. Stites and Crawford play off one another with exciting bounce. Roma congratulates Levene, they recall the wildly successful times of the Glengarry and Glen Ross developments, and they plan further celebration.

Until Williamson the office manager provides devastating information about completed sales. Then Williamson puts ½ and ½ together and comes up with 4, a guess that gives the police the solution to the burglary. Leaving the absentee owners of this hellish, soulless office as the only real winners.

Well cast, acted with conviction and skill, Glengarry, Glen Ross is a sharp, cynical entertainment that leaves an audience wondering whether the events depicted constitute a comedy or a spiritual train wreck. The actors’ energy and control, with fine shading of the characters, win our sympathy for them. The superlative pacing of the action keeps us off balance and in suspense throughout.

Notch up another success for the City Theatre!

Ryan Johnson's review on Austin.com, heavy with comparisons with the film

Elizabeth Cobbe's review in the Austin Chronicle, October 24