Hyde Park Theatre

Sick

The Luv Doc Recommends

November 18, 2009

Hear that? That’s the sound of the holiday clock ticking toward C-Day. Another week and you’ll have to beat the dust out of your flashing Bobbie Brooks Rudolph sweater and plug in the string of Christmas lights that’s been permanently attached to your house for the last three years. Sure, Thanksgiving is just around the corner, but what used to be a gentle road bump on the superhighway to material excess is now a big, white, one-way arrow. After all, if you don’t have any things, what are you going to be thankful for? Health? Happiness? Love? This is Austin, Texas, America, not an ashram. You might be able to somehow monetize your health – say, if you’re a day laborer or a sex worker, but love and happiness aren’t going to put spinny rims on your Hummer or crust your grill with ice. Really, what good are love and happiness if you can’t rub them in other peoples’ faces? After all, happiness in the absence of external validation is very often mistaken for insanity. You can’t just wander around in a state of bliss for no reason without checking someone else’s opinion. You’re not Kierkegaard. Life is much uglier and meaner than that. You have to occasionally check in with friends and neighbors and complete strangers to make sure they recognize your happiness as genuine happiness and not some freak chemical imbalance. When you proudly open the door of your crawl space to reveal the piles of corpses, it’s probably a bad sign if your friend recoils in horror. It’s an even worse sign if you don’t have any friends with whom you can share your crawl space. People need people … if only to make sure they haven’t gone off the deep end. This system of external checks and balances doesn’t always work. Sometimes abominations slip through. For instance: People still engage in hardcore, sloppy tongue-kissing sessions at shopping malls. They still take out second mortgages to lease PT Cruiser convertibles. They still wear nugget jewelry and Ed Hardy prints. They still launch into tedious long-form soliloquies about their fitness regime at cocktail parties. Actions such as these are basically cries for withering social criticism. It’s how society evolves. Sure, solitude has its perks. Everyone needs a little downtime – but not everyone is John the Baptist, Hank Dave Thoreau, or Jeremiah Johnson. Increasingly, people are forced to show their asses 24/7 whether they like it or not. These days you never really know if your innocent, back-alley beer piss is going to end up going viral on YouTube or whether you’ll be tagged in a Facebook photo with a wrinkled nutsack resting on your sleeping forehead. Welcome to the fishbowl. “All the world’s a stage, and we are merely players” … with no green room. Will it force us into a morally homogenized lifestyle, or will it simply make the aberrations seem commonplace? Stay tuned, the plot thickens. If you want to catch a little old-skool theatre, you can find it at the Hyde Park Theatre this weekend as Capital T Theatre continues its run of Sick, Zayd Dohrn’s comedy about a family of germophobes trying their best to retreat from the dangers of the outside world. Spoiler alert: People mess it up.

FronteraFest: Best of the Week

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MON., JAN. 15, 2007

The beautiful thing about January is that the gyms are full of pasty chubbsters looking to get their fit on. It’s beautiful because they annoy the shit out of the full time narcissists who sometimes forget entirely that there are other people in the world. Other people come in all shapes, sizes, and types – one of those types are the people who park their shopping carts perpendicular in the aisle at the grocery store while they loiter at the sample table. These are the same ones who bogart the treadmills (set on “crawl”) at the gym. Yes Narcissus, there are other people in the world, and recent statistics show that 60% of them are overweight. That’s a disturbing figure to be sure, but since the majority of the exercise most people get these days is the digital dance their fingers do on their keyboards, it’s not surprising. Maybe someday we’ll evolve into something resembling a jellyfish, but for now we have to deal with a physiology that’s behind the evolutionary curve. If our bodies were evolving as fast as our minds, each of our hands would have ten fingers and our asses would be huge (come to think of it, maybe our bodies aren’t that far behind the evolutionary curve after all). Truth is, life in the third millennium doesn’t take a lot of physical effort, but fortunately we have technology to counteract the effects of technology. Treadmills, stair-steppers, stationary bikes, rowing machines, weight machines, and countless other ingenious contraptions make our bodies do what they were designed to do: move. Used to be people were able to move without the assistance of machines, but as the world gets smaller and people get larger, it’s probably best we have machines that can work us into a lather without taking up the valuable space of a basketball court, soccer field, or an 18 hole golf course. Maybe in the future we’ll just be working out to keep our bodies fit so that we can work out some more. No drama, no competition, just repetition. Bor-ing. Better enjoy the drama and competition while you can. For the next few weeks Hyde Park Theatre is hosting FronteraFest, a monthlong festival of fringe theatre that includes nearly every kind of performance imaginable: dance, improv, multimedia, music, films – you name it. This Saturday is the first Best of the Week, a night of performances selected as the best by audiences from each night of the previous week. Performances are short and snappy, clocking in at 25 minutes or less – about the same amount of time you would spend on a treadmill at the gym but less repetitive.

Fronterafest Short Fringe Best of the Week

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SAT., JAN. 28, 2006

It would be a serious chain yank to tell you that you’re going to love everything you see at the Best of the Week FronteraFest show Saturday night at the Hyde Park Theatre. There will be ugliness. There will be a few gaffes, bloopers, and outtakes. There will be quiet, awkward moments when the dramatic ball is dropped, when you feel a vicarious blossom of sweat tickle your philtrim, when the fidgety creak of chairs and muffled coughs provide the only auditory signals that a performance is taking place. Hey, this ain’t 42nd and Broadway, it’s 43rd and Guadalupe. The neighborhood may seem safer, but it isn’t – at least not artistically. FronteraFest is the cutting edge of experimental theatre, and when you’re on the cutting edge, you have to expect a little abrasion. So if the avant garde doesn’t flip your switch, or if you’re not even sure what avant garde is, this may not be your festival. You may want to hold out for Winedale. If however, you don’t mind a little schmutz on your Technicolor Dream Coat or more to the point, if your dream coat is sort of a patchy, rabbit fur jacket kind of affair, you should feel right at home. If you’re on the fence, it should comfort you somewhat to know that Saturday’s Best of the Week show is the crème de la crème of this week’s Short Fringe, so even if it seems really atrocious, you may rejoice in knowing that some unlucky sap had to sit through something even worse earlier in the week. That ought to turn your frown upside down.

X-Mas Unwrapped! A Holiday Burlesque

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FRI., DEC. 2, 2005

You know what Christmas doesn’t have enough of? Nudity. Cold weather notwithstanding, Christmas just isn’t a very skin-centric holiday. Oddly, even Jesus isn’t wearing his birthday suit in most nativity scenes. He’s all swaddled up like a mummy. Can’t have the baby Jesus spazzing out and doing the Macarena or thrashing around trying to latch onto Mary’s milkbags. That would be unGodly, wouldn’t it? Really the only ones going native in the nativity scene are the cherubim, who appear to be blissfully freeballing despite a humiliating degree of shrinkage. Maybe it’s because they pioneered arrested development. Of course, back in the BC angels couldn’t just send off for a complimentary trial-sized sample of Levitra. They had to get their bone on the old-fashioned way, and a mangerful of farm animals, wiseguys, hay and placenta probably wasn’t doing the trick. Angels just aren’t freaky like that anyway. Remember Sodom? The original Sin City? Lot tried to offer up his daughters to keep the randy citizenry from “knowing” the angels he was hiding in his house. Wow. Talk about literally leaning over and taking one for the team. Without a lot of theological stretching, it can be safely deduced that angels don’t vacation in Amsterdam or Thailand and that they’re pretty much chill about not rocking big timber. Clearly God is not a size queen, but back in the day He had a thing against tan lines. Adam? Eve? Garden? Serpent? Quince? Yes, God loves us, but he loves us better naked. So, if you’re looking to add a little holiness to your Holiday season, look no further than the Hyde Park Theatre, where this Friday the Jingle Belles will be performing X-Mas Unwrapped! A Holiday Burlesque. Think about it: All the shameless schlock of Christmas dressed down and done dirty by six bawdy burlesque babes. Hallelujah!

FronteraFest Short Fringe Best of Show

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SAT., JAN. 24, 2004

If you have been here long enough, you probably already know it, but if you haven’t, here’s Austin’s dirty little secret: There are a lot of bad musicians in this town. No, really – a lot. For every Eric Johnson, Redd Volkaert, and Rich Brotherton, there are literally hundreds, possibly thousands of blundering hacks who, through ego, love, or a dangerous mixture of both, keep plugging away in relative obscurity. In this respect, Austin isn’t all that different than the rest of America or even the world. What makes Austin anomalous is that, by and large, we embrace the ugliness, even celebrate it. Why? Because, metaphorically speaking, you have to go through a lot of oysters to find that rare pearl. From the outside it seems that Austin is somehow disproportionately blessed with a wealth of talent, musical and otherwise, but the reality is that other places just aren’t willing to open the oysters. Austin has the reputation (deservedly so) of a place that is willing to try new and different things. Probably this is because so many people move here because they want to create something new and different. The price we pay is swallowing all of those oysters – so many in fact that we learn to appreciate the oyster as much as the pearl. That is the quintessence of the Austin aesthetic and generally it carries across all of our creative endeavors. If you can’t appreciate that, you’re probably living in the wrong burg. If you think you’re on that train, but aren’t sure, you can prove your mettle this weekend at the 11th anniversary FronteraFest. FronteraFest is Hyde Park Theatre’s festival celebrating theatrical performance of all kinds: monologues, plays, dance, improv, music, multimedia – a veritable hodgepodge of dramatic arts. The festival is primarily held in two venues: the Blue Theater in East Austin, which hosts the Long Fringe (works up to 90 minutes in length), and Hyde Park Theatre, which hosts the Short Fringe (works up to 20 minutes in length). The timid may find the Short Fringe more palatable if only for the fact that if it’s bad, it’s only 20 minutes of bad. Plus, for those with a short attention span, the Short Fringe tends to be a little faster paced and at times over the top as performers go for the quick, big payoff. There is also one additional venue called the BYOV (Bring Your Own Venue) whereby performers provide their own venue. This weekend’s is at the garage apartment next to Sandy’s Custard. You may not have the sand to dive in at that level yet, and that’s OK. Fortunately for you, Hyde Park Theatre’s Short Fringe offers a Best of the Fest show on Saturday that reprises the best performances from that week’s festival. It’s a great way to tiptoe into the Austin aesthetic gingerly and with a healthy amount of reservation. After all, oysters aren’t for everyone.

Boom Town

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JULY 19, 2002

Just a stone’s throw from the corner of 43rd and Guadalupe is a small, one story brick building that houses the Hyde Park Theatre. If you burn around that corner like most people, you’ll probably miss the beautifully painted mural of the Austin skyline on the West side of the building. What will more likely catch your attention are the orange road cones placed on the edge of the street to keep motorists from mowing down the intermission crowd. Like the neighborhood in which it resides, the Hyde Park Theatre is old and a little funky, but the folks inside are usually up to something new and interesting. This Friday is the opening night for “Boom Town,” a play penned by actor Jeff Daniels, the same beloved Jeff from films like “Dumb and Dumber” and “Something Wild.” Over the last decade, Jeff has been cranking out original plays for his Purple Rose Theatre, located in his hometown of Chelsea, Michigan.. “Boom Town” isn’t exactly a comedy, nor is it the David and David hit song, although interestingly enough David Baerwald of the aforementioned has recently made Hyde Park his home. Boom Town the play is about love triangle gone bad in a small Midwestern town and has been hailed as one of Daniel’s finest. This production, directed by Don Bradley, stars Margaret Hoard, Ken Bradley, and J. Damian Gillen looks to be well worth the $10 advance admission. If you’re still waiting on that Pharmaco check, you can take advantage of Thursday night’s “Pay-What-You-Wish” preview ($5 minimum).