'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 . . . .

Another Review: Thomas Jenkins on The Laramie Project, Ten Years Later, Zach Theatre, April 18 - May 13

Our colleague Thomas Jenkins at the San Antonio Current has written a powerful review of Zach's The Laramie Project, Ten Years Later, which AustinLiveTheatre.com is proud to republish here to complement the AustinLiveTheatre review of May 2:

San Antonio weekly

The Wicked Stage:

(image: www.zachtheatre.org)

The Laramie Project, Ten Years Later

by Thomas Jenkins, May 7, 2012

. . . last weekend, I headed up to Austin’s Zach Scott Theater to catch The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, which also has yet to see a San Antonio production (although it would fit in nicely at, say, the Jump-Start).

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect: reviews and previews sometimes described the play as a sequel or epilogue to the original Laramie Project, but neither moniker exactly inspired confidence in the evening’s artistic merits. (I mean, is there any term less exciting than “epilogue”? Appendix, maybe. Or Nachschrift.)  But it turns out that The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later is not only a fully-realized and intelligent work of theater, but that, in many ways, it’s a more substantial and rewarding piece than even the original play.

The first Laramie Project certainly had novelty going for it: most American audiences had never been exposed to the type of theater-as-sociology-experiment represented by Moisés Kaufman’s Tectonic Theater Company. (Happily, there’s now an off-shoot of that movement in SA, at the AtticRep’s Forum Theater Project.) Seeing a theater company descend on a town—microphones and videocams in tow—represented something new and exciting, as actors transformed the raw transcripts of their interviews into an affecting docudrama about the shocking murder of Matthew Shepherd: a young gay man brutally beaten and left for dead, shackled to a fence in Wyoming. The piece thus explored the intersection of homophobia, politics, and rural identity at the turn of the millennium.

At first, the sequel presents itself almost identically to the original play: troupe members return to Laramie, Wyoming—with the same sort of idiosyncratic self-narration that characterizes the first piece—and begin the long (and doubtless, tedious) process of field work. But then the piece takes a startling turn. In 1998, the Tectonic Theater Company was not only new to American audiences, but new to Laramie: the troupe’s other-ness helped to establish its credibility as a dispassionate recorder of human experience. By 2008, however, the observers had clearly affected the observed—and the observed are hopping mad. (“We’re a town, not a project,” the local paper objects.) And as the Tectonic Company discovers, there are darker undercurrents afoot: in the first play, it was obvious that Matthew Shepherd was the victim of anti-gay violence—indeed, the trial transcripts are conclusive on this point. By 2008, however, the town is well on its way towards re-inventing history: after an (odious) episode of TV’s “20/20,” much of Laramie is happy to think of the murder as merely a drug deal gone bad. (No homophobia here in Laramie, thank you much.) And that’s just the remembering; even worse is the forgetting, signified not only by literal excision of Shepherd’s fence, but by the clueless freshmen at the University of Wyoming who have only the vaguest idea of who Shepherd was, or why anybody should care.

The first Laramie Project was permeated by a sense of a single crime’s injustice: the second, by the inexorable and cruel suppression of the discourse of homosexuality within an entire system. The first looked at the plight of a solitary gay man at a single, terrible, instant in time; the second, at a pattern of injustice against gays that permeates all available media (newspapers, TV, theater) and that uses every postmodern trick in the book: re-writing, re-membering, re-presenting. Dave Steakley’s elegant and understated production employs the spare set design—a table and chairs—to good advantage; the ugliness of human nature plays out against the natural beauty of Wyoming, as illuminated in Colin Lowry’s subdued projections. The acting of the eight-person company is generally fine: it’s always a pleasure to see Jaston Williams (of “Greater Tuna” fame), though sweet-faced Frederic Winkler is somewhat miscast as neo-Nazi murderer Aaron McKinney. (That interview is still the most horrifying and gripping scene in the play, however.) The evening’s single intermission makes more dramatic sense than the original’s double intermission.  It’s a powerful evening of theater.

The Zach Scott is presenting both parts of The Laramie Project in repertory for another week, so if you haven’t seen the original, you can (and should, dammit) take in a twofer on Saturday. For unless one of the theaters in San Antonio programs it soon, Alamo City audiences will have to wait until The Laramie Project: Twenty Years Later.

-- Thomas “Bouquets” Jenkins, Current Theater Critic

Reviews from Elsewhere: Cabaret, MacTheatre, McCallum Fine Arts Academy, February 23 - March 4, reviewed by David Glen Robinson

Review published by David Glen Robinson at the Tutto Theatre blog, March 8:

Macademy produced Kander and Ebb’s renowned Cabaret in their new arts center and made of it a giant party, a song festival, a design exhibition and homage to the powerful artists who staged this show in the past.

Perhaps the essential stroke of genius in this play is Kander and Ebb’s setting of it in Berlin, 1931/1932, drawn from Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. The potential themes on which a production could touch in “Cabaret” range from libertinism, to sexual and religious liberation/oppression to the rise of fascism. Touching on too many of them, depending on one’s resources, can give a production of Cabaret the feeling of a play at war with itself (What are you, Cabaret? Are you a historical romance, an anthology piece on club life, a musical revue, a screed on Nazis or all of these?)

The Royale Court Players [of McCallum Fine Arts Academy] in their youthful enthusiasm succumbed to the play’s temptations and tried a little too much, giving us a two hour and forty minute show with one 15-minute intermission. The attempt, however, was laudable, verging on glorious. At the end, the audience was happy and cheering as it rushed out to the restrooms.

The show was well designed from top to bottom, and primary credit for its success starts with directors Courtney Wissinger and M. Scott Tatum. All of the design elements seemed well coordinated. [. . .]

The action of the play roared across this set. The story of the Kit-Kat Club on New Year’s Eve 1931 and into 1932 is familiar to theatre- and movie-goers alike. The story dances through its many themes, all in lace and feathers, and easily escapes becoming merely the story of the romance between club singer Sally Bowles, played by Annamarie Kasper, and American writer Clifford Bradshaw, played by Connor Barr.

The dynamo of the show is actually the Master of Ceremonies, played by John James Busa in the role immortalized by Joel Grey. Director Wissinger and Mr. Busa addressed the high standard and dominating image of Grey’s characterization wisely by seeking another dynamic. Their efforts were successful. Busa’s Master of Ceremonies combined the punk and goth esthetics, with a flavor of the vampiric. Busa’s Master of Ceremonies was snide, dominating, darkly threatening, seductive and sarcastic. In the end, too, he was tragic and suffering. He borrowed nothing from and owed nothing to Joel Grey. Delightful work, Mr. Busa.

[image: MacTheatre, McCallum Fine Arts Academy]

Read more at the Tutto Theatre blog . . . .

Civilization (All You Can Eat) by Jason Grote, Salvage Vanguard Theatre,

By Catherine Dribb

It’s strange. The concept is great, but the play is strange.

Just a warning.

The show opens with actors engaged in movement who quickly scatter when the initial dialogue begins, and the audience meets the first character, a hog, played by the talented Jude Hickey. And the rest is, well, an unveiling not only of hogs but also of porn stars, bigots, directors, hippies, self-help-book authors and (of course) actors.

It’s a strange show. But what was I expecting?

Under the direction of Jenny Larson, Salvage Vanguard Theater presents Civilization (All You Can Eat) by Jason Grote, a playwright simultaneously watching two productions of his show go up in Washington DC and, you guessed it, Austin. While I can’t speak to the D.C. show, the Austin cast is strong, rivaled only perhaps by the set designed by Connor Hopkins and the visual concept for the show, which I found compelling and effective, if under used.

From George Washington eating Twix bars to a giant man-hog strangling a runaway porn-star teenager, the show will surprise and shock you with both laughter and poignant disillusionment.

That’s not to say the writing is brilliant. It isn’t. The script appeared to be the weakest part of this production. Scenes dragged not because of boring actors or bad directing but because the dialogue isn’t engaging. Like I said, the concept is great. The writing wasn’t.

Civilization is described as a “parable of the Obama age,” where “desperation, desire, and existential dread connect the lives” of the characters. Hilarity mixes with overwhelming disillusionment as the audience empathizes with the characters trying to make a small difference in the world, to embody the change they long to see. They want to be effective and good at something, however obscure or shunned by society. They want to felt, noticed, loved, successful: these are basic longings of most of the angsty offspring of baby boomers.

Barack Obama said change was on the horizon. But is it, really, when compared to the stars staring down on us from millions of miles away? Is it, when a thousand or a million butterflies can change the course of history without any rhythm or warning? What really drives this world? What really matters?

Pertinent questions. I can’t say Civilization (All You Can Eat) adequately expressed or, for that matter, answered them (but wasn’t that the point?). But the concept was there. The disjointed chaos emphasized by the apparent links among these characters’ lives reminds us where the playwrightwanted to go, despite the fact that he never took us there.

Got a free night next weekend? Go see Civilization. It’s fresh, creative and different. And funny as hell. Disjointed, but amusing. Featuring Florinda Bryant, Michael Joplin, Heather Hanna, Griçelda Silva, Mical Trejo, Annie La Ganga and Jude Hickey. The set is brilliant, the acting is fresh and the play is short… under an hour and a half with no intermission.

Hey, George Washington… is that a Twix bar you’ve got hidden under that Declaration of Independence?

Maybe. Then again, maybe not.

Civilization (All You Can Eat). And then some.

Cinderella Waltz by Don Nigro, Red Dragon Players, Austin High School, January 19 - 21

The mischievous Don Nigro puts the Cinderella fairy tale into a humorous trailer-park context and sends it spinning around so unpredictably that you're never quite sure whether the sweet, mistreated Rosie Snow is going to turn up roses or not.

Shannon Tipton directed a one-act version of the story last week as her inaugural outing with the Austin High School Red Dragons with their 401st stage production. It was a "novice" production with a cast of faces mostly new to me, for I missed their Jungle Book earlier this year.

The core story is there, of course, with the sweetly downcast Louise Root as the titular character, afflicted by her garish, dim and horrible stepmother (Samantha Melomo) and stepsisters wearing names from Shakespeare's King Lear -- booted, grumpy Goth-style Goneril (Layla Gilliland) and Barbie-esque Reagan (Abby Lewis). Dull-witted Dad (Oliver Davis), sort of like Jed Clampett, spends most of his time in the trailer behind the playing area, hollering for help in finding his pants.

Nigro plants a troll in the well at center stage. Or rather, an affably confused royal flunky named "Troll," who fell in while wandering around the countryside, delivering invitations to the ball on behalf of the prince. Zach Completo makes his trollish footman (or perhaps footmanish troll) entirely likeable, abashed but eager to please, quite baffled by the determination of Mama Snow to get herself and her two favored girls into the palace.

Add McCoy Johnston as the village idiot, touseled, dirty and moaning in inarticulate frustration, prototype of the "barefoot boy with cheek of tan" and prime material for a potential makeover -- he is at turns silly and touching. Riley Ryan-Wood as Mother Maggie pops out of the wishing well when needed, an ironic fairy godmother who'd be entirely at ease in an afterhours lush life bar.

Click to read more and view additional images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Conversations While Dining Alone by Ken Johnson, Dougherty Arts Center, January 13 - 29

by Hannah Bisewski

An evening at the Dougherty Arts Center for Ken Johnson’s Conversations While Dining Alone is a voyage into the brooding, lonely thoughts of the saddest people we know. Or maybe into those of just about everyone we know. These original monologues capture some of the ideas we have when we’re alone, the frustrations and the very ugliest thoughts that haunt our quieter moments.

Chuck Merlo enters and seats himself at a desk, places a McDonalds breakfast before him and begins an irritable rant into the cell phone pressed against his head. His steady monologue suggests there isn’t much of a conversation taking place. Merlo gestures at the wooden human figures around him, painted in all shades and fixed in all sorts of poses, referring to them as the “great unwashed,” the unshowered masses, homeless people whom he must serve in some capacity. He complains of their stupidity, their laziness, their sordid attempts at taking advantage of the welfare system. Only toward the end of his monologue do we understand that he might envy them in some sense, that maybe his character craves some level of acceptance and compassion from their community.

And so begins the parade of intimacy, texts fashioned entirely by Ken Johnson. Kayo Productions’ cast of eleven actors presents a total of twenty-four characters. Each provides a brief introduction and context and then expounds upon the most painful trope of the character’s existence. They range from sexually deprived wives to lonely custodians and murderous husbands -- the abusive and the abused. The light dims gently after each monologue and the company rearranges the featureless wooden figures. Sometimes the characters speak to the silhouettes, trying to bridge some communication gap and to make themselves understood. Of course, they fail. Sometimes the figures simply serve as a faceless crowd, a reminder that much of the interaction in which we engage every day ends up anonymous and unheard.

The bottom of the stage is lined with a cityscape in silhouette, suggesting that these characters are people we can find anywhere, in this city as much as in the next. And, sure enough, many of the issues the monologues confront are believable, even familiar, so much so that a few of the characters feel a bit archetypical or clichéd. Many of the performances hint at self-parody, though rarely with conviction or entirely enough to be understood as such (Sally Hultgren’s “A League of her Own”, performed at the end of the first act, is an exception: the story of a wealthy homemaker addicted to crack cocaine). Many of the performances are designed to make us uncomfortable at times, so that the audience isn’t sure whether to laugh or to keep a somber silence.

Conversations While Dining Alone is an exercise in humanity, in stepping into the shoes of another person, probably someone less fortunate than yourself, and trying on that plight for size. What you’ll find is a trove of compassion you might not have tapped in quite a while. Some of the issues are stark and much of the language is strong and raw (and rightly so), so children aren’t likely to enjoy the performance.

Conversations While Dining Alone plays at 7:30 p.m. and tickets are $12.50. Student discounts are available.

God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, Zach Theatre, November 29 - January 8

Zach Theatre's God of Carnage is a beautiful mess.

That's intentional. The set by Michael Raiford is sleekly contemporary with a bold abstract mural inspired by Cy Twombly spread across the back wall. This living room has a stark leather sofa, a Barcelona chair and large pillows in African-style fabrics, all positioned over a striking red floor so highly polished that the characters can probably see themselves in it. Somebody in this family has got money and and a strong sense of design or perhaps has employed a very decided home decorator.

The Zach Theatre is promoting Yasmina Reza's four-character piece as a boisterous farce about sophisticated adults losing it and behaving very badly. We're in the home of the Novaks, Veronica and Michael, whose middle-school-age son had a nasty confrontation with the son of the Raleighs, Alan and Annette. Responding to name-calling, the Raleigh boy bashed the Novak kid in the mouth with a stick, knocking out two teeth.

Now the adults are meeting to discuss the matter and to decide in civilized fashion just what should be done about it.

Hah. Good luck with that, especially when Yasmina Reza is creating you.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Reviews from Elsewhere: The Method Gun, Rude Mechs, Mention in Scott Brown's 'Best of 2011' in New York Magazine, December 4

Via link tweeted by the Rude Mechs:

The Off Brand

Some of the best shows came and went in a flash.

By Scott Brown, December 4, 2011

It’s fashionable to write off Off and Off–Off Broadway—hey, I do it all the time, for fun and profit. But 2011 made that a difficult proposition: My favorite shows of the year, as a bloc, were those wee, untransferable gems and oddities from smaller theaters throughout the city, the sorts of shows that regularly blow in and out of town in two-week runs. Most of the time, frankly, two weeks is far too generous a cushion. Not this year, not for these ephemeral, yet unforgettable events.

I’ve made Sweet and Sad my No. 1 pick for 2011, but it’s just a tributary to a giant, churning underground reservoir of nanoscale theater-art. I thrilled at a revival of Howard Barker’s furious Restoration anarch-omedy Victory: Choices in Reaction, starring the great Jan Maxwell, which spoke directly to our present viciousness, revanchism, and social cannibalism. The Method Gun, a nothing-short-of-magical mousetrap rigged by Austin’s excellent Rude Mechs troupe, purported to tell the story of an acting guru named Stella Burden and her cultlike teaching techniques, but really massaged the old American ache for purity in theory and practice—and made the stakes of an elaborate theater-game feel like life and death. [. . . .]

Click to read full text at New York magazine. . . .

Housebreaking by Jakob Holder, Poison Apple Initiative, at a private venue, December 1 - 17

A MILESTONE for ALT:

With this post AustinLiveTheatre.com has published 2500 articles about Austin theatre since June, 2008!

by Hannah Bisewski and Michael Meigs

What does a theatre space feel like? How is it supposed to make us feel? Those of us in the small crowd gathered for the opening of the premiere run of Jakob Holder’s Housebreaking were asking ourselves those questions in some form or other. People from the Poison Apple Initiative funneled us into a cramped living room nook in a discreet East Austin housing venue. We found ourselves in the kitchen of a fairly average but rundown home. But that’s a part of the story, too.

The play opens with a painfully long blackout, finally interrupted by the entrance of two men through an oddly placed kitchen door. One of them, Chad, has brought home with him a homeless man – Carmine -- he met outside a bar. Chad treats him with an erratic combination of pity and disgust. With dark, voyeuristic curiosity about the hobo’s lifestyle, he drills the baffled Carmine with questions, only to express repulsion at his responses. Carmine once had a home but has lived on the streets since it burnt to the ground. The exchanges reveal more and more deficiencies in life of each man.

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

Reviews from Elsewhere: Oregon Arts Watch on The Method Gun, Rude Mechanicals, September 13

Published at the Oregon Arts Watch:

TBA:11/ Rude Mechs, ‘The Method Gun’: art and self-reflection

By Brett Campbell ⋅ September 13, 2011

I approached the Rude Mechs show The Method Gun with some skepticism. I generally detest art about art, with its usual insider references (or so I thought) and the premise sounded oh-so-meta: a theater piece about a theater company’s staging of a theater production. Happily, the Austin-based company merely used the subject matter as a vehicle to do what the best theater always does: tells us about who we are and why we do what we do. In giving us a deliciously deceptive story about art, they’re telling us about ourselves, artists and non artists alike.

It’s really a story about an absence — though not the big lacuna alleged in the story, which concerns a famous (though fictional) theater director named Stella Burden, who devised a way of making theater more real called “The Approach,” and if this sounds suspiciously like a famous nonfictional Stella (Adler) and “The Method” she created, it’s hardly an accident. (As for the surname, I wonder if it references the Los Angeles artist Chris Burden, who wanted to make art with so much impact that he staged a performance in which a collaborator actually shot him. He survived and is happily making art to this day; I visited his Los Angeles studio a few years ago, where he was making a big installation involving old lightposts.)

Stella B’s conceit is to stage a version of A Streetcar Named Desire — without Stanley, Stella, Mitch or Blanche. Like them, Burden never appears in The Method Gun. The show is about the actors she left behind, somewhat like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is about the bit players in Hamlet. “She gave us ourselves, and now we don’t even have that,” one wails.

Read more at Oregon Arts Watch . . . .

Where in the World is ALT? -- Austin, July 8

In July and August, 2010 I will be traveling, first to Chicago and then to Europe. This is a vacation in the sense that I'm "vacating" my activities as reviewer for made-in-Austin theatre productions during that time. Thanks to digital technology and the birthday gift from K of a new laptop computer, I'll be maintaining the site, including the Austin Live Theatre calendar, notices of upcoming theatre events and arts reporting.

(image: tropic diver at flickriver.com)

July 8, Thursday

After two years of creation and dedication, It's time for a getaway. I've written and published 79 theatre reviews so far in 2010. In 2009 I published 158 and in the last six months of 2008, while defining AustinLiveTheatre, I published 57. Wowzers -- 294 essays on Austin artists and productions! That part is the labor of love, involving attending productions, thinking about them, and invoking the mysterious muses with the aim of depicting those events in prose, appreciating the artists and saying something significant about them. Theatre writing isn't quick or easy. The French would call it un travail de longue haleine -- a job that requires endurance and stamina for the long haul (literally, "a job for sustained breathing"). Depending on the complexity and challenge, each essay takes from two to four hours to craft and publish.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .