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Austin Playhouse
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Theatre journalism has a half-life of perhaps two weeks, a fact that prompts me to strive to see a production as soon as possible. After all, a theatre review published only 48 hours before closing has not much more than archival interest.
One would prefer to deliver the report and comments hot off the first-night griddle, particularly when the show's an interesting or engaging one. Perhaps, just perhaps, the review might contribute to increasing the turnout for deserving productions.
Unfortunately, I didn't get to The Mousetrap until its final weekend, due to family visits, a surging December theatre season, and my own return to the boards in mid-December.
We're subscribers and modest contributors to the Austin Playhouse, in part because it's the first theatre we discovered in Austin after relocating here in 2007. I have an affection and respect for Don Toner and the Playhouse's company of about two dozen actors. Now mid-way through their tenth season behind the Penn Field water tower at 3601 South Congress, they have increased their core season to five plays and they operate an intriguing side space, the Larry L. King Theatre.
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Henry James' novella The Turn of the Screw takes you into a dark place. A brief chapter sets the scene. On Christmas Eve in an old house in the countryside a group of bourgeois friends has just listened to a ghost story. Their host, Douglas, offers them another, but they have to wait for a manuscript to be dispatched from his residence in London.
That text -- "in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand" -- came from his sister's governess, twenty years dead. Her words as imagined by James constitute the entirety of the rest of the novella.
The unnamed woman is the well-read but lonely daughter of an impoverished country clergyman. At an interview in Harley Street, central London, she agrees to care for two orphaned children at a distant estate called Bly. Her new employer, the gallant but inveterate bachelor who is their guardian and uncle, admonishes her that she is never, ever to contact him. Of course, she is immediately infatuated with that gallant gentleman.
So there we are, inside her head. |
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Almost thirty years had gone by when British dramatist Peter Morgan wrote this piece. The Gielgud Theatre picked it up from an "off-West-End" theatre in 2006. A Broadway production ran for 137 performances in 2007. Frank Langella won both a Tony Award for best actor, as well as the corresponding Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards.
Thirty years is about the right lapse of time before one exorcises demons and rehabilitates felons. Pain is remembered but no longer throbs, and different issues occupy the public mind.
The audience members at the Austin Playhouse were almost without exception of an age to have vivid memories of Watergate, Nixon's resignation, and David Frost's 1977 interviews, watched by some 45 million persons. That is reportedly still the record viewership for a televised political interview.
The play is structured as a hunt, a negotiation, and a verbal contest. Don Toner and his cast keep the suspense tight, almost convincing us that we don't know how this will turn out. The pull of the piece, however, is in the acting.
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The Fantasticks at Austin Playhouse is charming. This reliable, charming low-budget winsome musical has been charming 'em since its low-budget opening off-Broadway in 1960.
This is the show that smashed the records for long runs -- with a 42-year run by the original production and 17,162 performances. Then a New York City revival that ran 655 performances in 2006-2008 at the Snapple Theatre Center's Jerry Orbach Theatre on 50th Street, paused, then resumed and is still going. You can check out their website with perky piano audio, theatre description, ticket info and pages and pages of press clippings. Regular tickets are $75 (twofers, $112.50) and premium seating tickets are $125, which by comparison makes the Austin Playhouse production a grand bargain.
Wikipedia records that there have been 11,103 U.S. productions in 2000 U.S. cities and towns, as well as more than 700 productions in other countries, including 200 in Canada and 45 in Scandinavia.
 What's the secret? There are several:
A comfortable formula (boy meets girl, fathers stage fake abduction, boy saves girl; boy discovers trickery, boy ventures into world, girl falls for cad and is disabused; couple are reunited, now more experienced and wiser).
Simple, memorable melodies and lyrics (Try to Remember, Why Did The Kids Put Beans In Their Ears?, Soon It's Gonna Rain, I Can See It).
The simple staging that evokes a troupe of traveling players. With duos: two lovers, two clownish dads, two actor-clowns. And with a mysterious master-of-ceremonies named "El Gallo" who moves the plot, fakes the abduction, seduces (or almost seduces) the jilted heroine, and exposes the lovers to the world's cruelties.
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Age of Arousal is a strange, febrile comedy. It's like Dickens on drugs, if Dickens were to write about a closed circle of odd women.
These women are "odd" both in the numerical meaning of "not in a pair" and in the metaphorical meaning of "singular" or "remarkable." They are not "unique," because playwright Linda Griffiths intends them to represent for us the plight of women in late 19th century England, where by demographic quirk women outnumbered men by 25%. The sentimental Victorian ideal of cozy, obedient matrimony was an impossibility for many women.
Canadian playwright Linda Griffiths took as her point of departure the 1893 novel The Odd Women by British author George Gissing.
Gissing was ranked by some contemporary British critics alongside Thomas Hardy and George Meredith. A brilliant student from working-class origins, Gissing was expelled from university for stealing from better-off classmates and briefly imprisoned. He spent a year in Chicago and then went back to England in 1877. He churned out a total of 23 novels before his death from emphysema in 1903.
Gissing's social themes were well ahead of his time. He wrote about exploitation of the poor, hypocrisy in religion, the injustices for women in conventional matrimony, and unscrupulous commercial practices.
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