Doubling Your Fun: Two Cats, Two Romeos and Two Juliets

With so many companies and productions busy in Austin and nearby, some duplications are inevitable. The familiar musicals, of course -- Annie seems to come around in some form about every four or five months. The huge and joyful production at the Georgetown Palace ran through the holiday season, Lee Colee's Broadway Bound boot camp in Wimberley did a fine short version, Tex-Arts has just done a junior production, and now SummerStock Austin has settled in -- "for the duration," as they used to say during World War II. Their Annie, free of charge to the public camping on the hillside in Zilker Park, runs almost a month and a half, until August 14.

For Christmastime 2008 one could attend no fewer than four productions of Christmas Belles. I took my spouse to the one in Wimberley and she thought I was nuts to insist on taking in two more. I passed up the version that played at the Harlequin Dinner Theatre in San Antonio.

But sometimes you'll have an unusual opportunity to see versions of a notable piece of theatre, opportunities to glimpse just how great the differences of interpretation and impact can be. Theatre is, after all, a live art. Though texts may be standard or closely aligned, the real life and blood of a piece comes in the staging. Austin, you now have the chance to examine Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare as examples of the powerful transformations of dramatic art.

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

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 . . . .

Two Rooms, Rapscallions of the Periphery at City Theatre's Summer Acts! festival, July 8 - 17

Maybe I'm the wrong person to review this play.

I did accept the Rapscallions' invitation to see it, and I rearranged my schedule before departing Austin so as to get there for the opening. I empathized immediately with the leads Scot Friedman and Val Frazee as they explored for us the intimate pain for a married couple of his arbitrary abduction in mid-80s Beirut.

That core story is powerful because of its simplicity: abrupt separation, lives torn apart, a forced interiorization of loss and the hallucinatory escape into memories and wishes.

Blessing's framework for that tearing story shows tawdry incomprehension of the realities of the time. He seeks to complement the interior story with an exterior story, a sort of j'accuse, portraying with contempt the imagined actions and attitudes both of the U.S. government and of the U.S. press. He presents us a bloodless State Department official who has been assigned the task of keeping the wife Lainie quiet and compliant, and he presents us with a bloodhound reporter convinced that he can bust this story wide open by befriending and betraying Lainie.

As the action went forward and the auxiliary characters pressed Lainie and lied to her, I felt a growing distaste, almost a nausea, and my systems began to shut down. Because I had been there.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Spider's Web, Different Stages at the Vortex Repertory, July 2 - 24

You don't see much of Agatha Christie in the United States any more, except perhaps in public libraries and the occasional revival of one of her many plays. Airport newstands will offer you thick paperbacks by Clive Custler or Sue Grafton or any of a number of other contemporary producers of blockbusters.

Different Stages does us a service by providing an accomplished and amusing production of her mid-twentieth-century curio, Spider's Web. Most of Dame Agatha's familiar elements are there: an isolated old manse in the countryside, a collection of proper, well brought up English folk, a murder and some earnest police officers trying to clear it up. There's a mystery to solve -- who assaulted the despicable Oliver Costello with a blunt object in the secret passage? Christie is very sporting with her puzzle, scattering clues along the way like Hansel and Gretel dropping breadcrumbs in the woods.

Spider's Web is a comedy rather than a thriller. Clarissa, the vivacious young wife of a much older British diplomat, happily plays country hostess as husband Henry, all atwitter, rushes off to deal with Foreign Office business. She teases and charms the three men visiting from London -- her former guardian, who has been knighted; a half-deaf old country duffer; and a young man from London who courts her shamelessly. Mix in a couple of eccentric servants, the wicked dope dealer who gets bashed, and the plods from the local constabulary.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Where in the World is ALT? -- Austin, July 10

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 10, Saturday

Chicago is a great theatre town, with well-established, classy and innovative companies such as Steppenwolf and the Goodman in the loop, a generous helping of semi-pro theatres mostly in the north of the town, and a variety of suburb and university theatres.

Both of our children chose to go to Chicago for university, so we've had an intimate but long-distance relationship with that town since 2003. We still do, for our son L, just graduated, is sharing an apartment in Hyde Park, working and thinking about next steps, including graduate school.

First N and then L learned that a visit from dad was probably going to mean an excursion to the theatre. In this Internet age you can pick over the theatre offerings at leisure -- the Chicago Tribune's metromix.com provided me hours of dreamy trip-planning as we sat in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic, on assignment from 2003 through 2007.

On-line entertainment information in Austin

Metromix has pushed into 63 other urban markets. Their beta site for Austin is laughable, by comparison with the meaty buffet available for Chicago. The new Austin start-up focuses on restaurants and bars and mentions a single current stage performance, misnaming it as "The Hat" (and, to boot, the Austin Lyric Opera's "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" was sold out within hours, long ago).

Maybe I should contact them.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

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 . . . .

Critics: "God Bless Their Picky Hearts" -- Mark Rylance

Via "You've Cott Mail," a daily blog digest by Thomas Cott [thomas.cott@verizon.net]:

Quote of the Day: "God love the critics! Bless their picky hearts!"

Posted by Mark Shenton on his blog for The Stage, July 8, 2010

Yesterday the Critics' Circle bade formal farewell to Benedict Nightingale, who retired in May as chief theatre critic of The [London] Times; and last night Benedict -- now a civilian -- was appropriately in the stalls again for the first night of La Bête, where Mark Rylance extravagantly proclaimed (in the rhyming couplets of which the entire play is comprised):

"I'm grateful for a shrewd critique;
It keeps my talent honest, so to speak!
We of the theatre share that common view -
The criticisms of the things we do
Inspire our interest, not our hurt or rage:
We know it's part of 'being on the stage'
To have oneself assessed at every turn,
And thus we show a willingness to learn
From judgements which might wound another man.
I much prefer to any drooling fan
A critic who will SLICE me into parts!
GOD LOVE THE CRITICS! BLESS THEIR PICKY HEARTS!
Precisely, and in no uncertain terms,
They halve the apple, showing us our worms."