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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

by Lauren Smart

SMU Daily Campus

April 3, 2011

Upstart Productions brought to life another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of design; a journey into a wondrous land with boundaries limited to the audience's imagination – Next stop, "The Violet Hour."

Even if the words are borrowed from Rod Serling, the description is accurate: Upstart has some good things going on with its current production of Richard Greenberg's surrealist play.

Greenberg is a genius in his own right and this play is an especially brilliant work that pays a due homage to T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" (this critic's favorite poem).

When you walk into the theater, you must walk through the door of Cindy Ernst's stunning set, which is impeccably designed to look like a period office.

The year is 1919 and the play begins with John Pace Seavering (Marcus Stimac), a budding publisher, listening to his assistant Gidger (Linus Craig) expatitate about his life.

Seavering's office is in disarray, covered in countless sheets of paper, as he is attempting to choose the first book he will publish.

He must decide between an extensive novel titled "The Violet Hour" written by his college buddy Denis McCleary (Austin Tindle) or the not-so-true memoirs of his black mistress Jessie Brewster (Candy Williams).

The approval of McCleary's future father-in-law depends on the promise of a published novel, but Seavering's love life hangs in balance with Brewster's book.

A tornado of a plot twist surfaces when a mysterious, noisy machine is delivered, and it begins to print page-upon-page of unexplained manuscripts of books that have yet-to-be-written...(Read more at smudailycampus.com)

by Adam Sachs

cravedfw.com

April 18, 2011

It felt like quite some time since I had sat down to take in an intellectually intriguing piece of work when I went to see Upstart Productions’ interpretation of Richard Greenberg’s The Violet Hour.  The lights dimmed and Gidger (played by Linus Craig) shouts “Paper!  Miles and miles of paper!” setting the tone for this absurdist meditation on the role of the written word in the direction of time.   Though it may sound like a cerebral piece that requires more concentration than we prefer devoting in our free time, Director Susan Sargeant’s greatest achievement laid in using every avenue to pull me in as an audience member through the intriguing set design to the electrifying performances.  All the while, the play maintains a spare simplicity that highlights the details of every word spoken and every gesture made by individual actors.

The title refers to an uncertain moment of the day between dusk and sunset, a point at which John Pace Seavering (played by Marcus Stimac) is struggling to make the most important decision of his first book to publish.  It is not so much his conflict between publishing a book by his friend or his lover that made the play compelling, but the surprising arrival of a machine that is heard but not seen.  The machine ultimately produced the most interesting reading material, as it forecasted the characters’ future and forced them to consider what they would publish in a different light.

Upstart Productions has built its reputation on edgy works that grab our attention, from the aptly timed Topdog/Underdog premiering in the throes of the 2008 election to 2009’s unforgettable Talk Radio.  The Violet Hour initially seems like an exception, with period costumes and flowery language that are a departure from Upstart’s modern bent.  While the portrayal of the machine heightens the mystery in this play, I was most rapt with attention by Candy Williams’ performance as Jessie Brewster.

To me, Ms. Williams represents exactly what I find exciting about Upstart Productions, an actress who did not attend a conservatory nor has she made a big name for herself in any city’s theatre scene...(Read more at cravedfw.com)

by Melyssah Colerangle

dallasweekly.com

April 8, 2011

Upstart Productions is chugging its way to becoming Dallas’ very own Little Theater that Could. Tucked inside of the Green Zone Theater near West Dallas, Upstart prides itself on being a launching pad for upcoming, creative minds from all backgrounds and levels of experience.

Together with Project X: Theatre, Upstart presents The Violet Hour, a play by Richard Greenberg, directed by Susan Sargeant.

Set in Manhattan in the early 1900’s The Violet Hour tells the story of John Pace Seavering (Marcus Stimac), a twenty-something year old publisher trying to establish himself. The world of publishing has never seemed as aggressive and challenging as it does here. Seavering has good, noble intentions, but lacks experience. His struggle to create a reputation and image for himself makes each decision painstakingly and unnecessarily difficult to reach. Because he’s just starting out, he can only afford to publish one book, and so he must choose between the work of his college best friend, Denis (Austin Tindle) and the memoir of his desirable, African-American lover Jessie Brewster (Candy Williams). Seavering is acutely aware of the fact that both authors have no chance of getting published without his help. Further complicating things is that Denis has fallen in love with an heiress Rosamund (Barett Nash), who is betrothed to another man. Because Denis has yet to do anything to create a name for himself, Rosamund’s father has threatened to disinherit her if she pursues the relationship. Together they are convinced that the only way Denis can possibly earn Rosamund’s father’s respect is to be published. Rounding out the cast of characters is Gidger (Linus Craig) Seavering’s outspoken and hilarious assistant. As if all of this happening isn’t enough, Seavering receives a mysterious machine that spews out pages written at the end of the twentieth century. These pages reveal what will happen in the future, and the characters are forced to evaluate just how important their lives are, and what their legacy will be...(Read more at dallasweekly.com)

by Jason Roberts

GoOakCliff.com

March 29, 2011

Three year old Upstart Productions has made quite a name for itself in short order. In their first season alone, Upstart landed acting and directing awards from the DFW Theater Critics Forum, and in 2010, both of their productions, subUrbia and Talk Radio, tallied three awards each. Oak Cliff resident, Barrett Nash, is a founding member of Upstart Productions’ Artistic Team.  Barrett grew up in a house near Steven’s Golf Course, where her family still lives today.  Her father, Barry Nash, is CEO of the Coaching Company and a member of Kitchen Dog Theater where he performs on stage regularly.  Barrett’s mother, Sandra, works as a Medical Aesthetician for Aqua Medical Spa.
Barrett attended Bishop Lynch High School, where she was incredibly active in the Theater Department, starring in several musicals including “Guys & Dolls,” “Mame,” “Sugar” and “Sweet Charity.”  She was also in the award-winning choir, show choir, and drill team.  Following high school, Barrett received a BFA in theater studies from The University of Texas in Austin in 2005.
Since its inaugural season, Barrett has been highly involved with Upstart, when she appeared on stage as Jessica in Upstart’s award-winning 2009 production of This Is Our Youth by Kenneth Lonergan.  Since then, she has taken on the role of producer with two productions for Upstart (suburbia by Eric Bogosian in spring 2010 and PINTER: Art, Politics, Truth in fall 2010) and contributed a great deal of extra work and input toward the non-profit theater’s fundraising efforts over the years...(Read more at www.GoOakCliff.com)

Theater Review: PINTER: Art, Politics, Truth at the Green Zone in Dallas

by Christopher Stephen Soden

John Garcia's THE COLUMN

Sunday, November 14, 2010

It seems to me that in any major city with an enthusiastic theatre community you're going to find (if you're fortunate) a handful of theater companies that are willing to push the boundaries of expectations. They explore pieces and playwrights that might not get as much exposure, challenging our comfort zones, provoking us to confront and process some of the more harrowing truths of life on this planet. Upstart Productions is just such a company. They surprise us, they intrigue us, they amuse and frighten, enervate and compel us to engage our minds when we participate in the realms of performance, rather than passively witness.

In the Pinter Trilogy (PINTER: Art, Politics, Truth) currently being presented by Upstart (playing at The Green Zone in Dallas through November 20), the three one-acts are prefaced by a shadowy, somewhat nebulous filmed interview in which Pinter describes his technique.

Like numerous other artists, Pinter attempts to capture the truth of a situation by pointing to its reflection or some other indirect manifestation of its process. Like inferring an orange by finding seeds on a plate. In these cinematic interludes Pinter clarifies his intent to plumb the deeper truths by expressing the enigmatic, the inexplicable, the result rather than the entire equation. I believe this was an appropriate gesture on the part of Upstart, as it makes Pinter's motives a great deal easier to grasp. He's not being elusive simply for the sake of mystery or tantalization.

In Celebration (Art), directed by Donny Covington, we join diners in a very posh, sophisticated restaurant in London. The action cuts back and forth between a younger married couple and two older married couples (two brothers married to two sisters) celebrating a wedding anniversary. Pinter exploits this special milieu by eliciting frank, ambivalent dialogue from the characters. There's something about these surroundings, dedicated to comfort, pleasure, sybaritism, and high spirits that strips away a level of personal decorum.

In a way, the restaurant is almost utopian in its appeal to people from all walks of life, imbibing wine and gradually confiding more and more than they normally might, because the gathering feels safe. What begins as polite conversation might progress to revelations of animosity, rapaciousness, or secrets more easily confided to strangers than lifelong partners. Celebration, in its acerbic, curiously heartfelt way, dissects the nature of intimacy and the caste system as well. You might believe that slavery no longer exists in more enlightened corners of the world till you see two women groping a waiter because they know they can. Covington has brought just the right balance to this grotesque wedding of the sacred and profane.

One for the Road (Politics), directed by Mason York, is a grueling, intense examination of the connection between torture and patriotism. What is most profoundly disturbing about this piece is the self-righteous, lofty tone of Nicolas, an interrogator who does most of the talking. The other three characters barely say a word, and Nicolas is all about propriety, control, degradation, and ethical hubris. He is nearly the quintessential representation for partisan rationale; for the ends justifying the means.

He feels absolutely justified in the abominations he condones, yet Pinter doesn't disclose much more than the slightest details. The pain and misery of his prisoners, Victor and Gila, is apparent in their responses to Nicolas. They are utterly terrified and afraid to make the most trivial mistake. Mason York has done very well with this material in which tone is so crucial and where so much is transmitted through the unspoken. If you heard Nicolas pontificating at a party, he'd seem like a buffoon, but here, in his private kingdom, he is a merciless, bilious despot.

A Kind of Alaska (Truth), directed by Diana Gonzalez, was inspired from the cruel phenomenon sleeping sickness epidemic that spread in the winter of 1916-17. With the discovery of L-Dopa, many of the victims were roused from their coma-like, prolonged repose. Deborah is one of those stricken and when she stirs, at the beginning of the play, she still has her memory as a 12-year-old, even though 30 years have passed.

Gonzalez has a consummate grasp of this piece, which uses the disease encephalitis lethargica, as a device for looking at the nature of being, connection, and the core, elemental values that influence our perception of the world, whatever our age...(Read more at pegasusnews.com)