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ALT reviews in 2009
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So what, exactly, is the Method Gun?
The short, obvious and wrong answer is that it's the loaded pistol that is secured in a birdcage by a troupe of intense, troubled actors. And like any loaded pistol that features in stage action, it will, eventually be used (cf., "the loaded gun theory").
That piece of hardware is a gun, but it's not The Method Gun except in a very minor, representational way.
The ensemble makes us at home for the show, opening the house early and providing piano music, a compendium of sentimental ballads keyed out carefully by a cast member. "Stardust," "Red Sails in the Sunset, "Alfie," "I Will Wait for You," pieces relatively appropriate for the early 1970s setting of the action, played about as well as I might play them after 30 years away from the keyboard.
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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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One of the challenges of Macbeth is that we all know the text. Not by heart but, thanks to the hard work of generations of English teachers, just about anyone who is sitting in the theatre when the lights go down will have the elements of the plot.
That's good, and familiar, and comforting. The downside of that familiarity is that the actors don't fear losing us. They have a text to deliver, and they make sure that they hit all of the words and action. Like slalom skiing. You make all the curves and hit all of the gates, and you make it to the finish line still on your feet.
Texas State's production of Macbeth this past week was vigorous, atmospheric and fun to watch. Preliminary music was eerie and appropriate, and stage movement was excellent.
Director Charles Ney gave us a surprise in the opening scene. Yelling, battling warriors rush onto the stage and have it out with much clashing and dying. When the dead are left and the quick are fled, the witches rise from among the corpses. As they chant, they dispose of the slaughtered, dumping them down a trapdoor at center stage. After the Weird Sisters disappear, one prostrate figure remains, and he is revealed to be the "bloody sergeant" who then unfolds to newly arrived King Duncan the tale of the battle. |
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Billy Alexander is beleaguered and bemused throughout this cheery piece of Canadian froth, now playing at the Gaslight Baker Theatre in Lockhart.
As the stay-at-home writer Ross Cameron, he's a Mr. Mom surrounded by women: his wife the successful industrial designer, the friendly home care nurse Miss Bricker from the Canadian public health service, and his flighty mother-in-law Beattie, still a dish after all these years. Oh, and his infant daughter, offstage. We never see her but she does generate comic demands on her dad, who is slowly going diaper-pail pablum stir-crazy in their house out in the remote Canadian woods.
 The plot is a little bit color-by-the-numbers. Writer Warren Graves piles on top of the gender role reversal a series of funny bits about the frustration of Cameron's libido, and then introduces that wide-eyed pretty nurse just as Cameron's wife Alexandra is back from three weeks of travel and crashing on an important design project (left) . Mom-in-law Beattie and her droll companion George swing by regularly for comic relief and a tipple.
Inevitably, when Alexandra travels for a presentation, bad weather and good luck bring that cute Miss Bricker into Cameron's house. An aspiring author of romance fiction, she has lent Cameron the draft of her first novel, written in hot pink prose.
Will they or won't they? And what will be the consequences? |
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An impressive cast brought San Antonio playwright Antoinette Winstead's Common Ground to the Boyd Vance theatre this past weekend, with the sponsorship of the Pro Arts Collective. LeVan Owens stands tall at the center of the piece, in the character of James Parker, a powerfully built man stiff legged from a rodeo accident long ago. He's a dutiful son enduring a deep, mute resentment.
Winstead sets the piece at a Christmas sometime in the early 70s, starting the action with the unexpected arrival home of younger brother Luke, an Air Force pilot back from Vietnam. Luke's wife Sara Beth and his six-year-old child Veronica have for some undefined period (years?) been living with the boys' mother, "Miss Ruth."
In program notes Winstead says that Common Ground is her attempt at addressing family dysfunction in all its dark and illustrious glory.
 The situation depicted is plausible. The drama arises from tensions between the brothers and the enigmatic position in the family of Luke's wife Sara Beth. Six-year-old Ronnie is a lively and inquisitive child who worships Uncle James and initially distrusts the smooth, smiling stranger said to be her father. And "Miss Ruth," with a mother's sharp eyes and authority works hard to keep comity in the household with the best weapons she has at hand -- cooking, chores for everyone, good-natured grousing, and, when necessary, straight talk.
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Page 13 of 18 |
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