Classic cars of the 1950s float in the collective consciousness of Americans, but as David Jewell gently admonishes us, they'll soon be gone, as distant and vanished as the dinosaurs that enchant our children today.

Jewell is the solo narrator, actor and verbal imager for In.Car.Nation, while Sergio R. Samayoa provides the live soundtrack with computer-synthesizer and guitar. Jewell gives different first-person voices for his unnamed spoken characters, different rhythms, with a keen but deadpan sense of drama. Between them is the screen that flickers with video, kaleidoscopic images and transforming stills, a non-linear dream of transportation as power, elegance, and adventure. They first explored this hallucinogenic territory back in 1997, and the current live two-man concert runs again only tomorrow night and Saturday night at the Hyde Park Theatre.

It's a seance, an incantation, an trip into memory and into the alternate reality of sweeping streamlined designs and the curiously empty landscapes of the mind. Electronic Planet Ensemble makes a rich triple score of this one. Jewell is a master of the prose poem -- one would call them lyrics, although they do not rhyme, because they are so carefully fit into Samayoa's music.  Blues riffs, power thrumming, alpha wave music, up-tempo improvisations, translucent walls of sound. And the video, all new for this edition, a collaborative magic lantern.

First of all, you are NOT going to get to see Joey Hood frolicking naked in a bathtub.  That's just the way it goes.  The Collection is not that kind of play.  I guess that photo was just to good to pass up.

  Ken Webster's a Harold Pinter man.  During Hyde Park Theatre's FronteraFest of short stage pieces back in January, the usual program of five thirty-minute pieces came up short when a couple of performers cancelled at the last minute.  Ken hustled and got performers from a Long Fringe piece to provide an excerpt from their piece.  For the remaining slot, he appeared himself, reading Pinter's stern Nobel Prize acceptance speech.  One didn't have to agree with Pinter's adamantly leftist, anti-government sentiments to appreciate the eloquence of the text or the restrained ferocity with which Webster delivered it.

So it's no surprise that to see Pinter's The Collection mounted by Ken and his collaborators.  "Fellow travelers" would be an appropriate term if it didn't have a McCarthyesque tinge.  After all, Webster and the Hyde Park Theatre just celebrated his 30th anniversary of theatre work in Austin.That's a long trip and one hopes that it will go on and on.