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Two persons, forty brief scenes, a scant hour and twenty minutes in a playing space about the size of a writer’s study – this was the most deeply satisfying theatrical experience I’ve had since beginning my exploration of Austin theatre last year.The Nina Variations is a theatre-maker’s dream, crafted by Stephen Dietz from the material of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Coincidentally, last year’s production of that play by Broken String Players at the Off Center was my first evening of Austin theatre.This beautiful evening will be caviar to the general, in part because to appreciate its creativity fully the audience should have at least a vague acquaintance with Chekhov’s quietly comic melancholy, with the source play and with its characters. Playwright Dietz does give us a quick refresher in Scene 4, as Treplev (Aaron Hallaway) gives a list of the characters with comments on their relationships, illustrated with whimsical drawings, back-projected.Chekhov always gives us a large cast of characters. Family members, friends, local officials, servants and others spend much of their time in desultory talk with and about one another. The trivial mixes with the transcendent. There is a slow overall movement through his plays, but just as in real life, the present moment is the most important. And the present moment is often filled with longing, with banter, with philosophizing, with small absurdities. The Seagull, set in a remote Russian province, opens as family and friends gather by an improvised stage by the lake. Treplev, the neglected son of a famous actress, is staging a play, a new sort of play, in which he has confided the single role to Nina, the neighbor girl whom he adores. As dusk gathers, Nina delivers before the idly curious group of onlookers Treplev’s impossible text, a soliloquy evoking a time hundreds of years from now, when mankind will have perished and the earth will have changed unutterably. When they titter at his concept and at the red-eyed devils that appear to accompany his words, Treplev angrily breaks off the presentation.Much, much more happens in the play. But Act IV, set years later, gives us Treplev once more, a recognized though anonymous author, scribbling in his study. His beloved Nina has returned to town, after running off to live with the successful novelist Trigorin, who neglected and abandoned her even though she bore his child. Nina is now a working actress. She comes unannounced to the door of Treplev’s study. After a brief encounter, a scene of less than three pages, she leaves him, leaves the town, and leaves the province. Shortly afterwards, as Treplev’s family and acquaintances play cards, they hear a distant explosion. The family doctor goes out, comes back unperturbed, reassures everyone, then draws a friend downstage to tell him, in confidence, that Treplev has just shot himself. Curtain. For The Nina Variations we are allowed into the house just fifteen minutes before the announced starting time of 8 p.m. Treplev is there, seated at his desk, wrapped in thought, scribbling, revising, thinking, scribbling some more. 
There is a faraway, droning chord, almost obscured by the low surge of the ventilation system. We sit. We watch Treplev. If we are so minded, we can empty our thoughts, quiet those drunken monkeys of the mind, and absorb the scene of the writer at work, emblematic not only of Treplev’s dilemmas but also of those of playwright Stephen Dietz. After that contemplation, eventually the distant music changes, a young woman walks irresolutely out of the shadows beyond the stage, and Nina initiates the action.Dietz takes this relationship, respecting fully the characters involved, and offers variations, in the musical sense, on Chekhov’s scene. What more might they have said? How could Treplev have opened his heart to her? What could she have said to him about the patent scandal of her profligate life with Trigorin or the early death of their child? What if they re-explored the script from Treplev’s failed drama, or changed roles, or tormented one another, or free-associated in Chekovian style about the meaning of art, of form, of love, of eternity, of one another? What if somehow they had overcome the inevitable characteristic of Chekhov’s characters, that of not quite listening and instead speaking past one another? 
Dietz rings the changes, and the bells peal out in ever-changing sequences. Or, changing the metaphor, his Treplev and Nina rise and bank through the imagined world of the play like paragliders following thermals over a familiar landscape, giving us new views and unexpected possibilities. They close with one another or they confront. Treplev mocks the use of a seagull as a symbol. They dream. They give us their premonitions. In a powerful moment Treplev speaks from the lonely lakeshore about his thoughts as he lifted the pistol to his head. The variations are marked only by the silent change of a number discreetly projected on a back curtain. Initially I found this off-putting – shouldn’t we receive an audible signal, a quiet ding to emphasize each beginning again? But the scenes are variations, not alternatives. Without explicit, insistent demarcation, those many possibilities assume simultaneous existence for us. They exist because Dietz imagined them, Aaron Hallaway and Rachel McGinnis embodied them, Will Hollis Snider directed them, and the whole apparatus of theatrical production gave them life. Add to that intellectual stimulation the fact that the acting is of the very highest quality. It had to be – with two characters working one another and working the text, any false note would have thrown the whole exercise into the “interesting but so what?” category. Their pacing, silences, concentration, gestures, congruence of character to the originals in The Seagull – nothing was lacking. 
In other productions of The Nina Variations, directors have chosen to populate the stage with several Ninas and Trigorins, thereby suggesting that outcome is tied to individual traits. Here, in contrast, by embodying their characters consistently with conviction and apparent spontaneity, Aaron Hallaway and Rachel McGinnis raise for us the issues of actions, responsibility, uncertainty and risk. If only I had said. . . . In opening moments Hallaway appears too young to play Treplev, but his intelligence and emotional openness overcome that handicap promptly. McGinnis, assured, unapologetic, alternately amused by Treplev and annoyed by him, is never a victim and always alluring. This is such an intimate play in substance and in setting that in style much of the acting approached cinema technique. Small gestures, visible thought, naturalistic diction, throwaway lines. At times the volume was so subdued that phrases or whole sentences went missing for me in the soughing of the ventilation. But anger or emotion flared as well – such as Treplev’s response to Nina’s word game, taunting her repeatedly with “Masha” – the name of the provincial girl hopelessly in love with Treplev. Laughter was there, as was hope.Gobotrick’s Nina Variations is a brilliant, consistent, heart-rending series of riffs on Chekhov’s characters, one which preserves Chekhov’s sensibilities and reminds us gently and insistently that life is here, life is now, life is immediate, and all our choices are full of meaning.
Joey Seiler writes a perceptive review, Austin Statesman, November 19Austin actress Jennymarie Jemison's post on the Nina Variations, with a response from Rachel McGinnis (who played Nina), November 26[Click for Ryan E. Johnson's perceptive review on Austin.com][Click here for the Act IV scene between Treplev and Nina, contained in teaching materials prepared by the Vienna (Austria) Theatre Project for the first European presentation of the play]
Elizabeth Cobbe in the November 7 Austin Chronicle:"What this Frankenstein does offer is the pleasure one should get from seeing good puppeteers at work."[Click for full review]Review by Ryan E. Johnson on Austin.com:For their latest production of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Trouble Puppet Theater Company throws away everything the audience may know about the classic tale, replacing them with the most outrageous, yet creative, ideas imaginable. Instead of a beast made from the body parts of corpses, this is beast grown mainly from vegetables and roots. Gone is the bleak European countryside; much of the story takes place in Revolution-era France. It all comes off as extremely bizarre, even a bit jarring at first, but once it pulls you inside its world, you won’t want to leave. [Click for full review]
Robert Faires of the Austin Chronicle has done a lengthy article & interview with playwright Stephen Dietz, now at UT but previously from Seattle. Excerpt:Such self-importance doesn't stand with Dietz. "A lot of people dine out on the idea that what they're doing is so special and so difficult," he says. "That stuff makes me sick. I try not to tolerate it in my students, and I absolutely will not tolerate it in myself, nor would my friends let me get away with that. I was lucky enough in my formative playwriting years to have [the romantic notion of playwriting] kicked out from under me and instead to embrace working hard at the part you can control – where the short word goes in the sentence, where you come into the scene – and have patience, tolerance, and forbearance with the stuff you don't control."[Click for the full text on-line]Two Dietz plays are currently running in Austin: Still Life with Iris at UT [click for ALT review] and The Nina Variations by Gobotrick Theatre Company at the Dougherty Arts Center [click for ALT review].
From the perceptive review by KariKross at Austinist.com, dated November 4:The touring company is very fine both as actors and musicians, and Carrie Cimma's Mrs. Lovett was especially notable, whether shaking her bum in time to her tuba-playing during "Pirelli's Miracle Elixir," gleefully swapping puns and bad jokes with Sweeney in "A Little Priest," or breaking down at last in the unrelenting finale. This isn't Angela Lansbury's blowsy music-hall turn; this performance, based on Patti LuPone's, is more Weimar cabaret with a touch of Goth style in her ripped fishnet stockings. She was well-matched by Merritt David James's Sweeney, whose singing voice has some of the tenor qualities of Johnny Depp's voice bolstered with theatrical firepower like that which Michael Cerveris brought to the role on Broadway. . . .This production of Sweeney Todd is a deceptively simple staging, reading at first almost like an experimental black-box theatre piece. The simplicity is in fact the result of a well-oiled machine, and the actors don't miss a beat in the transitions from scene to scene and from acting to music and back again. And in the end, the minimal elegance of the staging allows the audience to focus on the beauty, discords, and humor of the music, and on the emotional heft of the story. It's not a museum piece; it's a living work of art.
[Click for text of full review]From the review by Laura Cole posted by the Daily Texan: Though the entire cast is talented, Carrie Cimma stands out in both vocals and acting as Mrs. Lovett, with her brash, domineering personality, strong cockney accent, physicality and comedic timing. Her duet with Merritt David Janes drew the most laughs of the night in “A Little Priest,” a song filled with puns about the people they plan to bake into meat pies. Janes also performs solidly as Sweeney Todd, especially notable for his power over dynamics in songs like “Epiphany,” a song of both vengeance and mourning, that jumps between fierce staccato and softer, more sustained stretches of vocals. Chris Marchant gives an incredible performance as Tobias. Along with some of the strongest vocals and instrumentals in the cast, his characterization of the mentally unstable boy is utterly convincing. Those who opted to spend their Halloween at the theater enjoyed a real treat.
[Click for text of full review]
Found on-line:
High School MusicalNovember 6th - November 9th 2008One-Act EditionDisney Channel's smash hit musical comes to life on stage! Join Troy, Gabriella, Sharpay, Ryan and all the Jocks, Brainiacs, Thespians and Skater Dudes as they sing, dance and discover that “We’re all in this together!”
This popular teen musical contains all of the songs from the Disney Channel musical including Start of Something New, Stick to the Status Quo, Bop to the Top, Breaking Free and We’re All in this Together plus one new number and a High School Musical Megamix. Don’t miss this special presentation, funded by scholarships from the City of Georgetown. NOTE: This is a special presentation by the Fall Teen Palace Playhouse workshops and is not included in the 2008 - 2009 Season Ticket Package. Tickets are $10 for all ages.Prices: General: $10, Senior(55+): $10, Student(16+)/Active Duty Military (with ID): $10Children(15 or younger): $10
Found on-line:
Our Lady of 121st Street
Written by Stephen Adly GuirgisDirected by Luke LeonardPerformances: November 7, 13, 14, 15 at 8:00 PMNovember 9, 15 at 2:00 PMUT Lab TheatreAdmission: FreeSynopsis: The Ortiz Funeral Room is in big trouble: The body of beloved community activist and nun Sister Rose has been stolen from the viewing room, and waiting for her proper return are some of New York City's most emotionally charged, life-challenged neighborhood denizens, trying to find a place to put their grief, checkered pasts and their uncertain futures. A dark comedy in two acts.Author Stephen Adly Guirgis is a playwright, actor, and teleplay writer. He is a member of the New York City LAByrinth Theater Company, whose other members include Philip Seymour Hoffman and Justin Reinsilber. His play Jesus Hopped the A Train won the Edinburgh Fringe First Award and the Detroit Free Press Play of the year. It was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Awards as Best New Play. Our Lady of 121st Street received a best play nomination from the Drama Desk. In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings was named one of the Ten Best Plays of 1999 by Time Out New York. In 2008 his play The Little Flower of East Orange was produced by New York's LAByrinth Theater Company and The Public Theater, directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman and featuring Ellen Burstyn in the title role.His television writing credits include NYPD Blue, UC: Undercover, and Big Apple, along with many projects in the works. He continues his acting on stage and on film, in movies like Todd Solondz's Palindromes, Brett C. Leonard's Jailbait (opposite Michael Pitt), and Noah Buschel's Neal Cassady.Director Luke Leonard is a current M.F.A. Directing candidate at The University of Texas at Austin. Before relocating to Austin, he spent 12 years in New York where he received a B.F.A. in Acting from Brooklyn College and worked in theater and film as an actor, writer, director, producer and amateur-cinematographer. Recent awards include: a Morton Brown, Nellie Lea Brown, and Minelma Brown Lockwood Scholarship Fund in Drama, a Jack G. Taylor Memorial Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Fine Arts, a Frank C. Erwin, Jr. Centennial Professorship Travel Grant, and a the University Co-Op Presents the Cohen New Works Festival Research and Development Grant.
Steven Dietz wrote Still Life with Iris for the Seattle Children’s Theatre, which produced it in 1997.
The UT production now onstage at UTPAC is as marvelously iridescent as a soap bubble lifting into the night sky. It won’t be much longer lived than a bubble, either, with only 8 performances scheduled.
Scenery, costume, lighting and special effects are impressive, as well they should be – the back page of the program reads like a movie title crawl, with well more than 100 individuals involved in the technical aspects alone.
UT actors embrace Dietz’s fantasy world and have a good time doing so. Particular credit goes to Stevi Baston in the title role as Iris and to the nefarious, court-of-Versailles-mannered couple, the Goods (Matrex Kilgore and Ashley Hayes). I enjoyed the bumptious Annabelle Lee (Betsy Clair Cummings) and Michael Bowman as Mozart.
Dietz posits a magic world called “Nocturna” in which the inhabitants all have special duties for the greater world – for example, painting the spots on ladybugs, teaching the wind to whisper or howl, or hauling the moon up every night. Nocturnans wear thickly padded coats that preserve their memories – and the tailor (called the “Memory Mender”) fussily admonishes them to keep their coats in shape, so no knowledge will dribble out of broken seams or unfilled buttonholes.A huge moon hangs over this prancing fantasy land, looming against a galaxy of stars and a dim, billowing horizon of waves or hills.
Into it comes the intruder Mr. Matternot (the somber, good looking Nick Spain), with the mission of enticing Iris out of her coat and away to an island ruled by “the Goods.” At his conniving, Iris’s mom (Molly Searcy, left) doffs her coat and suddenly doesn’t recognize her own daughter any more.
Iris goes away with him, coatless, but carrying a worn leather pouch with a single button we’ll discover to be carrying fragmentary images from memory.
Grotto and Gretta Good in their island realm collect the best of everything – but only one exemplar of each. Their palace is defined by eccentric angles and its surprising collection (“Imagine,” says Grotto, gesturing, “We have ONE drape, but it is the best one that exists!”)
The sky over the palace is dark, with a single star.
The Goods needed a girl and a boy for their collection, and Iris appears initially to fill the bill. She winds up wearing one silver shoe (“the best shoe in the world!”) and receives as a present the best doll in the whole world, which is inexplicably sealed away in a locked box.
As her counterpart, the Goods acquire a young man with brilliant yellow coat and a keyboard on a strap -- the young Mozart (Michael Bowman), who is baffled when he loses his musical instrument and is encouraged to compose, instead, on a piano with a single key and a single note.
From there, the plot thickens, of course. After all, what child would want to be a museum piece, even if she could not remember clearly anything different or better?
Mix in a stray female free spirit, attached to a 
multicolor fabric chain and in search of her misplaced sailing vessel. This Annabel Lee (Betsy Clair Cummings) is just as decisive as Iris is disoriented, although she doesn’t have any clear explanations for the state of the world.
That makes the odds 3 to 2, and the Good Guys Iris, Annabell Lee and “Motz” combine in the naïve effort to overcome the decisive dispositions of the dubious Goods.
A tailor called in for some mending turns out to be the Memory Mender (Brian Fahey), who drops a few helpful hints. . . .
And so on. All comes out well; the ladybugs get their spots, the wind learns again how to whisper and howl, and that big old moon gets hauled up once more.
The show is charming, the actors breathe life into characters who are written as two-dimensionally as Javanese shadow puppets, and the spectators can smile at the familiar tinkling Mozart tunes on the soundtrack.
Annabel Lee, sure, that’s Edgar Allen Poe, isn’t it? “It was many and many a year ago,/In a kingdom by the sea. . . / I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea;/But we loved with a love that was more than love - / I and my Annabel Lee.” (But come to think of it, that Annabel Lee wound up dead, in a whitened sepulcher by the sea.)
Grownups writing for children sometimes can't resist a knowing wink. For example, in the published version of the play Dietz includes a shred of Keats as a preliminary: "And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,/ And she forgot the blue above the trees,/And she forgot the dells where waters run,/ And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze."
But more important than those considerations – where were the children?
This play is written for audiences of the enchanted ages from 6 to 12 years of age. They can laugh and embrace its non-sense and can root unabashedly for the heroine struggling to understand the arbitrary world of decisive, wrong-headed grownups. They would love the magic and the spectacle; they would grasp immediately the bewilderment of a girl whose mother stares blankly at her.
But as far as I can tell, Still Life with Iris is playing at UT to audiences made up of university students and other grownups.
For this Halloween performance, I had the Joker on one side of me and Marilyn Monroe a couple of rows behind us. But theirs were probably not the fantasies that Dietz was seeking to fulfill.- - -
ADDENDUM, November 3: Thanks to UT Producing Director Denise Martel, who informs ALT that Still Life with Iris will play two shows for fifth graders from the Austin Independent School District, Wednesday and Friday. Shows are sold out -- so nearly a thousand kids will get to experience the production!Daily Texan review by Aboubacar N'Diaye, November 6Production photos and information, UT Drama DepartmentCostume sketches for Still Life with IrisGoogle preview of published edition of Still Life with Iris, including most of Act I
In other productions of The Nina Variations, directors have chosen to populate the stage with several Ninas and Trigorins, thereby suggesting that outcome is tied to individual traits. Here, in contrast, by embodying their characters consistently with conviction and apparent spontaneity, Aaron Hallaway and Rachel McGinnis raise for us the issues of actions, responsibility, uncertainty and risk. If only I had said. . . . 
Joey Seiler writes a perceptive review, Austin Statesman, November 19
