Beyond the biggies

Drama outside the District: From Stoppard to the vibrator play to QB crime,great theater stretches Houston's boundaries

Tom Stoppard's "Utopia" trilogy won seven Tony Awards for its New Yorkproduction. Now Houston will become the first U.S. city outside of the Big Appleto stage all three productions.
The Wonderettes are getting a sequel.
Ensemble has a play about the Lotto's "luck."
Main Street will put on one about a beloved quarterback who's committed a"senseless crime." Not that it's based on anyone in real life.

The 18th annual Theater District Open House happens Sunday, allowing Houston’s biggest performing arts organizations to — sometimes literally — toot their own horns about their upcoming 2011-2012 seasons.

These performance giants certainly deserve their day-long preview celebration, but when it comes to H-Town’s great live theater, it can’t be confined to one district. This might be a good time to remember some of the other companies that might be upstaged during this time of year.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the 2011-2012 drama outlook for some our outside-the-District theaters.

Stages Repertory Theatre

Winter musicals and a one-woman show keep Stages busy for the rest of the year. In October, one of Stages’ favorites actors, Susan O. Koozin, plays seven different characters with seven different perspectives on the same event in Robert Hewett’s The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead. Then when November hopefully brings some cooler weather, Stages will be ready with two musical comedies, The Winter Wonderettes and a Panto Red Riding Hood.

Stages kept extending the run of The Marvelous Wonderettes last season, so it’s no surprise that it's presenting a sequel. Its yearly offering of a new Panto play is a good antidote to those of us who like a little holiday cheer but have had enough of the same traditional shows every year. 

Once the year turns, Stages will stage an intriguing mix of contemporary plays. Playwright and television writer Craig Wright depicts the life of a Broadway producer in the comedy Mistakes Were Made. In recent years, The Alley Theatre has produced several of Sarah Ruhl’s works, like Clean House and Eurydice, but in March it’s Stages who will probably excite audiences with her more recent play: In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play, which wins my vote for most memorable title of the season.

Next up is an earlier play from one of today’s most acclaimed female playwrights, Yasmina Reza and her The Unexpected Man. The season ends with the 2009 Tony winning musical, Next to Normal.

Ensemble Theatre

The 2011-2012 season also just happens to be the 35th anniversary of Ensemble, the Southwest’s oldest African-American theatre. Ensemble begins with Cliff Roquemore’s Lotto, a play that looks at how one stroke of 10 million dollar luck can change a family. The theatre rings out 2011 with the African American Shakespeare Company’s adaptation of Cinderella, like Stage’s Panto, a welcome bit of holiday show variety.

2012 begins with Ifa Bayeza’s Edgar Award winning The Ballad of Emmett Till, a play Ensemble describes as a work “told through contemporary prose with the infusion of jazz.” Then, contemporary life in an African-American barbershop is depicted in Charles Randolph Wright’s comedy Cuttin’ Up. Over many seasons Ensemble has been working its way through the 10 plays of the late, very great, Pulitzer Prize and Tony-winning playwright August Wilson’s Pittsburgh (or Century) Cycle.

In May, Ensemble completes the project with King Hedley II. It ends the season with Javon Johnson’s “gospel comedy” Sanctified.

Main Street Theater

Main Street might have the city’s most ambitious seasons as it takes on several world premieres, attempts a Tom Stoppard trilogy and continues its relationship with the Prague Shakespeare Festival. Main Street begins the season in September with the world premiere Woof by Y York about a beloved quarterback who commits a “senseless crime” on camera.

With a title like Woof it will be interesting to see if the play is based on any real life people or events.

The other world premiere, the two-woman play Cakewalk by Nalsey Tinberg depicts the relationship between a Holocaust refugee and her American daughter.

The New York production of Utopia won seven Tonys and Main Street will be the first United States theatre outside New York to produce all three plays in the series. 

On Jan. 12, Main Street rings in the new year with the production I’m personally most excited about, Sir Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia trilogy. The three-play set “chronicles a group of real-life Russian intellectuals dreaming of revolution” between 1833-1866.

Stoppard tends to create plays that truly play with ideas, ranging from quantum physics and chaos theory to history and economics to the nature of reality and memory, but his characters are always nuanced and alive, never just flat representatives for those abstract ideas. The New York production of Utopia won seven Tonys and Main Street will be the first United States theatre outside New York to produce all three plays in the series. 

Spring brings another co-production with the Prague Shakespeare Festival and one of the best loved of Shakespeare’s villains, Richard III. In May, the official season ends with the regional premier of the Alan Ayckbourn comedy, My Wonderful Day, which tells the “recommended for mature audiences due to profanity” story of 9-year-old Winnie’s wonderful day.

Still not enough theatre to fill your every evening and weekend?  In September, Catastrophic Theatre performs Mickle Maher’s There is a Happiness That Morning Is, with dialogue spoken entirely in rhymed verse. And then in December, Catastrophic brings to Diverse Works Obie award-winning Lisa D’Amour’s Anna Bella Eema, a “ghost story to be spoken and sung.”

If cabaret is more your thing, one of Houston’s newest theater companies, Music Box Theater celebrates Damaged Divas of the Decades in the fall and then puts another new holiday production under the city’s tree with Fruitcakes.

Want to help influence a company’s play selection process? Check out Mildred's Umbrella’s Fresh Ink Reading Series

And if you’d rather not be warned your evening is recommended for mature audiences, head over to the A.D Players, where founder Jeannette Clift George’s comedy Faces begins in September and the Blue Ridge Mountains set musical Foxfire goes on stage in February.

Whew, that’s an abundance of drama, comedy and musicals to choose from, yet it’s only a partial summary of what the 2011-2012 season holds. We have almost as many theatre (and theater) companies as we do bayous, so keep the CultureMap Events Calendar bookmarked and hold on for a very dramatic performance year.

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Movie Review

Daniel Craig shines in Queer, an unapologetic tale of love and loss

Photo courtesy of A24

Drew Starkey and Daniel Craig in Queer.

As recently as the late 2010s, if a movie was made about an LGBTQ+ character, it was more than likely about their coming out experience. Romance, if it existed, was typically chaste, and actual sex was almost completely out of the question. Things have changed dramatically in the 2020s, to the point that a major movie star has no issue starring in a film called Queer.

Based on the 1985 novella by William S. Burroughs, the film features William Lee (Daniel Craig), whom everyone calls just Lee, a writer living in 1950s-era Mexico City who spends most of his time haunting local bars with friends like fellow writer Joe Guidry (Jason Schwartzman) and hitting on younger men. His early interactions in the film seem to indicate that Lee has a bad reputation within the local gay community, as multiple people avoid him or give him odd looks.

Lee senses an opportunity when he encounters a newcomer, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). Despite some awkward interactions, the two of them start spending time together, although Lee has much more invested in the relationship than Eugene does. Their hit-and-miss bond continues until Lee, who’s starting to get into drugs in addition to the booze, convinces Eugene to accompany him on a trip to South America.

Directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by Justin Kuritzkes (making their second straight film together after Challengers), early on the film seems to be mostly about the divide between an older person who’s grown comfortable in his ways and a younger person who’s living a relatively carefree life. The introduction of drugs into the plot changes things, though, with Lee searching out more ways to open his eyes to what the world has to offer.

Guadagnino and his team use some interesting visual storytelling techniques to introduce ideas that may not be present in the actual script. The most successful, demonstrated in multiple scenes, is the superimposition of movements by Lee over what’s actually taking place in the scene. The subtle overlay gives the audience insight into Lee’s true feelings, showing what he can’t or won’t say out loud.

Music also plays a big part in how the plot is perceived, with the use of anachronistic songs from Nirvana and Prince serving to heighten certain moments. The score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is not as in-your-face as the one they did for Challengers, but it complements the film well, especially when the plot starts to get trippy in its final half hour.

Craig, who appears sweaty and disheveled for much of the film, is about as far from the suaveness of James Bond as you can get in this role. He takes multiple risks with his performance and almost all of them pay off. Starkey’s character is subdued by comparison, but still comes off well. Schwartzman and Lesley Manville are given showy roles, with both using altered appearances that make them nearly unrecognizable to deliver memorable performances.

Queer is not as accessible as Challengers was storytelling-wise, but the fact that it tells a story about gay men living their lives as they see fit with no interference or questions shows how far the film world has come in a short period of time. It also continues Guadagnino’s streak of making audacious films in a way that few other filmmakers are willing or able to approach.

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Queer is now playing in theaters.

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