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Theatre Companies, ad hoc
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Two worlds converge to dark uncertainty. These linked plays are completely different in style but taken together, they resonate and provide tremendous opportunity for gifted actors.
Matt Hartley wrote The Bee with a satirical pen as broad as a paintbrush. High school sweetie Chloé (Tayler Gill, left, below) is devastated when her older brother Luke dies in a traffic accident. His dramatic end provides a point of excitement and assembly for the rest of his high school class, particularly for bubble headed Hannah (Melissa Recalde, right).
 Candlelight vigils, a dedicated website, Hannah's efforts to scoop some of that admiration and kumbaya feeling for herself . . . the focus is not on the dead boy but on his acquaintances' exploitation of his death. Melissa Recalde plays her breathy self-dramatizing character to the outer edges of parody, a director's decision that strengthens our sympathy for the relatively contained and nondescript Chloé.
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The vividly bald guy in a white t-shirt and carrying tools has just walked onstage, grimaced, and there's a chuckle of appreciative amusement from the speakers. He shrugs, as if annoyed, and there's another rumble from the audience on the speakers. Then he stalks off, to more recorded merriment.
Canned laughter? What's going on here?
Lights go down, then up again on two buddies, Doug and Peter. They're brainstorming ideas for a play, or at least a script. Pirates? Space? Space pirates? The one-liners zip back and forth, the actors strike attitudes appropriate for close-ups, and that damned canned laughter sets the rhythm. As the guys rapidly unfold the plot elements (chuckle), the semi-crazed handyman Roy wanders across the back of the house waving tools, plugged into his Walkman (anticipatory exclamations)and trips over a toolbox (laughter).
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 Ken Webster's austere staging of this vision of a nightmare world uses the vocal and emotional projection of these four actors with the formal eloquence and depth of a string quartet. The music here is their inflection, counterpart, and conviction in a narrative that raises the hairs on the back of your neck.
Ben Wolfe appears first, in solo, as Darren, citizen in a world drowned in gray totalitarianism and decay. Motionless, from the depth of the stage he recounts a simple train journey, the pain of attraction, and his effort to find an "angel." The range and intensity of his telling, like a lengthy, complex solo cello sonata, is all the more striking because he scarcely moves a muscle. The color and depth of the text overrides our lazy spectator demands for visual excitement.
The rest of the quartet joins him. They stand virtually motionless in the depth of the stage, dressed in featureless dark clothing. They unfold the story, each speaking in first person when solo and reverting to dialogue when interacting with one another. At intervals of ten to fifteen minutes in this 90-minute piece the words stop, the lights fall away to black briefly and then re-illuminate the stage, where the four artists stand in the same positions and attitudes as before. |
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Want to get away?
Electronic Planet Ensemble's Spaceman Dada Robot can move you out of Austin's conventional theatre and out of Austin's club-based music scene. The characters and narrative are in your mind, as in a radio play, and the music is high-energy and percussive, with clouds of chords. Add an hour of images improbable, humorous and awesome, then put David Jewell in front of it.
space travelit gets you out out of the houseit gets you out of this worldit gets you out of your mind
This is a remarkable experience, one that floats somewhere in a dream world compounded of free verse, image, and music. You can get a three-minute whiff of it, similar to that "flavored oxygen" that spaceman Jewell describes, by viewing the video. Click on the galaxy, above, to go to the group's website, and then click on "video." |
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