To Kill a Mockingbird has always been a tale of memory, of the woman who was Scout rediscovering how much she learned of life that summer. In this Mary Moody Northen Theatre production, director Amparo Garcia strives to enhance the sense of the tale being replayed in Scout's mind. The actor playing Scout makes her first entrance in an overcoat, bearing suitcases, a grown woman journeying home. As an African-style chant is sung, a black man in a breechcloth dances around and with her. The overcoat is removed, revealing her dressed as a child, and she steps back in time. It's a stylistic invention Garcia employs throughout: music, movement and sound used metaphorically, to represent mood or action or an internal state of being. In some cases - as in the MMNT production of Fuente Ovejuna last fall - this kind of theatricality can be invigorating, charging work with urgency and a super-poetic power. Here, however, the additions don't provide that voltage. When they occur, we are conscious of Garcia, of an external hand manipulating the text. The additions seem not to have grown out of the drama but to have been imposed upon it.
That concept in general may be what keeps the production as a whole from being as effective as it might. The performances feel as if they have been put on from the outside rather than grown from within, too. There is much in the way of movement - energetic gesticulations and changes of expression, darting across stage and leaping up out of chairs, as well as the aforementioned dancing - but so much of it still bears the mark of fabrication, of having been choreographed or set by the director. It has yet to evolve a natural quality. Feelings are expressed, sometimes with great volatility, but they come from the surface, prompted not by a stirring in the actor but by timing; you stopped speaking, so I start. It makes the relationships among characters seem loose, tenuous, insubstantial. The sense of community - such a powerful force in Harper Lee's original novel - seems thin and brittle here.
What we are left with is still Scout's story, but it is not grounded; it hasn't the connection that communicates to us the charge that jolted - and still jolts - Scout's life. As memories go, it is a shadow of what was, a thing that passes without our feeling it. (Robert Faires) FINAL WEEKEND! Through Oct 15, Thu-Sat, 8pm, Sun, 2pm, at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward's University campus. Tickets: $10 ($8 seniors, faculty/$5 students). Running time: 2 hrs, 20 min. 448-8484.
THE HOMECOMING Ah, to be in the bosom of one's family, where one can enjoy the cursing, the insults, the belittling of one's path in life, the threats, where one may steep in the bile of resentment boiling for years on end and be stained anew by old foulnesses. Such is family in Harold Pinter's vicious comedy. In it, being bound by blood is tantamount to being chained permanently to your bitterest foes, passing your days hacking at them and being hacked at in return. It's a ghastly, bloody business, but Pinter crafts it in such a way that it's as funny as it is disturbing. You laugh at some serrated remark, then blanch at the thought of how creepy a comment it truly was.
In this Subterranean Theatre Company production, the comedy and the creepiness co-habit handily. Director Ken Webster has traveled this path before, in the outrageous satires of Chris Durang and Nicky Silver and this play in a production 10 years ago, and, as in those efforts, his actors mine laughs from the most unsettling circumstances. As the clan's dark patriarch, Robert Rudié hurls scalding insults at his sons one minute and lapses into misty-eyed reveries about them the next; as brother Lenny, Webster himself affects a funny offhandedness, but his gaze has the frosty hardness of cobalt; Eric Vik's Joey has the slack-jawed gape of a boxer who's failed to guard his head too often; and Lorne Loganbill's Uncle Max lolls on the sofa, gulping air, a feeble old bear who has lost all his teeth. As the brother who returns to the fold, Joe York's Ted has a bad case of the heebie-jeebies, fidgeting and jerking over being back in this den of vipers for the first time in years. As the wife accompanying him - a wife his family hasn't yet met - Katherine Catmull is coolness itself, polished marble allowing warm hands to touch her when and only when she says.
While the performances offer much that is seamy, they deliver surprisingly little in the way of menace; the mood that Webster as director creates is more one of laid-back malcontentedness. Early on, many of the pointed remarks - derisive comments and vague allusions to sordid past events - are lobbed underhanded from one family member to another. The words are fractious and cruel, but the feeling is almost mellow. It isn't until brother Teddy's midnight homecoming that the air begins to crackle a bit. York's jittery obsequiousness adds some energy off which Catmull and Webster strike sparks. But even past this point, the pace of the piece is irregular, ragged, as if everyone can't get up to the same speed. And the one bit of physical violence - a moment which ought to fuse humor and horror in our throats - is flaccid and unconvincing.
Even without a churning undercurrent of physical violence, though, the
production effectively summons Pinter's vision of family as combatants forever
bound in the most bitter battles the race knows. It provokes laughs and
witheringly reminds us: There's no place like home.
(Robert
Faires) Through Oct 28, Thu-Sat, 8pm; Oct 16, Mon, 8pm, at Hyde Park Theatre,
511 W. 43rd. Tickets: $10 ($9 seniors, students, ACOT). Thu: Pay What You Wish.
499-TIXS.
THE DEAD PRESIDENTS' CLUB is a pack of former Chief Executives of the USA: Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon, who must cool their heels in the Afterlife together as their Final Judgment is prepared. The work is a new effort from the pen of Larry L. King (The Night Hank Williams Died), being given a staged reading by a trio of well-established actors: G.W. Bailey, Barry Corbin, and Larry Hovis. The occasion is a benefit for the Southwestern Writers Collection and the Southwest Texas State University Department of Theatre Arts Scholarship Fund. Mr. Bailey directs. A buffet dinner with the author and actors follows the reading. ONE PERFORMANCE ONLY! Oct 14, Sat, 6:30pm, in the University Theatre, SWTSU campus, San Marcos. Tickets: $50. 512/245-2368.
LADY DAY AT EMERSON'S BAR & GRILL Emerson's Bar & Grill, as designed by Jim Fritzler, is a crimson palace of skirted lamps, ceiling fans, cocktail tables, and a stage with piano, mikes, stool, and a table supporting a highball glass and bottle of vodka. All is prepared for Lady Day, and when she enters, after some arguing backstage with her pianist Jimmie (played with show-stopping élan by Clem Moorman), she glows her way on-stage, everything about her creamy, cool, and long. As she slips into her first song, she is like a lover, caressing us with her voice, sliding and gliding over words and notes, holding each like a small gift of love. I can't say enough about Ernestine Jackson's performance as Billie Holiday. There wasn't a moment in Capitol City Playhouse's production when I could separate the character from the actress. It's a purely human, strong yet fragile portrayal, with nary a moment of acting histrionics to take us out of the stories she tells and the songs she sings. And the lady can sing, and she believes what she sings and sings it from the darkest depths of her tortured soul, taking your heart with her when the lights make her disappear. (Barry Pineo) FINAL WEEKEND! Through Oct 14, Thu-Sat, 8pm, at Capitol City Playhouse, 214 W. Fourth. Tickets: $13-$19. Running time: 1 hr, 45 min. 472-2966.
SCENES FROM AN EXECUTION We have a complex relationship to art. We know what it is - paint on canvas, lines on paper - yet we can still be elated by it, repulsed, comforted, haunted. This play by Howard Barker spins a debate on what art can be and how our passion for it and fear of it can drive our actions. Its arguments are so energetic, its language so bright and kinetic, the play is a Jackson Pollock painting: primary colors slung and spattered on a dark background, motion, action. In this staging by The Public Domain, director Robi Polgar brings this dervish dance of ideas off the page with vigor, not with agitated motion of the body, but of the mind. His actors, even sitting still, convey darting intellects, flashing in and out of philosophical queries and positions. Leading the way is Johanna Whitmore as Galactia, a painter of boldness, unshakable resolve, and voracious sexual appetite. Whitmore seems unshatterable, a wall of artistic will. Countering her deftly is Steve McDaniel's Doge and a cast that supports their war with keenness, supplying intellectual skirmishes that are riveting. (Robert Faires) FINAL WEEKEND! Through Oct 14, Thu-Sat, 8pm, at The Public Domain, 807 Congress. Tickets: $10 ($8 seniors, students, ACOT). Thu: Pay What You Wish. 474-6202.
RUNS LIKE A DREAM offers self-discovery and coming of age in a general store in a small town in Texas. Lonely young Paul seeks the answers to his past and future from his father and his Uncle Eddy. University of Texas playwright P. Seth Bauer penned most of this new play in the general store in Andice, Texas, just north of Austin. The show opens the 1995-96 season for the UT Department of Theatre & Dance. FINAL WEEKEND! Through Oct 15, Thu-Sat, 8pm, Sun, 2pm, at the Theatre Room of the Winship Drama Building, UT campus. Tickets: $9 ($7 w/UT ID). 471-1444.
THE ACTOR'S NIGHTMARE/TITANIC provides a double-barreled shot of deranged Durangia. The two one-acts are among the most surreal and popular by satirist Christopher Durang. In The Actor's Nightmare, George inexplicably finds himself being forced to perform in a play he's never rehearsed. In Titanic, identity and sexual high jinks are upended as the famed luxury liner steams toward that fatal iceberg. Warning: Explicit sexual language, adult subject matter. Oct 13-22, Fri & Sat, 8pm, Oct 22, Sun, 2:30pm, in the Gallery Theatre, ACC Rio Grande campus, 1212 Rio Grande. $5 donation requested ($2 students). 495-7230, 223-3245.
THE MIRACLE WORKER gives language where none existed and opens up a world of possibilities to a blind and deaf child. William Gibson's revered drama traces the early life of Helen Keller and the pivotal moment when teacher Annie Sullivan broke through her wall of darkness and silence to give her words. The Starlight Theatre Company of Bowie High School presents this revival. Oct 18-22, Wed, Thu, Sat, 7:30pm, Sun, 2pm, at Bowie High School, 4103 W. Slaughter. Tickets: $5. 414-2343.
SPIKE HEELS are the keys to control for Georgie. In Theresa Rebeck's satire, the woman in question gets a job in a law firm and some unwanted sexual harassment. But by slipping into some shoes that give her height and show off her legs, she gets the upper hand on her oppressors, and assumptions about gender, work, and class get skewered. Cary Libkin of Penn State University guest directs this University of Texas Department of Theatre and Dance production. Oct 13-15, Fri & Sat, 8pm, Sun, 2pm, Oct 17-20, Tue-Fri, 8pm, and Oct 22, Sun, 2pm, in the B. Iden Payne Theatre, UT campus. Tickets: $12 ($9 w/UT ID). 471-1444.
AT THE ALTAR OF YES gives us an inside look at the struggle of a young police officer to confront his own insecurities. The script, by Austin Police Department psychologist Albert Cantara, is per-formed by APD employees as part of APD Arts, a police department program for improving police-community relations and morale in the department. Proceeds benefit the PAL Program, an organization in the APD sponsoring recreational, educational, and cultural programs for Austin youth. Through Oct 27, Fri & Sat, 8pm, at the Dougherty Arts Center, 1110 Barton Springs. Tickets: $8 advance/$10 door ($2 discount for seniors, students, APD employees, ACOT members). 499-TIXS.
TALKING WITH... offers the voices of 10 memorable women: actresses, a rodeo rider, a twirler, a snake handler, and more. Each voice is distinct, but all are lyrical and funny, and all come from the pen of Jane Martin. Critical Mass revives Martin's collec-tion of monologues as an Actor's Equity Members Project Code production, directed by Jill Parker-Jones. A potent cast makes this notable: Janelle Buchanan, Lana Dieterich, Mary Furse, Margaret Hoard, Anne Hulsman, Parker-Jones, Kathy Lagaza, Lauri Raymond, Sandy Walper, and Cyndi Williams. Through Oct 28, Thu-Sat, 7:30pm, at Chicago House, 607 Trinity. Admission by donation. 320-0811.
AVENUE X In the darkness under a Brooklyn street, two voices entwine. A young Italian-American parts his lips and spins music into the hollow, reverberating night of a sewer, and, unexpectedly, a voice answers in kind. The teen is startled but he sings on, and the unseen singer responds. Their voices approach each other tentatively, circling like wary boxers, then, each sensing a likeness of spirit in the other, they curl together, making resplendent harmony. With a bond forged, the singers move where they can see each other. One is white, one is black.
So begins the hard journey of two singers whose music draws them together and skin color pushes them apart. In John Jiler and Ray Leslee's Avenue X, Pasquale is a young singer with stars in his eyes who sees the Fox Theatre talent show as a rocket to glory. The pals he sings with don't quite share his vision, so in frustration, he goes underground. There he meets Milton, an equally gifted, equally frustrated African-American teen who hears in the communion with this other voice a chance for something more than Sundays in a church choir. They team up, but they must face friends and families who consider their pairing unnatural.
We've seen much of this before: New York, the early Sixties, cultures at odds, rebels who unite in the face of great opposition. In fact, the milieu is so familiar that it would be easy to take this tale for granted. But Jiler and Leslee do more than recycle West Side Story and its ilk, so much more. They make us feel music and feel how it fills in spaces in our lives. Through a stunning range of song styles, from cathedral hymn to gospel call to old African chant to period pop in many variations - doo-wop, R&B, creamy ballad - they reveal how we employ it in our celebrations, in our worship, how it ineffably articulates our deepest feelings without words. As in the sewer, it brings sweet concord even in darkness.
In this Zachary Scott Theatre Center production, music is a force that resounds powerfully through our being like the echo in that sewer. Director Dave Steakley and musical director Allen Robertson have brought together and nurtured a cast of performers who surrender their hearts to song in every number. Their voices rise up with the grace and affecting power of birds in flight, and the soaring they do is all the more astonishing for being a cappella. No instruments are there to guide the singers upward, only voices flying, pure and free. Each actor is nicely matched to his or her role, with John Robertson and Kevin Farr providing ample amounts of bubbling impatience and bright yearning as Milton and Pasquale, respectively, and Meredith Robertson, Billy Harden, and Janis Stinson deliver-ing truckloads of earthy humor and the pointed comments of the realist that can deflate naïveté from a block away. The simple, precise design work offers just enough to place us in 1963, in New York, on a traffic island, in a church, on a subway platform. It suggests and steps back, letting us focus on the real power here, the music. And the music is glorious. (Robert Faires) Through Oct 29, Thu-Sat, 8pm, Sun, 2:15pm, at the ZSTC Kleberg Stage, 1421 W. Riverside. Tickets: $17-19. Running time: 1 hr, 55 min. 476-0541.
TEMPORARILY YOURS takes very literally the idea of putting yourself in someone else's skin to understand their situation. The magical comedy by San Francisco playwright (and UT alum) Tom W. Kelly uses a little Bewitched-style hocus pocus to allow some gays and straights, some men and women, some parents and children, to really see how the other half lives. Bill Jay directs this Vortex Repertory Theatre production, staged in cooperation with Scottie Wilkison, who alternates the role of Helen with Lana Dieterich. Oct 13-Nov 11, Thu-Sun, 8pm, at Planet Theatre, 2307 Manor. Tickets: $11 ($7 w/discount). 478-LAVA
SHEAR MADNESS reigns again! The comedy whodunit that ran a stunning 20
months at the Zachary Scott Theatre Center is being revived for a special
end-of-the-year run in the same space where it made so many Austinites laugh.
Director Alice Wilson is at the helm again, and she's lured Boyd Vance back to
Austin to reprise the role of Tony, madcap master of the Shear Madness salon.
It's bound to be as much of a hoot as ever, a sleek, smart, giddy ride of gags,
takes, suspicions, and send-ups of Austin. Through Dec 31,
Thu-Sat, 8pm,
Sun, 2:15pm, at the ZSTC Whisenhunt Arena Stage, 1510 Toomey. Tickets: $14-17.
476-0541.
Theatre Classes, Etc.
KGSR 107.1 Weekly Theatre Update can be heard every Thursday on the morning show with Cecilia Nasti and Ed Mayberry. At 8:05am, Chronicle editor Robert Faires discusses what's going on this week in Austin theatre... An Acting Workshop is being led by Alexander Genievsky, director of Austin Sign Language Theatre Academy. Open to hearing and deaf actors, the session covers text analysis, improv, how American Sign Language can enhance acting, and more. Oct 14, Sat, 11am-1pm, at Synergy Studio, 1501 W. Fifth. Cost: $10 ACoT members ($20 others). 499-8388... A Weekend Character Acting Workshop for Actors and Writers promotes acting and writing techniques that remove creative blocks and refresh the imagination. C.K. McFarland (In the West, Cow Pattys) is the instructor. Oct 21 & 22, Sat & Sun, 10am-4pm. $75. 441-3738... An Improvisation Workshop with Tim Simek will be held Oct 29, Sun, 10am-6pm. $60. 251-2610... Scripts With a Message Wanted. Send to: POB 162853, Austin, TX 78716. 512/306-0704... The Texas Young Playwrights Festival Is Soliciting Scripts for production in its 1996. Wanted are one-acts by Texas youth under the age of 19. Entries must be submitted by Dec 8 to: Texas Young Playwrights Festival, Dougherty Arts Center, 1110 Barton Springs Rd., Austin, TX 78703. 397-1457... Metamorphosex is a sacred sex workshop to be led by Annie Sprinkle and Linda Montano. Openings are available for 20 women to take part. Dec 3-10. Cost is on a sliding scale: $150-300 ($75 deposit needed to reserve a spot). 478-LAVA... Half-Price Tickets can be had through AusTix, the half-price outlet for the arts. Go to the Dougherty Arts Center, 1110 Barton Springs Rd. (11:30am-6:30pm Wed-Fri/11am-2pm Sat), or the Austin Visitors Center, 201 E. Second (11:30am-1:30pm, Thu-Sat), or, as of Oct 16, Mon, to AusTix's new location in BookPeople at Sixth and Lamar. That's right, you can now obtain all your half-price tickets at a booth in this convenient spot. Just look to your right as you enter the front door. 397-1450... The Box Office lets you order full-price tickets by phone. Hours: 11:30am-6:30pm Wed-Fri & 11am-2pm Sat (Phone hrs to 6:30pm), Dougherty Arts Center, 1110 Barton Springs Rd. 499-TIXS.
Auditions
7th & Failing, a play by Danielle McClelland. The work will be given a staged reading Oct 21, Sat, 3pm, at Capitol City Playhouse, 214 W. Fourth. Roles available: nine women, 25-older. Actors will not be compensated. 707-8333... Capital City Mystery Players, a troupe presenting interactive whodunits: Call Gary Payne for audition times, dates. Actors will be compensated. 338-1074... The Beggar's Opera, by John Gay. Roles available: six men, six women. The production is being directed by Robi Polgar and will run Dec 8-30 at The Public Domain. By appointment. 474-6202.
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