History may be written by the victors, as the saying goes, but fundamentally history is written by the writers and the landscape of history etched into images by the cartographers, though they are perhaps paid by those victors.
If good playwrights tend to have discerning ears for the language and voices around them, then perhaps those wanting to produce a new kind of theater festival need to become the most sensitive of auditory aficionado as well. Kenn McLaughlin, artistic director of Stages Repertory Theatre in Houston, seems to subscribe to this theory because when the company began organizing their new play-reading event that would become Sin Muros: A Latina/o Theatre Festival, he knew the first act of creation was to be quiet and listen.
Girls, and boys, may just want to have fun on New Years Eve, but for many people the celebratory countdown to some second when the Earth has managed another full orbit around the Sun without getting struck by an asteroid makes for a pretty crappy holiday.
Last April, as the evening weekend revelries began at Fusebox, Austin’s annual cross-disciplinary arts festival, performer Joseph Keckler took the stage at Al Volta’s Midnight Bar.
As a critic, I try to stay open to every theatrical form, genre and story to lay aside my personal preferences and tastes so that they don’t prejudice my views of any specific play and production.
As a curmudgeonly connoisseur of holiday performing arts, I’m always on the lookout for the innovative, quirky or simply new shows to devour like Christmas candy each most-wonderful-time-of-the-year
Shakespeare, politics, glam rock: these are not terms we often put together, if ever, yet this month, Austin’s Hidden Room theater company plans to merge the three into a rocking trio for a production of the Bard’s glorious history play Henry IV, through Oct. 1 at York Rite Masonic Hall.
“What the heck is a Rec Room?” was the question I set out to answer almost a year ago when I interviewed the performance art space co-owners and founders, Matt Hune and Stephanie Wittels Wachs