Good Buzz for WASP and Bob Birdnow at FIT

by Elaine Liner

Dallas Observer

July 22, 2011

There's nice sting in Upstart Productions' staging of the surreal Steve Martin one-act W.A.S.P., one of the eight shows rotating on the schedule at the ongoing Festival of Independent Theatres at the Bath House Christopher Eastland as "Son" - Photo by Marc RouseCultural Center. The lights come up on a family at the dinner table. Stabbing madly at their empty plates, Mom (Diane Casey Box), Sis (Nicole Stewart) and Son (Christopher Eastland) listen attentively as Dad (Ted Wold) announces that heaven is 17 miles above the earth.

But wait, says Son, that would mean heaven is between the earth and the moon, which is about 240,000 miles farther away.

Uh, oh. Nobody can contradict Dad in this send-up of WASP-y nuclear families of the 1950s, like the type sent up in the film Pleasantville. With lots of funny lines that the cast lands with aplomb, W.A.S.P. gets its point across about narrow-minded thinking, hypocrisy and the emptiness of some American ideals. It couldn't be more topical in today's political climate.

(Read more at www.dallasobserver.com)

What to see at FIT

by Arnold Wayne Jones

Dallas Voice

July 22, 2011

The Festival of Independent Theatres got off to an auspicious start last weekend (see below), and continues for a few more. Tonight, Lanford Wilson’s The Madness of Lady Bright, pictured — sometimes called the first major work of gay theater — follows an aging drag queen as she puts on her makeup, perhaps for the last time. It shows at 8 p.m., and also Saturday at 2 p.m. and Sunday at 5 p.m. Also tonight at 8 is a double bill from WingSpan: Tennessee Williams’ A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot and John Guare’s The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year. It also plays Saturday at 5 p.m.

But some very good shows have already opened. Upstart Productions launched it with WASP, an absurdist comedy from Steve Martin (yes, that one) about the Protestant nuclear family: Disaffected dad (Ted Wold), neurotic wife (Diane Casey Box), confused son (Christopher Eastland) and airhead daughter (Nicole Stewart). The style — flat, crazed, silly, disturbing — fits perfects the nonsense, such as the voices mom hears because her husband can’t be bothered to look at her. Jell-O mold desserts, sexual frustration, 1950s-ish ignorance and a host of other stereotypes of American suburban culture are deliciously skewered. (Also plays Saturday at 5 p.m., July 28 at 8 p.m. and Aug. 6 at 8 p.m.)

(Read more at www.dallasvoice.com)

Which Productions Should You See at the Festival of Independent Theatres?

by Lance Lusk

D Magazine

July 25, 2011

Looking to catch a performance at the Festival of Independent Theaters? Here is our guide and all the reviews.

WingSpan Theatre Company: A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot / The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year

Repeats: Thursday, July 28 at 8 p.m.; Saturday, July 30 at 5 p.m.; and Saturday, August 6 at 2 p.m.

One of the greatest things about well-crafted short plays is that they can be tiny, exciting snapshots of life. Wingspan Theatre Company shoots with both barrels in its double bill of Tennessee Williams’ A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot and John Guare’s The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year at the Festival of Independent Theatres at the Bath House Cultural Center.

Susan Sargeant directs the finely paired duo of plays with a madcap fervor that brings about their well-stocked highlights. A Perfect Analysis gives us a glimpse of two waning Southern Belles who find themselves separated from their convention group and end up in a dive bar. The girls about town – Bessie (a fulsome and fantastic Nancy Sherrard) and Flora (Cindee Mayfield Dobbs doing her best Dixie debutante) – resemble feisty inhabitants of Designing Women, especially as they begin sniping and nitpicking at each other with the precision of well-practiced socialites. It’s a tad more genteel than The Real Housewives of Atlanta, but just as juicy.

The action in The Loveliest Afternoon skews toward the peculiarin its depiction of two fledgling lovers who meet in a park and continue their wooing, but only on Sundays. She (a fresh and spunky Cara Reid) is young, pretty Ohio girl feeling the keen sting of loneliness in a new city. He (a Thom Pain mixed with Clark Kent Ben Bryant) is prone to spinning funny, “true” stories that relate to almost everything. This anything but predictable little love ditty caps off Wingspan’s satisfying twin features with charming spirit.

Upstart Productions: W.A.S.P.

Repeats: Thursday, July 28 at 8 p.m. and Saturday, August 6 at 8 p.m.

Every now and then, the universe is truly unfair with its allotments of talents to just one individual. It’s not enough that world famous comedian Steve Martin is already an actor, banjoist, lecturer, novelist, memoirist, screenwriter, and art historian, but he’s also a pretty darn good playwright too. Upstart Productions adds to Mr. Martin’s artistic oeuvre with its perfect portrait of twisted domesticity in WASP.

Director Josh Glover plays up the absurd in this wry skewering of 1950s ultra-Christian (hence the title) family life in the burbs, and allows his actors to transcend their roles, which could have just as easily settled into caricatures. There isn’t much plot to follow (even for a one-act), just wacky interludes like at dinner where we learn that Heaven is exactly “seventeen miles above the earth,” and a re-imagining of a Christmas morning as upper crust Brits complete with a butler (a workmanlike John M. Flores in three different roles).

The play is supposed to be big and inane to play up the hollow ludicrousness of that particular American dream, and the cast buys into their roles like gangbusters. Ted Wold as the Dad is a stalwart Creationist with all the “facts.” Sis and Son (Nicole Stewart and Christopher Eastland) slay as strange siblings. Diane Casey Box’s Mom shows the strain of maintaining the perfect suburban matriarch façade. Her mad smile is her armor as she stops down to converse with her Voice (Elizabeth Van Winkle) for life advice. It’s a bit of an over the top portrayal, yet it works in this petite, biting play.

(Read more at www.dmagazine.com)

 Upstart's 'The Violet Hour' mixes literary virtuosity and big laughs

by Lawson Taitte

Dallas Morning News

April 1, 2011

Dallas has now had two productions of Richard Greenberg’s extraordinary comedy The Violet Hour, at Dallas Theater Center six years ago and currently at Upstart Productions — both far more satisfying than the 2003 Broadway version.

Susan Sargeant directed the one at Upstart, which opened Wednesday. Her interpretation emphasizes the play’s literary virtuosity — entirely appropriate for a play about a fledgling publisher, John Pace Seavering (Marcus Stimac), who can’t decide which book to launch first with his seed capital. Should it be the novel by his friend Denis (Austin Tindle), whose prolixity is modeled on Thomas Wolfe’s and whose love life is reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s? Or the memoirs of his secret paramour, Jessie (Candy Williams), whose charms combine those of Josephine Baker and Billie Holliday?

Stimac sets the pace and tone of the show with his manly, measured delivery of Seavering’s formal rhetoric. You believe him as the spoiled rich kid whose outlook on life changed irreversibly in the Great War. The impulsive Denis is a good fit for Tindle, and Williams projects Jessie’s sexual mystique and tragic undercurrents. Unfortunately, Tindle and Williams suffer most from the often ill-fitting costumes. They also don’t quite make us believe in their doomed genius.

Barrett Nash plays Rosamund Plinth, the beautiful but troubled heiress Denis wants to marry. We know that the character, like Zelda Fitzgerald, is not going to end well. Nash shows us Rosamund’s instability in subtle ways that get downright creepy. She’s the most darling, and most fatal, of femmes fatales...(Read more at www.dallasnews.com)

Theater Review: The Violet Hour

by Christopher Stephen Soden

pegasusnews.com

April 12, 2011

Imagine a play that’s comedic, yet tragic, pensive, yet playful, full of bravado, yet somehow frail. The premise of The Violet Hour (presented by Upstart Productions at The Green Zone in Dallas through April 23) is quizzical, yet playwright Richard Greenberg manages to excavate an astonishing, visionary plot from some fairly simple ideas. Should we base our decisions on a speculated outcome, or what we believe to be intrinsically ethical? Should we embrace moral relativism or stick ferociously to a code of behavior based solely on immutable truths? Do I let my family starve or steal a loaf of bread? John “Pace” Seavering, a fledgling publisher at the beginning of the twentieth century must choose between publishing the unwieldy, gargantuan first book of his close college friend, Denis McCleary, or his paramour, black Jazz chanteuse, Jessie Brewster. Both insist they must be next in line or face imminent demise, of one sort or another. Pace is torn between this devotion to his best friend and his lover.

Into this mix is delivered a machine which churns out pages from books (whole manuscripts really) that will be published far into the future. Well, the end of the 20th century, anyway. As the texts begin to accumulate in piles throughout an already chaotic office, Pace’s assistant, Gidger, starts to unwittingly pick up cultural jargon from a time as yet unknown to them. As the second act unfolds, Pace and Gidger they discover posthumous news about their own lives, and the lives of the other characters. This unseen device has become an oracle, polygraph and time machine. Greenberg carefully avoids a Twilight Zone sort of feel to this, though the more I consider, the more I wonder if that’s what he had in mind. For some reason, we never question the credibility of this fanciful contraption, probably because it’s so wedded to content.

I’d be remiss if I suggested that The Violet Hour is “about” any one idea, though the central metaphor, the time when the sun has reached a cusp of its cycle and everything is on the verge of change, fits exquisitely. Greenberg is examining a twilight period for Pace, who understands that what he chooses to publish, can change the lives of those very dear to him, as well as the world at large, irreversibly. At its center The Violet Hour seems to suggest issues like time, responsibility, reputation, fate are fluid and perhaps, wonderfully indecipherable. It’s like The Monkey’s Paw or The Lathe of Heaven, where any attempt to thwart some implacable catastrophe is pointless. The machine continues to print out an endless supply of information, yet the more Pace knows the worse his quandary...(Read more at pegasusnews.com)