Bacchae, Austin Community College Rio Grande Campus, November 14 - 23

Powerful, mythic, pagan and frightening –ACC’s Bacchae, directed by Arthur Adair and presented by a cast that is dedicated, haunting, and decisive, is no easy evening of theatre. This profound experience grabs you by the throat and opens your eyes to a world of danger and excess.

Take a look at the letters of the title. That glistening, dripping red-orange color is uncomfortably close to smeared blood. Think about that if you’re vaguely attracted to a play that offers some nudity.

Adair and his cast have taken key conventions of the classic Greek theatre, including the use of masks and the use of the multi-person chorus speaking and chanting as a single individual. But unlike the static presentations of antiquity, their piece surges out of the frame. The first row of seats is prohibited to the public, for they are used as points of attack for the actors. Entrances and scenes play out along the center aisle and sides. Actors speak and chant from the rear. The fascinating, harrowing action of this play can come at you from any direction, up close and personal.

Few in the audience will know the story. The program handed out at the door is diverting in itself, with information about Euripides, some rambling director’s notes, an acknowledgement that the text is pulled from several sources, the technical info and bios of the players and staff. But it doesn’t summarize the plot, and spectators may be confused about the names and the story at the same time that their senses are being overfilled with spectacle.

Briefly and without much erudition, then, a summary of the action:

Dionysius, also known as Bacchus, is the god of wine, altered states, frenzy and ecstasy – in this case, etymologically, ec + stasis, which means “removal to someplace completely different.” He is the child of the great god Zeus, who mated with the mortal woman Semele. Her body was consumed as if by lightning; Zeus saved the engendered child and sealed it within his thigh for the period of gestation. As the play opens, Cadmus the retired king of Thebes and the blind prophet Tiresias lament the disorder in the city-kingdom; women have disappeared from the city into the forests, where they are indulging in rites to honor Dionysus (dionysian revels are also known as bacchanals, so the celebrants are the “bacchae,” – singular, “bacchante”). Cadmus’ daughter Agave is leading the rites; the bare-breasted celebrants chant verse that is rhythmic, poetic and menacing.

Agave’s son Pentheus, now exercising kingly authority, is having none of it. Pentheus does not believe in Dionysus and scorns the cult. His soldiers captured and imprisoned bacchae, and he sends his men off to arrest a fresh-faced young foreigner reported to be encouraging these excesses.

Pentheus’s arrogance (hubris) means that he will inevitably and literally get the shaft by the end of the play. His men bring in the foreigner, eerily embodied by three shaven-headed young men speaking simultaneously in the same voice. Pentheus, who sees only a single individual, challenges this Dionysian missionary on his faith but gets no satisfactory answers. Soldiers pack the three-in-one offstage to prison, where the chains and locks on him and his celebrants give way. The women escape again to the woods.

Infuriated, Pentheus has the stranger brought back to court. Messenger-soldiers report on the ecstatic rituals of the escaped women. The men chant from the rear of the auditorium; before us, onstage, bathed in floods of light, blood-red and ice-blue, the bacchae carry out their rituals. Pentheus’ reason is numbed by Dionysus’ words. Hypnotised, he avows his desire to see the bacchic rites. He agrees to Dionysus’ suggestion to disguise himself in a woman’s robe, lifted without his knowledge from his mother’s body. Pentheus situates himself in the top of a pine tree, the better to peek upon the ceremonies. His mother and the other bacchae tear him to pieces.

(And maybe you thought that the classics were boring?)

Agave returns to the court, proclaiming to her father Cadmus (grandfather to King Pentheus, remember) that the women have captured a fine lion. She carries Pentheus’ head and her followers dump a sack of body parts at her feet. The solemn, grieving tones of Cadmus (Roberto Riggio) bring her out of her rapture and she realizes that through her Dionysus has taken revenge.

At this point the single extant Greek text is missing pages. Director and cast elected to stop the action so the dramaturg Ryan Manning could explain. After a few lame jokes from the dramaturg and a couple of false starts, director Adair instructs Cadmus and Agave to cut to the end – a desolate dialogue about loss and change.

The cast in this production achieve an elevated, almost hallucinatory intensity in their lines, establishing the action in an imaginary sphere far from the merely representative drama with which American audiences are so familiar. It is coherent and compelling. The multiplication of Dionysus, the throb and drone of music, the use of partial and then total nudity, the eerie and highly effective use of light and space – all of this induces in the spectators feelings resembling those of the enraptured bacchae. There is a severe and unpleasant jolt when this style is interrupted – early on, for example, when the ancients Cadmus and Tiresias are briefly played as clowns, with asides to the audience and even a trill from Tiresias from West Side Story (“I feel pretty. . . .”). In contrast, the jolt works in positive fashion at the missing pages toward the end, which probably contained an injunction to the city of Thebes from cloud-borne Dionysus (a “deus ex machina” not for magic resolution but rather for judgment and admonition). Even there, however, a sobre, even puzzled tone might have worked better than jokiness.

Triplifying Dionysus was an inspired stroke – first, as Adair explained in the post-production Q&A, because it establishes him as an immortal beyond human comprehension. But also because it gives three closely tied but nevertheless differentiated views of that godhead. Patrick Byers, John Montoya and J.R. Zambrano impress not only with their crisp, multiplied diction, but also in the odd and intimidating choreography of their movement.

Josh McGlasson, as Pentheus the tragic hero of the piece, is authoritative and eloquent at every moment – becoming even more so as he is gradually unsexed and sent into plaintive narcotic helplessness. Following the symbolic murder he remains kneeling, stunned, as the bacchantes caress the swaths of crimson gauze representing his torn tissues and Ashley Monical as his mother Agave exults and lifts a replica of his head.

Soldiers Carlos Lujan, Thomas Moore, John Osborne showed agility and discipline; their chanted account of the bacchic rituals instilled a hypnotic counterpart to the visual enactment onstage.

Sincere thanks to bacchae Esther Jimena Garcia, Anna McConnell, Aisa Palomares, and Sally Anne Marie Ziegler, as well as to Ashley Monical as Agave, for their courage and accomplishment in carrying out this challenging action. Their mastery of the text was superb. They were alluring, vulnerable, and profoundly unsettling for us – as I sat in the second row on opening night, at one point early in the spectacle a bacchante loomed over us in the eerie half-light of the public space. The rapture and fierce living certainty of her chant left me crouching low, as if any false move would unleash catastrophe.

The Bacchae is memorable, otherworldly and a triumph for Arthur Adair, for his cast, and for Austin Community College. Not to be missed!

The Three Sisters, Chekhov, Mary Moody Northern Theatre, November 13 - 23

St Edward’s Mary Moody Northern Theatre with its current production of The Three Sisters of Chekhov has again realized a fine synergy by adding two professional actors to an admirable cast of undergraduates.

The quality and success of university productions in the Austin area is almost depressing – so much talent and energy! This is a great boon for those of us who take the time to explore it, but it seems strange to have all that star power flaring hot out there and yet largely unrecognized.

The three Prozorov sisters and their brother Andrei reside in a distant Russian province but cherish memories of life in Moscow with their late father, a brigadier general. Their yearning for escape from the stifling provinces is much discussed, and a common interpretation of the play is that the entire movement is the effort to get to Moscow, a half-imagined magic circle of sophistication and light.

This lyric production is anchored by Marc Pouhé as a talkative middle-aged lieutenant colonel, saddled with an unbalanced termagant wife but wistfully in love with the only married sister, Masha, and by Ev Lunning, Jr., as the 60ish bibulous military doctor Chebutykin, regretful, ill-educated and gone to seed but deeply attached to the Prozorovs.

Cribbing from my own recent comments about the Nina Variations: “Chekhov’s plays always give 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.”

Or, better, quoting the author himself as cited by Robert Brustein, “Let the things that happen onstage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal at table, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up."

Act I of The Three Sisters gives us the celebration for the youngest sister, Irina, on her saint’s day, much of which takes place about a central table. Lt. Col. Vershinin (Pouhé) makes his first call; the vulgar local girl Natasha attends as well and captures the attention of the brother, Andrei. Act II, 18 months later, shows us Natasha, now married to Andrei, inexorably extending her influence over the household, as the same group of military officers young and old gathers to socialize and to court the sisters; Natasha puts an end to the evening by prohibiting the scheduled visit of Mardi Gras musicians.

Act III, two years further along, is set late during a summer night as all are dealing with the aftermath of a catastrophic fire in the village. And Act IV, that autumn, gives us the definitive reassignment of the artillery brigade, Irina’s decision to marry, and an offstage quarrel and duel.

Throughout the play the vulgar Natasha extends her influence and expropriates the sisters; the sisters seek work, affection and pleasure that is never completed; and Dr. Chebutykin hums, grumbles, resumes his drinking, and mutters again and again, “It’s all one. . . .” Moscow and the dream of escape fade into impossibility.

In the midst of disaster, in the closing lines Olga tries to reassure her sisters: ”Oh, dear sisters, our life is not over yet. We shall live! The music is so gay, so joyous, it seems as if just a little more and we shall know why we live, why we suffer. . . If only we knew, if only we knew!”

Sounds like a downer, doesn’t it? But no, it isn’t at all – Chekhov draws each of the characters vividly and director Sheila Gordon keeps her actors bouncing off one another, taking the greatest possible advantage of the remarkable, large “theatre in a square” that is the Mary Moody Northern Theatre. At one point the dinner party at stage center goes into silent, animated slow motion as the thoughtful and sincere first lieutenant Baron Tuzenbach (Nathan Osburn) relentlessly courts Irina, who keeps backing away from him.

The pace of the first two acts is intense and in fact almost too fast – for example, as Irina, Steffanie Ngo-Hatchie is charming and expressive but moves and speaks with the accelerated metabolism of a bird trying to escape from a cage. Act II and the first half of the production conclude with an unscripted, choreographed house invasion by the Mardi Gras musicians, who swirl around Irina and sweep her away.

It would not be fair to pick favorites, since this is such an ensemble piece and each character and actor achieves at least one intensely memorable scene. Guest artists Pouhé and Lunning are sympathetic and give fully realized portraits of decent men in impossible situations. Masha (Dorothy Ann Bond), the unhappily married sister who falls for Lt. Col. Vershinin, is sharp tongued, trapped and eloquent. Her brief, intense farewell to him shows both hearts breaking.

Olga (Julia Trinidad), who gives way to the inevitability of becoming a school teacher, has to listen to her brother’s rambling confession and complaints late at night after the fire in Act III. Her silent reaction to him, sitting stock still, speaks a world of emotion and meaning, far more than his blathering.

The eccentric, snarky Captain Solyony (Nathan Brockett) is in turns generous, offensive, pitiable, and threatening. . . . Et j’en passe, as the French say – there’s too much for me to recount. This Three Sisters is a memorable evening, one with characters and actors who will stay with you.

Hannah Kenah's strongly positive review in the Austin Chronicle, November 19

Leila Bela's review on Austinist.com

Driving Miss Daisy, Hill Country Community Theatre, November 13 - 23

It’s a good thing that the Hill Country Community Players out near Marble Falls post a map on their website. When I keyed in “4003 FM 2147 West, Marble Falls, TX 78654,” Google Maps gave me a location that was a tortuous ten miles away from their locale. Google would have sent me way east of US 281, when in fact the HCCT is located on the road running by Cottonwood Shores in route to Lake LBJ. That’s about six miles west of Marble Falls. Driving west along FM 2147, it’s just after the Esso station.

Driving is, after all, a major theme of the second play of HCCT’s season. But not the principal one – this three-person piece is also a deft, humorous examination of cultural differences, employers and employees, and ageing. As much as anything else, it is a look at friendship – and love.

There’s no way to escape the fact that the 1990 film of Driving Miss Daisy was a huge success. It won 4 Oscars including Best Actress for the 81-year-old Jessica Tandy and recognized with Oscar nominations for Morgan Freeman (best actor) and for Dan Ackroyd (best supporting actor as Booley, the son). HCCT, programming like any sensible community theatre, chose this title because it was likely to attract an audience looking for comedy and a warm feeling. To put “rears on seats,” to paraphrase the British expression, and it appears to be working – 24 hours before the Thursday night opening the staff had about 120 reservations for the modest 134-seat theatre.

This production works well, on its own merits, thanks to excellent casting and capable direction by Glen Bird.

As the stern Miss Daisy, removed from driving after crashing a three-week-old car, Sally Stemac is all straight lines and angles, terse and dismissive; as the chauffeur Hoke, Robert King, Jr., is round, happy, simple of heart and straightforward. Miss Daisy resents his presence but eventually gives way to her need for transportation to get to the market and to the synagogue in Atlanta.

The two acts of the piece encompass 25 years of change, including most tellingly the rise of the civil rights movement, hate crime reactions and a testimonial to Martin Luther King.

This is a comedy of character, not one of farce. The pace is deliberate, and the relationship builds gradually before our eyes. Robert King, Jr., gives us Hoke as an uncomplicated man, eager to help, easy to laugh and gently insistent on his own dignity. As he drives, his chin is uplifted – in part to watch his passenger in the rear-view mirror, in part as a sign of his consciousness of his responsibilities. Sally Stemac in the rear seat is always precisely folded and rigorously attentive. There’s a great moment that shows that she has relaxed into the relationship with Hoke -- making comments on the awful singing voice of one of her women friends, she breaks suddenly into a caterwauling Alleluia, all the funnier because she doesn’t crack a smile, herself. Hoke takes it in stride.


Anson Hahn is the earnest and occasionally harassed son Boolie – an impressive presence in his own right, mediating as necessary but as unfailingly firm, fair and courteous as any good Southern gentleman.

Actors’ accents captured the gentle roll of the Southeast. I felt entirely at home with these characters, in large part because I come from the same region of the country. (I swear to God, I really did hear relatives saying, “She’ll snatch you bald-headed!”)

This was a far more believable depiction of relations both across cultures and across religions in the 1950s/1960s South than, for example, the neurotic Carolyn or Change, which has just concluded its run at Austin’s Zach Theatre.

Despite this, the piece is not saccharine. Outside events intrude on the close but well-defined relationship between Hoke and Daisy. She is taken aback to find that the synagogue has been bombed; Hoke is matter of fact about the haters who committed the act. He tells her of seeing the dead body of a childhood friend, lynched and left hanging from a tree with hands tied behind him.

The one serious difference between them comes when he is offended that she seeks at the very last minute to give him her tickets for a dinner honoring Martin Luther King. Not because of the gift – rather, because under pressure from her son she is trying to discharge her responsibility by shoving them off on him.

By the end, age has brought Miss Daisy to hospital care and failing eyesight has removed Hoke from behind the wheel. The final scene and blackout show us that the bond between them remains strong. Perhaps even stronger than blood ties.

HCCT is a relaxed and welcoming venue. On the “sneak peek” Wednesday, the stage manager, the director and Executive Director Jim McDermott came around to greet all of us in the relatively sparse “Free Night of Theatre” crowd. Both before the performance and at intermission we could hear backstage conversations between actors and production staff, and after the curtain call the actors moved quickly out to the lobby to greet us. With that kind of reception and that quality of entertainment, we’ll have every reason to go back.

Ophelia, Tutto Theatre Company at the Blue Theatre, November 7 - 23

The Ophelia – or Ophelias – of Tutto Theatre Company appearing currently at the Blue Theatre in east Austin is a puzzle and a frustration.

The more deceiv’d Ophelia of Shakespeare has deep resonance in our tradition. She is the enamoured, disappointed, dutiful daughter who returns her lover’s tokens per her father’s instructions and in complying with filial and social obligation becomes the pawn and victim of both sides.

Trapped in an impossible situation, powerless and then bereft of lover, father and brother, she departs from reality entirely. Ophelia sings, babbles of lost maidenhood, dispenses flowers redolent with symbolism and rebuke, then dies unseen, pulled to the depths of a pond as her garments absorb the dark water that pulls her down.

Ophelia was a favorite subject of late 19th and early 20th century painters and writers, including the pre-Raphelite brotherhood in England, a group of mostly male painters and writers given inter alia to swooning over the innocence and vulnerability of young girls. Take these visions, for example (click on image for larger version):

In our own day, psychologist Mary Piper employed the character in Ophelia Revived, a popularized 1994 study of social dilemmas and character changes of adolescent girls. A sample, implying her thesis: “Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves. They crash and burn in a social and developmental Bermuda Triangle. In early adolescence, studies show that girls’ IQ scores drop and their math and science scores plummet. They lose their resiliency and optimism and become less curious and inclined to take risks. They lose their assertive, energetic and “tomboyish” personalities and become more deferential, self-critical and depressed. They report great unhappiness with their own bodies.”

So there you are – the alluring character from Shakespeare, made eternal in plot, verse, and image, interpreted variously, including by gentle lechers and by concerned psychologists, fraught with possibilities for our own day.

No wonder director/author Dustin Wills selected Ophelia for his project – including a UT workshop with staged readings in 2005, and now, after his villeggiatura in Italy, for this first production of a rechristened theatre company.

It just didn’t work for me.

Wills chose to split Ophelia into five personae – Ophelias “in love,” “impassioned,” “on edge,” “undone,” and “in water.” Designer Lisa Laratta and lighting designer Megan M. Reilly create a haunting nowhere for them to co-exist. Upon entering the theatre we find a rectangular space defined by chalk-white rafters with a teardrop pond at the back of it. The five Ophelias gather dreamily around the water.

As a joint persona, these five Ophelias are musical, lively and giggly, with the mischievous mutual confidence of high schoolers – they are high on life and thick as thieves. I half-expected one or another to whip out a cell phone and start text messaging.

There’s much movement here. For example, they perch on the five ladders ranged like trellises against the framework. The choreography of these early scenes is novel and appealing, reinforcing the message of untouched innocence. Chanting, singing, and repetition are devices that emphasize the shared identity of the five.

The action of the piece consists of the sequential exploration of these five. Each steps forward to interact with father Polonius or with the hot Hamlet (both roles played by Gabriel Luna).

Ophelia in love (Sofia Ruiz) is the first on deck. After her unsuccessful interactions with the father/lover, she winds up dead on her back in the water, where she gets to stay for the next hour.

Ophelia impassioned (Chase Crossno) has the next go. She is strong, daring, flirtatious and determined, with an amusing “will she – won’t she – what does she want?” scene, but she gets no farther. Off to the pond.

Ophelia on edge (Lizzi Biggers) is more successful in seductive arts, but she betrays alarm and anguish at her deed. Hamlet just laughs; Polonius goes into righteous rage when he finds Hamlet’s discarded trousers in the playing space.

Off to the pond.

And then there were two.

At about that point I seriously lost interest.

Maybe because Wills’ script is a dog’s breakfast of texts, mixing contemporary adolescent slang (“Oh, shit!”) with pseudo-Elizabethan talk with Shakespeare’s 24-carat verse from other characters or other plays jammed unexpectedly into the mouths of the Ophelias.

I found the text tiresome and pretentious, like the quotes from Chaucer, Kafka and Peter Brook in the program and the “Hamlet, in brief” summary found there (c’mon – if some idiot doesn’t know the plot or Ophelia’s part in it, how can he possibly absorb it from a 26-line summary that includes everything, down to the kitchen sink of Fortinbras – who, by the way, did not “arrive from the conquest of England”).

This is not meant to take away from the zeal or attention of the actors in the piece. All five Ophelias, in their, oh, dear, pre-Raphelite stereotypical dresses, are earnest, vulnerable and convincing in their efforts to deliver that much afflicted child/woman. Gabriel Luna makes a good foil to them, though he speeds through some of the real Shakespeare bits without adequately parsing or delivering the meanings.

So -- good try, guys. Maybe next time the show would benefit from a dramaturg or a session with a script doctor.

Click for JustFo's approving review on Austinist.com

Click for Joey Seiler's review on Austin360, November 17

Click for Avimaan Syam's strongly positive review in the Austin Chronicle, November 19

Statesman "Best Bets" Clare Croft's brief interview with director Dustin Wills, November 4

Hannah Kenah's pre-production article in the Austin Chronicle of November 6

Upcoming: A Profusion of Christmas Belles, November 21- December 21

The Austin Metro Area (if there is such a thing) will have THREE productions of the holiday comedy Christmas Belles, premiering at different companies:

Christmas Belles, City Theatre, December 4-21

Christmas Belles, Sam Bass Community Theatre, November 21 - December 13

Wimberly Players, November 28 - December 14

On some weekend nights in early December the shows will be running simultaneously!

See the Austin Live Theatre calendar or click on the companies above for ticket information.

Christmas Belles is the middle piece of a trilogy featuring the Futrelle family of the mythical town of Fayro, Texas. The first play was Dearly Beloved; the last is Southern Hospitality. Judging from the number of times they've been produced on the community theatre circuit across the United States, they must be making a mint for their trio of authors.

Here, courtesy of City Theatre Austin, is a summary of Christmas Belles and a description of the authors:

It's Christmas-time in the small town of Fayro, Texas, and the Futrelle Sisters—
Frankie, Twink and Honey Raye - are not exactly in a festive mood. A cranky Frankie is weeks overdue with her second set of twins. Twink, recently jilted and bitter about it, is in jail for inadvertently burning down half the town. And hot-flash-suffering Honey Raye is desperately trying to keep the Tabernacle of the Lamb's Christmas Program from spiraling into chaos. But things are not looking too promising: Miss Geneva, the ousted director of the previous twenty-seven productions, is ruthless in her attempts to take over the show. The celebrity guest Santa Claus—played by Frankie's long-suffering husband, Dub—is passing a kidney stone. One of the shepherds refuses to watch over his flock by night without pulling his little red wagon behind him, the entire cast is dropping like flies due to food poisoning from the Band Boosters' Pancake Supper and, of course, the pageant will be shown live on cable access television for the first time ever. And when Frankie lets slip a family secret that has been carefully guarded for decades, all hope for a successful Christmas program seems lost, even with an Elvis impersonator at the manger. But in true Futrelle fashion, the feuding sisters find a way to pull together in order to present a Christmas program the citizens of Fayro will never forget. Their hilarious holiday journey through a misadventure-filled Christmas Eve is guaranteed to bring joy to your world!

About the authors.

Jessie Jones co-authored the play Dearly Departed as well as its screen adaptation, Kingdom Come, which was released by Fox Searchlight Films in 2002. She has had several short stories published and has written for television sitcoms and an animated series for Walt Disney Productions. Jessie was also a character actor for many years, performing in New York and numerous regional theaters, as well as in TV (Murphy Brown, Designing Women, and Night Court) and film.

Nicholas Hope won the Texas New Playwrights Festival for his first play, A Friend of the Family. He has written for the TV series For Your Love and Teacher’s Pet. For many years, he was also director of casting for Theatre Communications Group in New York and ABC Television in Los Angeles.

Jamie Wooten has written and produced nearly 400 episodes of network television, including four seasons on the classic series The Golden Girls, as well as on the sitcoms For Your Love and Half & Half. He was a recipient of the Writers Guild of America Award for The Earth Day Special. Jamie is also an award-winning BMI songwriter.

“We are all Southerners,” Jones says. (Both she and Hope are Texans, Wooten is from Fremont, N.C.) “We write about Southern characters. We know what they eat for breakfast.”

In Christmas Belles, they’re careful not to make the characters into clichéd hillbillies, Jones says. “This is something that each of us has run into,” she says. “In New York, I was treated as the family pet because I was Southern. This is not Li’l Abner. We cherish these people.”

Fantasmaville, Teatro Vivo at Rollins Theatre, November 5 - 16

Raul Garza’s Fantasmaville won last year’s Latin Playwrights award even before it had been produced.

I’ve been anticipating the show for months, because I read the play last August. In fact, I auditioned for the “cranky old man” role of Akers, which seemed to be the best fit for my age, if not for my temperament.

"Fantasmaville" ("Haunted City") is here. Garza sets it in east Austin, complete with references to César Chavez Avenue, local schools, Capital Metro, Wheatsville Co-op, and even to a recent project to establish a dog park.

As I read the script I was charmed by the magical realism of the piece, in which an enigmatic spirit in the shape of a gigantic raccoon has been watching over the middle-aged party lady Flor, frequenter of beer halls who hasn’t lost a single dice game in the past 18 years.

And by the humor -- Flor’s daughter Celeste is an ambitious, underemployed idealist who, without informing her husband, jumps at the chance to offer foster care – only to discover that their new ward is in fact the cheeky local paperboy, Joaquín.

The chorus for this confusion is a pair of muddle-brained beer drinking buddies, Gustavo (Donato Rodríguez III) and Freddy (Rupert Reyes), operating on the principle in Tecate veritas.

Teatro Vivo has given the piece a beautiful production in the Rollins Theatre at the Long Center. The scene looks bleak when you arrive – a couple of couches and a bed, no more – but the panels behind each of these furnishings transform into video screens. With a click of the back projectors the scene switches from a bus in motion across an animé landscape to a living room to the interior of a tavern. Actors still have to tote a bit of furniture between scenes from time to time, and the faint glow of the screens silhouettes such moves – in fact, after one beloved character collapses and dies under a magical hex, that actor then has to scuttle backstage across that dimly glowing background. But such minor visual giveaways can certainly be forgiven.

Patricia Arredondo as the prancing, partying Flor has great gusto and a pack of juicy put-downs for some of the other dubious ladies of the neighborhood. Arredondo may just be herself, for her blurb in the program could accurately be applied to the character: “Patricia Arredondo is a versatile and energetic actor, delivering performances that teem with physicality, comedy and sheer reckless abandon. . . She is every bit as crazy as she looks.”

As I watched the action unwind, I realized that this is not, in fact, a happy story at all. The real protagonists of this play, Flor’s daughter Celeste (Karinna Pérez) and her Anglo husband Martin (Chase Wooldridge) are in serious conflict both with one another and within themselves.

In the opening scene on the bus Martin tells us a rambling story about middle school, twenty-two years ago, when he turned his back on his Tejano friends because they weren't “cool.” He is still looking for one of them, to re-establish that contact.

Celeste is angry at her irresponsible mother, frustrated with the lack of political engagement of her Latino neighbors, and unsuccessful in her search for full time work. Celeste tells the phlegmatic, pragmatic social worker Sonia that since she can’t get a real job, she is thinking of starting a family.


But Celeste never voices that desire to her husband Martin. Never. She speaks harshly to him, rejects his bumbling efforts to reason with her or console her, and insists on being left alone. Not even in a final, maybe hopeful scene on the bus do we hear a word of reconciliation between them -- earlier, Sonia coached Martin to put his arm around the despairing Celeste, but the gap between them persists.

Akers, the scrawny, resentful white man on the block is so spiteful and dismissive of "mojados and the rest of those people," including specifically Celeste, that he goads Martin into punching him out. David Blackwell in this role has a reptilian stillness and flat Texas accent that makes him scarily real -- all the more so when we learn of the cross-cultural scarring that made him that way.

Garza works to balance the two visions of Latino experience -- the magical, imaginative celebration of pleasures on one hand, and the tight-lipped lower-middle-class dealing with daily difficulties, on the other. But the melding of those two traditions is a brittle and not entirely successful one. Garza gives Celeste insight and information, but he has to resort to the "deus ex machina" of the raccoon spirit accompanied by a visitor from the afterworld to do so. The scene is entertaining, but we are not convinced that it provides any lasting spiritual solace to Celeste.

Erica Saenz as Sonia the friend and social worker is a solid, sympathetic presence, and Mario Ramírez as the newspaper boy Joaquín gives us a portrait of a Tejano who is disadvantaged but confident about his own abilities and future. They are the middle ground, really, representing Latinos who have faced economic and social realities and applied themselves to capture the possibilities.

In the end, Fantasmaville is a gentle, insistent admonition to the audience that real people populate east Austin. This is no brownface comic show; it is a reminder that while cultural differences persist, Tejanos face the same dilemmas as the rest of us.

Fantasmaville page on Facebook, including performance photos

Click for Jeanne Claire van Ryzin's pre-opening piece in the Statesman's XL, November 6

Click for thoughtful review in Austin Chronicle of November 13 by Avimaan Syam

Click for review by Joey Seiler on Austin Chronicle website

Click for review on Decider.com and interview with playwright Raul Garza

KUT "Arts Eclectic" audio feature (2 minutes)

KUT audio feature "A Funny Take on Gentrification," including dialogue from Fantasmaville, commented by Julie Moody, with interviews (4 minutes)

Op-Ed: Where Art Meets Religion, New York Times, November

The New York Times' Public Editor Clark Hoyt muses about the reactions to Terrence McNally's homosexual interpretation of the Gospel "Corpus Christi," ten years ago and today. And especially the outrage of some, including Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, at the NYT's sympathetic review of the current production. Excerpts:

Ben Brantley, the Times theater critic, was not impressed in 1998, calling “Corpus Christi” about as “threatening, and stimulating, as a glass of chocolate milk” and a “lazy” piece of writing. Donohue did not object to that review.

Jason Zinoman, who reviewed the revival for The Times, seemed to find it a bit more appealing, saying “there are moments of hard-won sentiment that will win over the biggest skeptic.” Zinoman called the play “an earnest and reverent spin on the Jesus story, with some soft-spoken, gay-friendly politics thrown in.” Donohue was infuriated because he said no play that depicted Jesus as sexually active, whether with men or women, could be “reverent.” Zinoman defended his description. He said the play was “very faithful” to the plot of the New Testament. But he said it had a “point of view. It’s certainly pro-gay-marriage and it’s intolerant of prejudice against gay people.”. . . .

I found Donohue’s language overheated, but I wound up thinking that he had put his finger on an interesting issue: how a newspaper like The Times, which devotes great space and energy to covering the arts, should deal with the frequent collisions between art and religion. The argument, as it did with “Corpus Christi” 10 years ago, often gets framed as a First Amendment fight between those championing freedom of speech and those seeking to stifle speech they object to. But lost in all of that can be the deeper story of the spiritual and religious tensions that gave rise to the art in the first place and the sensibilities of religious readers who may be struggling with aspects of their own faith. . . .

In a different context recently, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, told me that he believes The Times is a liberal newspaper “in the sense that a liberal arts college is liberal — generally secular in outlook, disinclined to take things on faith, nondogmatic, tolerant of and curious about a wide range of views and behaviors.” I think that is a good definition — and that editors need to be sure that the wide range includes the views of the religious."

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