Austinist: Austinist Theatre Review: At Home With Dick 2

Jooley Ann

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 17:44:44 -0600

Brenner, you're quite welcome & thx for your comments. I've been mulling them over b/c, indeed, where is that line between brilliance and everything being fucked? I don't know...it's quite mysterious to me. Interestingly my husband and I had just that conversation following not At Home With Dick 2, but We Are Normal, Cha Cha Chaaa. We loved the performance, but it was very abstract, and abstraction can so easily slide from great to soooo not great. We couldn't pin down why the abstract things we've hated (and believe me, there was a list) were hateful, nor could we identify precisely what worked in the things we loved. As for AHWD2, most of our drive-time conversation revolved around how amazing we thought Dick was, and how odd a life he must lead, being able to draw 50+ paid visitors into his home each weekend by sheer force of talent. Dick Price isn't cult of personality, contrary to what public perception might be. It must be both gratifying and...strange to have that kind of talent. Freakydiva, you're adorable. Josh, you make me laugh out loud with your response to "the boys at Rubber Repertory." The overly sensitive, feminist side of me really paused over that phraseology, worrying about its ageism and sexism. Then I thought, "Those boys won't mind!" I'm such a snotty old sow.

Josh

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 15:12:54 -0600

Thanks for making it out on opening weekend. Glad you enjoy Mr. Price as much as we do. Also, we love that you called us "the boys at Rubber Repertory." Makes us think of our idols--Stan and Ollie. TB@RR

freakydiva

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 15:27:22 -0600

Thanks for a great review. I saw it this past weekend and was both moved and delighted by Dick Price's stories/songs. I also saw last year's romp and I couldn't believe that this year's show is even funnier. The other night, when Dick asked us to sing him into the next room, we too gladly obliged. I guess I was singing too loudly, because he chastised me for trying to steal the show from him. I might of been offended coming from anyone else, but he's just too loveable! Dick price is a God in the realm of "in his own home theater!" ROCK ON Dick Price, and ROCK ON Rubber Repertory!

Brenner

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 11:45:50 -0600

Jooley Ann, you said: " The skeptic in us thought, "Yeah, okay. A kind of weird dude plays a bunch of kind of funny songs for a kind of long time." That couldn't be further from the truth. " That's the whole thing right there, in absolute precision. The IDEA of Dick Price gets this immediate pigeonholing in a person's mind, while the actual EXPERIENCE of Dick Price and his music expands a mind beyond such pigeonholes and makes any attendant hype seem like pale understatement. Pardon me for going on, but this is one of my Things here: How a performance or a static artwork could, so easily, shade into something less than engaging and meaningful ... how it could do this in so many different ways, because it's skirting a certain border of ordinariness or kitsch or whatever, and all an artist has to do is make one wrong move and it's all fucked ... and yet some of the most effective artworks are those which, consciously or not, constantly skirt these very borders but without the artist EVER making the wrong choice and sliding away from brilliance... (Wes Anderson's movies, say, can provide any number of vibrant examples of this, both pro and con.) Ah, I still have to do a lot of exploring in the territory of these thoughts, besides wrangling the grammmar to map it with ... Thank you for such a cogent review!