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ALT reviews in 2009
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The energy and the innovative staging of The Tempest by the Baron's Men go a long way toward overcoming the considerable disadvantages of their "green world" theatre.
"Castleton" lies in a narrow meadow along the lake, just west of the 360 bridge, and owner Richard Garriott has furnished it with quaint cabins, fancifully decorated. It reminded me very much of the "cabin camping" practiced in Scandinavia, where a family leases a tiny dwelling instead of pitching a tent.
The major and inescapable disadvantage to the locale is the boat traffic along the lake. Trees and reeds hide the playing space from inquisitive view, but the thump and roar of overpowered boat engines vies with very loud, very crappy music. And sound travels a long, long way along the surface of the water. So from your 7:30 start time until about Act III, it's easier to suspend belief than to suspend indignation.
Garriott's fantasies include a pretty impressive landbound pirate ship on the meadow's south side and a fortress/stockade slightly elevated to the north. Director Athena Peters offers seating on some wooden benches to the west, but also provides an array of mats in the center. Some of us took the mats, while others came with their own folding lawn chairs and placed them in front of the benches.
This is theatre in the round, but not in the usual sense. Instead of the spectators settling on all sides of the acting space, the Baron's Men move all around and through the spectator space. One never knows where the next scene will begin -- and consequently, for those of us on the mats, whether we will have to twist around, crane our necks to see past another groundling, or find ourselves pleasantly surprised by a player popping up close by from some unwatched quarter.
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On May 1 state senator Florence Shapiro (Plano) and other notables released with ceremony the study The Role of the Innovation Workforce & Creative Sector in the Texas Economy.
Latifah Taormina, executive director of the Austin Circle of Theatres, had advised ACOT members by e-mail, reprising the press release from the Texas Cultural Trust characterizing the study as "a powerful report on value of arts, arts education & creative industries to growth of Texas economy." ACOT commented, "The report demonstrates direct links between creative sector and Texas economy at a time when state leaders are debating: (1) the best way to prepare Texas schoolchildren as the workforce for the future, and (2) state funding of the arts."
The full report and a short PowerPoint summary are available from the lobbying campaign Create Texas.
ALT has spent some time with the report. It's an easy, generally anecdotal read, one that quotes pop sociology observers such as Richard Florida and Daniel Pink. The drafters from Texas Perspectives, Inc. (TXP) re-chew studies done in their own office and elsewhere, including particularly a 2005 national study by Americans for the Arts and a 2001 compendium issue brief The Role of the Arts in Economic Development: prepared for the National Governor's [sic] Association. These sources offer observations that pretty much all arts lovers will endorse:
- The arts generate employment, tourism, tax revenues well beyond modest subsidies, better students, mutual understanding and better citizens.
- Knowledge-based professions and industries tend to cluster in urban areas with lively arts communities.
- Disadvantaged students benefit disproportionately from participating in arts.
- America's global comparative advantage is the creativity of its people, a quality that can't be outsourced beyond our boundaries.
- Arts education enhances that creativity. (In this connection, my favorite quote from this piece: "The number of students obtaining an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) has dramatically increased in recent years, and corporate recruiters now routinely visit the top arts graduate schools in search of talent. The high-concept abilities of an artist are often more valuable than the easily replicated skills of an entry-level business graduate."
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Ken Webster's Victor is in control from the first instant of this piece. Lights dim and he flings open the doors to the theatre, entering to waves of recorded applause. Victor's expression is sardonic, dismissive, impatient. He gestures and cuts off the applause, then launches into a stream of consciousness monologue about group therapy. He is scathing, sarcastic, in control, telling us about the misfits and about the facilitator Just Call Me Joe -- "and I will NOT call him Joe."
Ken is in control of Victor, but sometimes it looks like a near thing. This guy is all over the place. Early on, with malicious satisfaction he violates the fourth wall of the theatre space, moving up close and personal, stalking around the house.
House!
 Victor reacts as if he is receiving an electric shock, whenever he uses the word. He builds his world for us with his compulsive tales and commentary, told with glittering eyes, shifts of mood and changes of locale. There again and again is that flash of contempt as he snaps a finger to signal a change in the lighting or a new subject about which to rail.
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Bastrop's serenely strolling musicale Sunday in the Park recalls that quaint Victorian device, the cardboard puppet theatre -- an elaborate dollhouse stage in which children could push forward stylized cardboard cutouts, imagining dialogue and story. In this production, Engela Edwards of Easy Theatre, Bastrop Opera's long-serving general director Chester Eitze and choreographer Laura Goff create for us a never-land version of an America small town, circa 1915.
 They draw on songbooks of the era, lightly and whimsically staging almost 50 songs with fetching melodies, most of them familiar. These are the agreeable melodies you might find on player piano rolls or, once upon a time, in the yellowing music sheets inside Grandma's piano stool. The large cast performs them with affection, in a succesion of tableaus and skits without spoken dialogue (except for "Delaney's Donkey," a mock-epic comic tale about a village race, done by Nick Collier in his character as the village policeman).
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The concept of human cloning is profoundly unsettling.
We like the fact each of us is unique. Individuality situates us in the universe and in our own skins. Each of us might fantasize a different reality or our self as a different individual, but we intuit that even those avatars, if realized, would be unique.
The existence of fraternal twins or triplets is nature's benevolent random trick that reinforces our faith in our own individuality. Nature has made each of us.
But suppose that nature took a backseat in the process? |
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