Circle Mirror Transformation, Hyde Park Theatre, July 8 - August 7

The Village Voice gave this Annie Baker comedy its Obie (off-broadway) award this year for best new American play and gave another Obie to the cast for their ensemble work. So you can expect an amusing evening when you stop by the Hyde Park Theatre to see them do their second play this year by the 29-year-old Annie B. They delivered her Body Awareness just this past April.

Director Ken Webster and the gang like to play hardball, but this one's a change-up. The familiar and welcome crew of HPT regulars, plus returning company member Rebecca Robinson, are pitching slow softballs and having as much fun with it as kids at a 4th of July picnic.

The set-up is simple. James, the manager of the community center, encourages his wife Marty in her notion of offering a six-week class in creative drama. Three individuals respond. We a watch a succession of short scenes depicting the evolution of Marty’s well-intentioned efforts to help these strangers liberate their creativity.

Circle Mirror Transformation is not, strictly speaking, a comedy. It’s a quiet little drama about needing to make connections and the potential costs of reaching out. Marty is not teaching acting or drama at all; she is dabbling in some very powerful juju. Back in the 1960s and 1970s many folks were attracted to the highs of encounter groups, an approach to group dynamics defined by Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin and pioneered in the United States by the National Training Laboratories. During a lost time in graduate school I participated in three full weekends of assisted but undirected “T-Group sensitivity training,” an experience from which I have probably not yet fully recovered.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

NEW IMAGES for Ongoing: The Trojan Women, University of Texas, October 30 - November 8

Click for ALT review, November 3

Updated with new images:

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
[Click image to view larger version]

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 and view more 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 . . . .

The Grapes of Wrath, Zach Scott Theatre, March 12 - May 10

A brooding orange light dominates the empty central space at the Zach Theatre's Kleberg Stage. A haze roils fitfully against a panorama of emptiness. A man in overalls, wearing a slouch cap and heavy work boots, holds a saw between his knees. He gently applies a bow to it, bends the saw, and an eerie, keening melody begins The Grapes of Wrath.




John Steinbeck's story follows the Joad family from the 1930s Oklahoma Dustbowl, driven by implacable weather and unforgiving bankers to abandon everything except a grim hope of finding work and land in California.


Read More . . . .

The Drowned World, directed by Ken Webster, FronteraFest at Blue Theatre, January 21, 25, 31, February 1

Ken Webster's austere staging of this vision of a nightmare world uses the vocal and emotional projection of these four actors with the formal eloquence and depth of a string quartet. The music here is their inflection, counterpart, and conviction in a narrative that raises the hairs on the back of your neck.

Ben Wolfe appears first, in solo, as Darren, citizen in a world drowned in gray totalitarianism and decay. Motionless, from the depth of the stage he recounts a simple train journey, the pain of attraction, and his effort to find an "angel." The range and intensity of his telling, like a lengthy, complex solo cello sonata, is all the more striking because he scarcely moves a muscle. The color and depth of the text overrides our lazy spectator demands for visual excitement.

The rest of the quartet joins him. They stand virtually motionless in the depth of the stage, dressed in featureless dark clothing. They unfold the story, each speaking in first person when solo and reverting to dialogue when interacting with one another. At intervals of ten to fifteen minutes in this 90-minute piece the words stop, the lights fall away to black briefly and then re-illuminate the stage, where the four artists stand in the same positions and attitudes as before.


Instead of a Singspiel, this is a Hörspiel. The German term is used for radio plays, and in fact you could appreciate the depth, violence and images with your eyes closed. The presence of the actors before you adds a corporality to the story that heightens your sense of the vulnerability of characters, actors and humanity itself.

Tara (Xochitl Romero) and Julian (Benjamin Summers) are lovers, in hiding from police who have been carrying out systematic raids and mandated "quarantines" of individuals guilty of possessing "radiance," a sort of vitality and charisma not conforming with the duties of citizens of an authoritarian state. Diligent citizen Kelly (Andrea Skola), with quarantine order in hand, takes thugs to apprehend, torture and murder the uncomplying lovers. Her glimpse of Julian at the window saps her will.

The lovers escape, attempt mutual suicide and intrude into the apartment of hapless Darren, who takes them in. He sees Tara as the angel of his yearnings. In clumsy efforts to sustain the triangle by selling on the black market hair and then teeth imbued with their radiance, Darren stumbles into Kelly, defrocked as a police officer and sent undercover to find the lovers.

Gary Owen's vision of that gray world is complete and convincing. His text is blank verse, especially in the mouths of these players. He meticulously describes desires, betrayals, exploitations and killings with a power of language and image evoking an Aristotelian level of pity and fear.

Owens is writing much more than an Orwellian meditation. In addition to oppression, these characters are exploring for us themes of intimacy, attraction and allegiance, decay and death, hope and the human condition. The finale finds us with two couples, of unexpected composition, the first imprisoned in that drowned world and the second in inscrutable apotheosis. His final image is cryptic: a silver moon seen through a burned, torn hand, delighting a girl child.

Ken Webster told us that this piece has to date been performed in the United Kingdom and in Chicago. Wolfe, Romero, Skola and Summers take the stage only three more times during Austin's FronteraFest.

See them. Be preprared to concentrate. Don't expect any laughs. Prepare to be haunted and rewarded.

Comments by Brian Losoya of Daily Texan, in article on FronteraFest, January 23

Review by Avimaan Syam in Austin Chronicle of January 30

Review by Ryan E. Johnson on Austin.com, January 30

Upcoming, FronteraFest: The Drowned World, January 21 - February 1

UPDATE: ALT review, January 22

Received January 15:

Ken Webster presents the Southwest Premiere of Gary Owen's hauntingly powerful THE DROWNED WORLD.

THE DROWNED WORLD is a poetic and futuristic vision of a world where the beautiful and intelligent are hunted down and destroyed.

The play will be directed by HPT Artistic Director and member of The Austin Arts Hall of Fame, Ken Webster, and features HPT Company Members Ben Wolfe (FEATURING LORETTA), Benjamin Summers (DOG SEES GOD, THE LONESOME WEST), Andrea Skola (HAM), and Xochitl Romero (BLACKBIRD, DOG SEES GOD).

WHERE: The Blue Theater, 916 Springdale Road

WHEN: Wednesday, January 21, at 7:00 PM

Sunday, January 25, at 4:15 PM

Saturday, January 31, at 6:30 PM

Sunday, Febraury 1, at 2:15 PM

TICKETS: $12 order online at www.hydeparktheatre.org or call 479-PLAY

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

Blackbird, Hyde Park Theatre, September 11 - October 11

I am beginning to see the pattern now, and you’ll just have to excuse me, as a newcomer, if the obvious has fallen upon my head.

The Hyde Park Theatre is an actor’s theatre, intensely dedicated to the craft and to the challenge of the actor’s art.

How else could one explain the production, back to back, of The Brass Ring and Blackbird?

This 75-minute one-act piece by the relatively young British playwright David Harrower brings together in a claustrophobic factory office two individuals with the scars of a suppressed history.

Ray (Ken Webster) spent 3 ½ years in prison more than a decade ago. He has been doggedly rebuilding his life since then, with a change of name and hard-won, underpaid management responsibilities at the plant. .

Una (Xochitl Romero) shows up unannounced, late in the day as the factory is shutting down, arriving to reawaken memories and turn over emotional compost in search of – something, we don’t know what, and neither do they.

This is a duet that starts in amazement and panic for Ray.

Harrower’s dialogue crackles, and the two actors capture the disbelief, the distraction, and the surging emotion of it. We are led both into their present lives and into the tangled feelings that resulted in a crime.

The image above is a fine emblem of Ray’s dilemma – clutching, desiring, and yet fixed upon the outside spectators to his dilemma.

It is less good for Una. This image suggests that she is a temptress, intent on sexual closeness. In fact, the young woman who disembarks at that grimy factory is plainer, intentionally so. We believe we can read her initial defensive-aggressive approach and her questioning. Having discovered Ray's whereabouts by accident, she is driving to understand events and feelings that shaped her life before she was of an age and understanding to do so, herself.

There is a virtually musical rhythm to this dialogue. Clash, stacatto, cacophony and speaking past one another, listening, interrupted thoughts, a sharp dig of angry humor, acknowledgment, intrusions from unseen shop workers, a frightening moment when the office is plunged in darkness and Ray leaves Una alone in the dim red glare of the emergency exit sign (pause – wait for it – a single syllable: “Ray?!?” – steps are heard outside – the lamps light once more. . . .yes, Ray has returned, he has not gone away).

Fragments of recollection and exchanged information about the present create the framework. And then Romero as Una has a long, long speech, a solo compounded of memory, desire, and childish confusion that stumbles, weaves, and crests as Ray sits at the table, motionless, with those same rigid features trying not to hear.

Mutual recriminations lead to small, focused revelations, and the rhythm builds once again. A last interruption, in the final minutes, snaps us and the dueling, courting duo out of their hermetic world.

Blackbird is a powerful piece of writing. Romero and Webster use every nuance and every syllable of it. They keep us so concentrated in the intimate space of this oddly shaped 60-seat theatre that we have trouble shaking ourselves free of them afterwards.

We do not particularly like the characters but we feel in them our own sense of fragile humanity.

Only two very gifted actors working with their equally gifted director Mark Pickell could have established that hold on us.

Arts Eclectic, KUT - - audio piece on Blackbird

Ryan Johnson's review on Austin.com

Spike Gillespie's review on Austinist.com

Joey Siler's review on Austin Statesman's arts blog, September 15

Elizabeth Cobb's review in the Austin Chronicle, October 3