Exhibitionism

The Moontower’s Glow: Keep Austin Weird

Running Time: 1 hr, 35 min

What is Igor Stravinsky doing deep in the heart of Texas, half a world away from his native Russia? More importantly, what’s he doing there 30 years after his death? That’s what Todd, an intrepid reporter from Chicago, wants to know, and he’s traveled from the City of Big Shoulders to the City of the Violet Crown to find out.

What he finds is the celebrated composer playing with an invisible dog.

And his wife Vera cooking up a mess of pain perdu, or “pan pur-doo,” as she calls the egg bread in her flat Texas twang.

And their daughter Vivien Leigh getting ready to go audition for the part of Blanche Dubois in the new play A Streetcar Named Desire.

And her husband, Jimmy Dean — the “sausage guy” — laboring to perfect a new barbecue sauce that will taste like the fabled ambrosia of the gods.

Now, this confuses Todd. Historically, these people don’t belong together. They don’t belong in the present. And they don’t belong in Austin. It’s as if they’re part of some surreal Twilight Zone sitcom with a Russian modernist composer in the Ward Cleaver role. Could they possibly be for real?

Well, no, they’re not for real. They aren’t terribly interested in what’s real. Reality never did them any favors, and that’s why they’ve created this blissful unreality for themselves under the artificial moonbeams of Austin.

Art Davis’ new play-with-music is a spiritual cousin to — as strange as it may sound — The Rocky Horror Show and You Can’t Take It With You. It too centers on a houseful of what the tradition-bound among us would deem oddballs, folks who for whatever reason have rejected the soul-deadening paths of normal society to go their own way, to live their dreams, no matter how ludicrous they may appear to the rest of the world. And it also focuses on what happens when someone from the strait-laced world crosses the threshold of their home and sees their offbeat life from the inside.

One place where Davis’ piece differs from its theatrical kin is in the lack of friction between his dreamers and the real world. Though he has Todd express some skepticism toward the Stravinsky clan, the playwright never really bothers to work it up into any kind of threat — no tax bogeyman or Transylvanian spies that could doom this Edenic refuge for outsiders. He’d rather just sing a sweet ode to the souls who embrace whatever crazy thing gives their life meaning, gives them an identity. So he does, weaving scenes of lightly comic chaos in the Stravinsky manse with lyrical musical interludes in which a pair of Stravinskian Firebirds and the Ghost of Petrushka light candles, drink wine, and dance.

In this Tongue and Groove Theatre production, these interludes possess a certain, well, dreamy allure. They roll lazily along on the music, smoothly vocalized by Jan Evans to Davis’ plummy trumpet and both their humming acoustic guitars; the sound is like the water flowing slowly over Longhorn Dam in one of the songs. And in the low, warm light provided by Jennifer Rogers, the movements of David Yeakle’s wistful Petrushka and Jennifer Sherburn and Jennifer Harlow’s playful Firebirds have the languor and grace of an underwater ballet. We draw from these bits something of the mystic charm of Austin — that elusive magic that has drawn so many to this town and led them to live out their dreams here — invoked by the image of the moontowers.

It’s that charm and the idea of living out your dreams that seems at the heart of the play, more than the characters. Whatever connection there may be between Stravinsky and Austin — or Stravinsky and Leigh or Leigh and Dean — is left unexplored. And while Russ Roten, Patricia Wappner, Elizabeth Doss, and Mark Stewart inject ample personality into their respective characters (with Stewart’s dimbulb Jimmy Dean a real hoot), those characters bear little to no resemblance to the historical figures whose names they bear; they might just as easily be Sergei and Lina Prokofiev, with their daughter Paulette Goddard and her husband Kenny Rogers. And since Davis never really shares what’s going on inside them, who they are, the characters remain, for the most part, a batch of amusing eccentrics.

But their eccentricity stands for something: a kind of freedom and lightheartedness and nonconformity that has a long history in this town. “Keep Austin Weird,” the bumper stickers say. Art Davis and his mismatched family out of time are doing their part.

This article appears in December 21 • 2001.