Review: Muses at a Private Residence
You know those sampler CDs you get at bars or have shoved into your face by record label muggers during SXSW? Some record label unites a broad swatch of acts loosely linked by the fact that their albums are all shipped from under the same roof, and maybe a similar aesthetic. No one we know likes everything you get on one of those samplers, but it's hard not to find a song or two that'll turn your crank, especially when the label behind a given compilation is one that focuses more on curating a small base of artists they believe in than when they take the scattershot approach.
Austin theater puts on samplers every so often, too. Muses III: Memories of a House, is the new one from the Vestige Group, featuring a broad swatch of Austin theater's talent curated by one of the city's finest incubators of said talent.
With four directors—Vestige mainstay Susie Gidseg (Touch), Will Hollis Snider (Orestes), and first-timers Aaron Black and Jen Brown—eleven playwrights, and fifteen actors performing eleven short plays, Muses succeeds at assembling a sampler that delivers an above-average hit-to-miss ratio. Which, given the mixtape-like nature of the evening, is a pretty strong compliment.
Not every piece in this setting is going to hit, but only a few really miss. The better pieces—like Spilled Milk, directed by Brown and written by Bastion Carboni, or Max Langert's vaguely surreal A Little Beethoven, directed by Gidseg—revel in the constraints of short-form theater by introducing concepts and characters with a left-field bent that could never sustain a full play, and don't need to. Langert's piece, the most successful of the evening's seven monologues, stars Tracy Medberry as a divorcee with a dwarf fetish who encounters what she believes to be a tiny version of Beethoven himself in front of a toy piano during an open house. Medberry is a joy to watch in her bridge-and-tunnel accent—a director's choice that threatened to be grating, but which succeeded thanks to Medberry's sincerity in the role—and Langert's script is one of the few pieces in the show that attempted to make use of the setting, a mammoth 1970's Westlake house.
In fact, it's the lack of interaction with the house that disappoints most about Muses. The place is full of bold decorating choices, from a safari-themed basement—complete with a full zebra skin on the wall, and African masks decorating the space—but "Swallowing Gum", a fun piece by Charles Eichman about a couple involved in an unusually complicated makeout session, ignores the room entirely. Similarly, a strangely circus-like bedroom, with deep maroon carpeting and a silk spire of fabric in lieu of a ceiling, is neglected by "Bloody Mary", a monologue in which a woman (Kimberly Mead) mourns the death of her lover. The circumstances of the production may have made it difficult for the playwrights to enter the home—which belongs to an Austin couple—to base their work on the space, but if so, it diminishes the evening's stated goal of telling the house's story. A room like the one in which "Swallowing Gum" takes place has a story to tell, for sure, but the most interesting one is probably not about a horny couple.
But some of the seemingly slight pieces keep the evening interesting, and they shouldn't be dismissed. While "Poolside", by Marshall Ryan Maresca and directed by Black, doesn't attempt to mimic either the emotional punch of a piece like "Bloody Mary" or the sheer weirdness of "A Little Beethoven" and "Spilled Milk", instead opting for a sitcom-y bit of May-December flirtation, it's one of the more memorable and fun pieces of the evening. Black pulls a genuine and affecting performance out of Christa Haxthausen, as a 40-something housesitter enjoying a morning dip when the homeowners' college-aged son (Phillip Emmanuel) surprises her by returning early. The chemistry between the two is palpable, and it's a refreshingly charming piece. It's more interesting to watch theater that succeeds at being entertaining than work that fails at being moving.
Few pieces in Muses really fail, but the reflective monologues about heavy issues do have a fatiguing effect by the end of the evening. Of the eleven plays in the performance, only four of them feature more than one actor, and, at the risk of sounding callous, there are only so many times you can be led into a room and made to listen to a monologue about a dead family member or lover, and the four times it occurs in Muses serves to diminish each of them.
In the end, Muses comes off well, as far as samplers go, and it's some of the stand-out performances—from Haxthausen, Emmanuel and Medberry, as well as "Spilled Milk"'s Sarah Granger and "Swallowing Gum"'s Alexandra Kirklis and Chris Higgins—that keep the evening from coming off as, say, a mixtape that relies to heavily on power ballads. There are plenty of those, but there's enough fun to be had from the evening that it doesn't bog things down.
Muses runs through August 30th at a private residence. Tickets available online only at www.nowplayingaustin.com
