fbpx Austin | HowlRound Theatre Commons

Austin

A Way of Saying Yes

You can’t be in Austin very long without hearing someone wax lyrical about the Armadillo World Headquarters. If you’re not familiar with that legendary venue, just know that the grandiose name was another bit of River City irreverence, gussying up an abandoned National Guard armory and bestowing global significance on the luckless varmint too blind to see a pickup bearing down on him as he crossed some farm to market road. Even so, the ‘Dillo was a cultural—make that countercultural—hub in Austin throughout the seventies, a venue that played host to as eclectic an array of acts as the city had seen up to that time: rock, blues, country, comedy, jazz, punk, folk, reggae—hell, even the ballet. I mention this not to indulge in nostalgic narcissism about how much cooler Austin used to be back when—as time-honored a tradition as that is in our town—but to offer a seminal example of an expansiveness of identity that’s long influenced Austin’s creative scene. One of the great legacies of the Armadillo was how it served as a crossroads for the country and rock scenes. At a time when long hair and pot could get you a serious whuppin’ in a lot of places in Texas, the ‘Dillo was a spot where you could be a cowboy and a hippie. And where the two fused—as with the scene’s most renowned and proudest “outlaw” artist, Willie Nelson—something fresh came into the world and flourished.

The notion of the hyphenate theatre artist hadn’t had a lot of traction in Austin up to that point; generally speaking, playwrights wrote, actors acted, and directors told everybody what to do. But the triumph of Tuna alerted local thespians that they could wear more than one hat in the theatre, and the idea really began to gain ground after the unexpected popularity of a locally generated play of monologues.

The interior of Armadillo World Headquarters, where a band rehearses on stage while the house is empty.
The inside of Armadillo World Headquarters. Photo by Armadillo World Headquarters.

 

Theatre wasn’t really part of the ‘Dillo’s multifarious menu, but the willingness to break free of traditional roles and embrace multiple identities has been just as alive on Austin’s stage scene since that time. In the early eighties, a couple of out-of-work actors in need of some cash figured to take some characters they’d regaled friends with at parties and throw them on stage. The play struck a chord, and not just locally; within a half-dozen years, it was the most produced play in the United States, and nowadays you’d be hard-pressed to find a corner of the country that hasn’t seen some version of Greater Tuna. Of course, those actors, Joe Sears and Jaston Williams, wouldn’t have had that success or been able to parlay it into a theatrical franchise (with three sequels), tour the shows coast to coast for thirty years (with runs off and on Broadway and a pair of command performances at the White House), or create any of their non-Tuna projects (Williams’ autobiographical solo shows I’m Not Lying, Cowboy Noises, and Camping With Gasoline; Sears’ The Kansas Open and Trail of Tears) had they believed they had to sit and wait for someone to cast them in order to get work in the theatre. That they were willing to cast themselves as playwrights made all the difference.

The notion of the hyphenate theatre artist hadn’t had a lot of traction in Austin up to that point; generally speaking, playwrights wrote, actors acted, and directors told everybody what to do. But the triumph of Tuna alerted local thespians that they could wear more than one hat in the theatre, and the idea really began to gain ground after the unexpected popularity of a locally generated play of monologues. The company members of Big State Productions had seen an exhibit of Richard Avedon’s portraits of westerners and disliked them so intensely that they decided to create a play in response, one with their own portraits of westerners drawn in soliloquies. To ensure that everyone had an equal hand in the show’s creation, Big State’s artistic director Jim Fritzler set it up so each company member wrote a monologue, which was handed off to another company member to perform, and a third company member to direct. It didn’t matter how much or how little experience anyone had in any area; for this project, everyone would be a playwright-actor-director. The show might have been little more than a curious theatrical exercise had it not become a roaring hit. In the West was revived a dozen times over several years owing to popular demand; toured to Dallas and Fort Worth; was one of only two theatrical productions to be invited to the Kennedy Center’s festival of Texas culture in 1990; and adapted into an indie film. The response was so positive that several Big Staters were inspired to write and perform multiple-character monologue shows of their own, and when locals embraced those, too, other theatre artists in Austin began to join in the fun. In the West premiered in 1985, and by the time Bush 41 retired to Houston, Austin stages had seen some two dozen homegrown solo shows. And no one here gave two hoots about whether an actor had the right to write a play or a director to perform. Austin’s other theatre artists—and more crucially, its audiences—were totally accepting of the artist who was creative in more than one way. Go ahead and experiment, they were saying. We’ll support you.

That sense of support for artistic experimentation has been continually reinforced in Austin’s theatre scene every few years. When Vicky Boone, Annie Suite, and Jason Phelps founded Frontera Productions in 1992, a key component of their company was a nonjuried fringe festival. You’d pay a fee and get twenty-five minutes of stage time to do whatever you wanted—no restrictions. From the outset, FronteraFest became a research lab for performing artists aching to try new things: actors writing plays, playwrights writing poetry, poets dancing, dancers acting… Even people who had never set foot on a stage felt they had a safe place in which to make a theatrical statement. The festival thrived and this year celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Of course, that kind of longevity for a theatrical free-for-all is worthy of a fist bump, but it’s also indicative of how Austin has institutionalized a way of saying “yes” to people seeking to expand their creative identities.

In recent years, the University of Texas Department of Theatre & Dance has extended that opportunity to its students with the David Mark Cohen New Works Festival. Founded to honor the former head of its playwriting program—himself a man of many hyphens: educator-working playwright-critic—the fest devotes a week to student-generated works. Every other spring, classes stop for five days so students can present original plays, dances, design installations, and works that mash them together in theatres, outside theatres, under theatres, wherever—pretty much anything goes, and the creators need not be restricted to their theatrical area of focus. Venturing into unexplored territories is encouraged, and the blurring of disciplinary boundaries is as much the rule as the exception. That’s just as true of Fusebox Festival, an annual celebration of experimental work where mashing up mediums is prized: dance-theatre, theatre-art, art-music, music-food. Projects and productions are curated from around the country and outside it, but work that’s made in Austin figures heavily in the festival—not because of hometown boosterism but because a significant part of the local scene is always restlessly playing with form and content, mixing this medium and that in the Erlenmeyer flask of performance and seeing if it fizzes or explodes.

Another lesson in ancient Austin history bears mentioning at this point: Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, the men behind The Fantasticks, didn’t write that half-century stage sensation here, but they might not have written it anywhere had they not met in Austin. Both had grown up in little Texas towns that had little use for theatre, and they spent most of their early years as lonely outsiders. Because the big state university was in Austin, this was where they came to school, and once here they discovered they weren’t alone in their love of the stage. The city was a magnet for all the drama queens and geeks stranded in the Tunas of the Lone Star State, and it offered them a space where they all could pursue their theatrical dreams together. Jones and Schmidt found in each other the perfect partner for making musical theatre, and they went on to build an extraordinary career together. Theirs is a story that's been repeated over and over again in the generations since: artists who clicked when working on a project and kept making theatre together for years and years. Just one example: The Rude Mechanicals, the audacious collective responsible for the stage adaptation of Lipstick Traces and the Blanche-less, Stella-less, Stanley-less Streetcar in The Method Gun, is closing in on its second decade as a company and, remarkably, all six of its founding members are still on board as co-producing artistic directors, still making theatre together in spectacularly collaborative fashion.

See, Austin is a relatively easy city in which to find creative collaborators. Very few arts companies operate as closed shops or isolate themselves from the rest of the community. Consequently, artists are free to work on stages all over town, to move among companies making different kinds of theatre and find the artists with whom they’re simpatico. And whether it’s a small-town neighborliness left over from the city’s long stint as a sleepy college town or the laid-back hippie ethos that took root in the ‘Dillo days or, as some of Austin's detractors claim, a simple lack of ambition in the slackers who roost here, local artists of like mind would rather cooperate than compete. “You like puppets? I like puppets! Why don’t we team up on a puppet adaptation of, say, Infinite Jest?” (Not that anyone has actually attempted such a version of Infinite Jest here, but since Austin’s ambitious puppeteers have staged adaptations of The Jungle, Riddley Walker, and Macbeth, it may be only a matter of time.) Get two or more of these unbound-by-boundaries types on deck, and they’re liable to start bouncing crazy what-ifs off each other—especially if there are longnecks or other mood-enhancing substances handy—and, before you know it, boom, something you hadn’t thought possible materializes onstage. (See, again, Rude Mechs’ Lipstick Traces, The Method Gun.)

Now, the Armadillo World Headquarters didn’t even survive into the eighties, but the spirit that keeps it enshrined in local culture is very much alive, and in the rapidly expanding Austin of today, it’s inspiring Austin’s theatre scene to expand beyond the old artist/audience divide, beyond the geographic boundaries of the city.

None of this is to suggest that Austin is the only city where artists feel free to work in more than one area of the theatre or can find like-minded collaborators or are making experimental performance. Sure, other cities have larger theatre scenes, produce more original work, and boast creative partnerships with much longer credits than the ones in our town. But to the extent that Austin has something going for it in the realm of theatre and people want to know how it got that way, or how to transplant its vibe to their own cities, this is a major part of Austin's appeal. My longtime colleague Michael Barnes, who has since left the theatre beat to cover the larger community from a social perspective, has called Austin an “open city,” and that feels right. There’s an openness to change, to new people, new ideas, and new ways of doing things. And because so many traditional barriers between people, groups, or methodologies either don’t exist or are ignored, there’s an openness of movement that makes it all the easier for someone to range all over the place, to seek out the horizon, and for others to strike out for it alongside him or follow his trail. When openness is as deeply embedded in the culture as it is in Austin, creativity and innovation come much more naturally. They’re as much a part of the landscape—and as profuse—as bluebonnets in April.

Now, the Armadillo World Headquarters didn’t even survive into the eighties, but the spirit that keeps it enshrined in local culture is very much alive, and in the rapidly expanding Austin of today, it’s inspiring Austin’s theatre scene to expand beyond the old artist/audience divide, beyond the geographic boundaries of the city. More companies are bringing the audience more actively into the action of the play, finding ways for them not only to work with the performers but with one another. In the past year, both the Rude Mechs and the Hidden Room Theatre have developed works in which the people who came to see the show were encouraged to work together to solve a mystery. In the Rudes’ Now Now Oh Now, audience members joined forces to decode messages in an old-school interactive quest. Hidden Room’s The Girl With Time in Her Eyes, on the other hand, took advantage of new tech, inviting audiences to use their smartphones to scan QR codes that would lead them to text messages, websites, and even a voicemail message providing clues to the play’s noirish mystery—clues that excited audience members couldn’t resist sharing with one another in order to piece together the full puzzle. This followed a Hidden Room coproduction with the British company Look Left Look Right in which audiences in Austin and audiences in London took part in the drama of a long-distance romance via a Skype connection. That show demonstrated vividly how theatre need no longer be split between those on the stage and those in the house but also how theatre need no longer be restricted to a single space. A performance can truly be global.

That’s where I see Austin theatre moving today: toward global perspectives. What’s the largest view we can take of our art form? Within an individual production, that might be all the company members sharing fully in a play’s creation, assembling a vision together, as seen in numerous student productions at this year’s Cohen New Works Festival. Within the theatre scene, that might be bringing together all entities that share a creative interest, as is happening with the New Works Theater Community, an alliance of companies and individual artists that all share a dedication to original work. Within the field, it's pursuing new directions in audience interaction and technological and social media applications for performance purposes, as with the Rudes and Hidden Room, and international collaborations, as with Hidden Room, Fusebox, and with Breaking String Theater’s exchange work with contemporary playwrights in Russia. A long, long time ago, Austin stopped respecting borders and barriers, rules and restrictions, and nowadays the future for theatre is as wide open as can be.

 

Bookmark this page

Log in to add a bookmark
Thoughts from the curator

An overview of the theatre scene in Austin.

Austin, Texas

Comments

4
Add Comment

The article is just the start of the conversation—we want to know what you think about this subject, too! HowlRound is a space for knowledge-sharing, and we welcome spirited, thoughtful, and on-topic dialogue. Find our full comments policy here

Newest First

This is a lovely and thoughtful look at Austin theatre's willingness to make magic together that goes beyond borders of all kinds. And thanks so much for the shout out to HIdden Room and Look Left Look Right!