Tag: TheatreWorks

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

Memphis Playwright Ruby O’Gray Hosts a Booksigning

After 40-years, and numerous awards Ruby O’Gray’s still got a few worlds left to conquer. Saturday, April 30, she’s hosting a signing party for her new book Running Away to Home, which tells the story of Kathleen, a 17-year-old basketball fan who leaves Memphis for New York in 1966, looking for adventure and opportunity. 

A portion of the proceeds from each book sold will benefit the Women’s Theatre Festival of Memphis, which O’Gray founded. 

The book signing takes place at TheatreWorks. 5:30-6:45.

O’Gray also founded the Bluff City Tri-Art Theatre Company, currently producing Gus Edwards’ play, The Offering, which runs through Sunday, at TheatreWorks. 

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

On stage: Lettice & Lovage and Marriage to an Older Woman.

What happens when a bit of harmless Mary Queen of Scots cosplay results in a near beheading? To find that out, you’ll need to reserve tickets for Lettice and Lovage, an intensely British comedy that was first staged in 1987 but feels like it might have been written with modern Memphis in mind. If you’re the sort of person who’s ever signed a petition to save the Nineteenth Century Club, or carried a sign to protest parking on the Overton Park Greensward, or gotten verklempt because some solid piece of architecture was demolished to make room for a Family Dollar, the jokes will resonate. To make things even more Memphis-esque, there’s a magnificent ritualized #wigsnatch near the end of act two.

Lettice and Lovage playwright Peter Shaffer is best known for weighty dramas like Equus and Amadeus, but the man could flat write a gag. If Lettice seems like a trifle compared to his more frequently produced tragedies, it’s a funny trifle, and more than a little wise. The New Moon Theatre Company’s current production may be austere, but it’s “enlarged, enlivened, and enlightened” in every way by a pair of finely tuned performances from Sarah Brown and Anita “Jo” Lenhart. Their meandering scenes are a real treat for theatergoers with a taste for quirk.

Brown plays Lettice Douffet, a tour guide with a flair for the dramatic, a lust for the life less “mere,” and a terrible reputation for straying from history’s facts whenever the facts are too damn boring to repeat in front of a live audience. Lettice’s gross historical embellishments bring her into conflict with Lenhart’s Lotte Schoen, an administrator for the historical preservation society who seems buttoned up but is truthfully on the verge of complete radicalization.

Shaffer’s comedy of little old ladies planning acts of violent terrorism is bottom-heavy and wears out its welcome somewhere in the middle of an ample third act. Brown and Lenhart are so full of life and fun to watch it doesn’t matter.

Marriage to an Older Woman isn’t “must-see” theater. John Fritz’s obscure-for-a-reason play introduces us to Babs, a 73-year-old free spirit who upsets her daughter by marrying a wealthy but uptight 60-year-old stranger on a cruise ship. It’s situation comedy that plays like the never-aired pilot to a failed Love Boat spin-off. It’s not unwatchable, but it’s not a strong “hello” for Memphis’ newest theater company, Cloud 9.

Marriage to an Older Woman was originally produced in Memphis by Playwrights Forum and is fondly remembered in some circles due to strong performances by a pair of actresses who are no longer with us: Dorothy Blackwood and Laurie Cook McIntosh. Cloud 9’s cast is capable, but it’s not Blackwood/McIntosh capable, and the material isn’t strong enough to merit revival.

It’s been said — and rightly, I think — that you shouldn’t produce a gun on stage unless somebody’s going to use it. Something similar might be said about the half-dozen ukuleles and other musical props decorating the set of Marriage to an Older Woman, a play that, as near as I can tell, has absolutely nothing to do with ukuleles or music of any kind. Nevertheless, various instruments hang on the wall and lurk in corners, waiting for somebody to pick them up and make noise. The play has even less to do with Marty Robbins, the great country crooner whose face is conspicuously displayed on the back wall like the picture of Tom Wingfield’s absentee father in The Glass Menagerie. Just as the presence of a firearm might create a sense of impending danger, these kinds of props create a different kind of anticipation that competes with the script for attention. Unfortunately, the promise of song and some textual connection to the famous El Paso balladeer is more intriguing than anything that ever happens in the play. It’s an itch that’s never scratched in a show where even the longest scene transitions occur in silent blackouts.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

The Killer Inside

”In the past, I’ve avoided doing any kind of play where a mentally ill person does something bad, because the stereotype is that they’re all a bunch of serial killers,” Bill Baker says cautiously. As the founding director of Our Own Voice Theatre Company, Baker works with like-minded artists to explore issues and ideas related to mental health. With his new play, The Ballad of Angie Awry — a play on the not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity legal plea — Baker is simultaneously exploring new territory and getting back to basics.

“Basically, I’ve tried to get inside of a person who commits a horrible crime,” Baker says. “In the first act, all of her hallucinations are experienced by the audience. We get this extra information, the voices, the paranoia, the heightened trepidation. In the second act, I take that away so the audience is no longer subjectively inside the character. They are looking at things from the outside, as most of us do when we’re watching someone with a mental illness on trial.”

Baker isn’t excusing the crime. “We will certainly recognize that what she’s done is wrong,” he says. “We’ll also understand the obstacles and judgments that led her to these actions, and, hopefully, there will be some compassion for her.”

Baker describes Angie Awry as a tragedy at the crossroads of the justice and mental-health-care systems, inspired by Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty and legislation that would prevent the use of the death penalty in cases where a defendant has a severe and persistent mental illness.

Our Own Voice Theatre Company presents The Ballad of Angie Awry at TheatreWorks, April 26th-May 11th. $10.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Psycho

CREDIT: photograph by Paha_I | Dreamstime

In uncertain times, there is one thing I know for sure: I am grateful to every god, devil, and hero in the combined pantheon of global myth that I’m not Sylvia Wilson, the stage manager for the New Moon Theatre Company’s ambitious and strongly acted production of Tracy Letts’ horror/drama Bug. The ridiculous mess of fake gasoline and bodily fluids left onstage at the end of every show has to be spirit-breaking. Bottles are strewn from one end of the theater to the other amid rumpled bedding, multiple insecticide containers, and bits of aluminum foil. The floor is slick with god knows what but still never as messy as the lives of Letts’ broken characters.

Bug is hardcore pulp and a special treat for anybody who ever stayed up late to hear the guests on Art Bell’s syndicated Coast-to-Coast radio show weave every conspiracy that ever existed about shadow governments and aliens into a crazy fabric of alternative space-time. It’s a grotesque love story about an intermittently stable woman with no self-worth and a charismatic but dangerously paranoid Gulf War veteran, who may be but probably isn’t the parasite-infested end-result of a mad government experiment gone south. These characters are hard cases: intelligent but isolated, sick, ignorant, deep into their booze, and hopeless from lights up.

Director Gene Elliot’s production is action-packed. His sound design, which consists mostly of Tejano music and helicopters, is managed in such a way that it projects the characters’ disorientation and drugged-up paranoia onto the audience. Bug won’t be everybody’s bucket of guts. It’s also one heckuva showcase for all of the artists involved.

When it comes to bad taste in men, Agnes (Tracie Hansom) deserves some kind of prize. She’s sandwiched between Goss (Greg Boller), her hyper-macho ex, who’s fresh out of jail and doesn’t give a damn about consensual, and Peter (John Dylan Atkins) who’s more sensitive and ultimately more dangerous. The more she falls for Peter, adopting his paranoid vision of the world, the more she tears at her own skin to get the parasites out.

“I’m not an ax murderer,” Peter says early on, telegraphing to everybody who’s ever picked up a trashy novel that he must be some other kind of murderer. Or he soon will be.

Letts revels in druggy, voyeuristic excess, and gore hounds and Halloween thrill seekers with the patience to make it to the end of this talky psychodrama will get their share of the ultra-violence.

Kell Christie, last seen in the New Moon’s King Lear, takes on R.C., a tough, coke-snorting lesbian who tries to help Agnes. Jim Palmer, a veteran of Letts’ better known August: Osage County at Playhouse on the Square, is superb in his walk-on role as Dr. Sweet, a psychiatrist who may or may not confirm all of Peter’s buggy suspicions.

At TheatreWorks through November 4th.

Germantown Community Theatre’s gone out on a limb to produce Twilight of the Gods. The new work by Wes Driver and Greg Greene of Nashville’s Blackbird Theater hasn’t played in New York or Chicago and doesn’t come with much name recognition. That hardly seems to matter judging by the packed house and appreciative response to Sunday’s matinee.

Twilight of the Gods is a literate murder mystery that parodies literate murder mysteries.

The plot is anything but tight, and the style careens wildly between satire and broad sketch comedy. But the writing is snappy, the slapstick is good, and where else will you find Emily Dickinson, H.G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rasputin, Annie Oakley, Jack the Ripper, Houdini, Friedrich Nietzsche and Christian Science founder, Mary Baker Eddy, all gathered together in one room for the purpose of global domination and/or a bloody game of shoot and stab?

A top-shelf cast includes James Dale Green, Emily Chateau, Brent Davis, Rob Hanford, and Greg Krosnes and gets big laughs with smart gallows humor.

One complaint, though. Rasputin the Mad Monk is famous for being hard to kill. It’s disappointing that he didn’t shake himself back to life at the very end for a final epic battle pitting evil against another, completely different kind of evil.

At Germantown Community Theatre through November 11th.

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

Girls will be boys at THE CLUB

The Club at TheatreWorks

  • The Club at TheatreWorks

“A gentleman is any man who wouldn’t hit a woman… with his hat on.”— From The Club‎

Ann Marie Hall doesn’t mince words.

“We’re not just sexist, we’re racist too,” she says archly doting on her production of The Club, a slyly insightful if somewhat obscure musical review compiled by poet Eve Merriam with choreography by Courtney Oliver and Jackie Nichols. The title of the show refers literally to Gentlemen’s clubs at the turn of the 20th-Century where certain privileged males of Anglo extraction could escape family obligations to gamble, drink, and conduct private business. More broadly it also alludes to the white male privilege exemplified in period songs like, “String of Pearls,” “The Juice of the Grape,” and “Following in Father’s Footsteps.”


Sights and sounds from The Club, 2012

This isn’t Hall’s first encounter with The Club, which showcases an ensemble of female performers impersonating men of means. In 1980 she played Freddy in the show’s regional premier at Circuit Playhouse and revived the role a year later for Playhouse on the Square.

Ann Marie Hall directing The Club, 2012

  • Ann Marie Hall directing The Club, 2012

Hall sings Miranda in The Club, 1980

  • Hall sings “Miranda” in The Club, 1980

“It was very popular,” she says.

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

Return of Sister Myotis: Voices of the South plans a unique fundraiser

Lately I’ve written a lot about Sister Myotis and Voices of the South and posted an awful lot of video too. So instead of repeating myself I’ll share this funny interview with WREG.

 

Their Dash & Dine fundraiser is Saturday Night at TheatreWorks and includes a trip on the Backbeat tour bus. Sounds like fun.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Earth-friendly

She is matter. She matters. Who will care for her? We all return to her. What happens to a motherless child? — from Matter by Latrelle Bright

Even in its first incarnation as a 10-minute sketch, Latrelle Bright’s Matter — opening at TheatreWorks this weekend as part of the annual SoloWorks series — wasn’t an easy show to describe. It’s a jazz-inspired poem about what it means to be human. It’s a modern dance about relativism and global crisis in an ultimately ambivalent universe. It’s also a multimedia courtroom drama pitting words against actions; a mild satire about bureaucracy; and a bit of Earth-friendly performance art with low-impact audience participation.

According to the author, who left Memphis last year to take a position with the Department of Theatre at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after earning an MFA at the University of Memphis, it’s all about hubris.

“You hear people talking about saving the planet,” Bright says. “But that’s not what they mean. Earth doesn’t need saving. The Earth is going to be here whether we’re here or not. What people mean when they say we need to save the Earth is that we need to save ourselves.”

Bright’s ideas about what live performance can and should be have evolved significantly from her days as an undergraduate at Florida State. “I thought I wanted to be a black, female artistic director for a major regional theater, then I realized I didn’t want to do those same plays that everybody else is doing,” Bright says, crediting professors like Gloria Baxter and Susan Chrietzberg at the University of Memphis and Cookie Ewing at Rhodes College for inspiring her to explore other possibilities. Her interest in building theatrical events around social issues grew as she began to work with the Heifer Theatre Project, an offshoot of Heifer International that helps young people learn to use theatrical techniques to express their concerns about hunger, war, and inequality. “The idea that I could make meaningful art outside of a theater just blew my mind,” she says of her decision to take a less-traveled approach to the performing arts.

“It’s a perfect fit,” Bright says of her current position as project coordinator for Inner Voices, the University of Illinois’ social-issues theater project where she helps to develop performances focusing on a range of topics, including race, gender, body type, food, health, and sustainability.

Matter began as a sketch for Voices of the South’s annual Christmas performance, Pre-sent, Pres-ent. And like all performances for Pre-sent, Pres-ent, it started with a gift from Jerre Dye, Voices of the South’s artistic director.

“I opened this box, and it was full of packing peanuts,” Bright says, remembering the day Dye’s package arrived at her new home in Illinois. Inside the box, Bright, an Army brat who has lived in many different places, found Christmas ornaments, images that reminded her of places she’d been, an old photograph of a family, and handwritten comments and quotations relating to the concept of home.

“I had about 40 minutes of material back in December,” Bright says, recalling her dilemma of how to take facts and statistics about things like water, air, and food and present them in a theatrical way. “But as I kept writing, the piece became more and more about humanity and this idea that taking care of the Earth is about taking care of people. I had more to say about that than I did about the statistics.”

Pre-sent, Pres-ent is a group show with many artists bringing work to the table, and there simply wasn’t time to include everything. That changes when Bright flies solo at TheatreWorks with her expanded version of the show.

Matter isn’t didactic like so many shows about man’s relationship with the environment. “I know I should separate [my trash],” Bright says, admitting that she is the definition of imperfect. With Matter she hopes to avoid defining what people should and shouldn’t do and look at how we behave and why we behave that way. “I can’t wait to see how audiences respond,” she says.

Matter is at TheatreWorks July 15th-18th. Tickets are $20.

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

One II: SoloWorks continues with “Birthing the Crone”

Picture_17.png

I worked at a health food restaurant during the height of the 80’s/90’s-era New Age “rebirthing” craze so almost any discussion of birth that doesn’t involve at least one infant gives me a small anxiety attack. But Lisa Wilson’s Birthing the Crone sounds like it might actually be an interesting performance.

The second week of the [SoloWorks] series welcomes LISA WILSON. Lisa is a performer, professor, writer, director, and Chair of the Theater Department at the University of Tulsa. Her unflinchingly honest show, Birthing the Cone, explores a woman approaching the third phase of her life, including the onset of menopause. Birthing the Crone was a huge hit at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, and now graces the TheatreWorks stage. Lisa uses humor and honesty about the challenges in her own life to explore this new and often frightening phase of life.

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

One: Solo performances return to Theatreworks in July

And here’s the lineup…