One of the hallmark strengths of Suzan Lori Parks' work is her ability to translate and make achingly familiar the foreign or estranged through simple, thick, and omnipresent metaphor. In In The Blood, one of her two riffs on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Hester, an illiterate homeless mother of five children by five different fathers, struggles to "get a leg up" on an impossible terrain. Wading through the mire of the welfare, medical, and social systems, she strains against those who only use her but claim she taxes them. Dehumanized, most literally via a court-advised removal of her "woman's parts", and improbably hopeful, she strives to learn the alphabet but never gets past the letter "A". A pair of shoes she refuses to wear until she has the finery to match are a sore reminder of what she might've had and cannot have, as are her children. Parks double casts the various men and women that manipulate and rely upon the heroine as her progeny, underlining the dependency and vulnerability inherent in the role of "victimizer". In the proper mouths, incantations of these "little spells" (as she calls combinations of words) pummel, corrode, and malleate the audience's perception of what poverty really means and what victimhood really entails. more ›

We’ve already brought to your attention most of this week’s theatre and dance openings, but here’s a quick refresher, just in case you haven’t been paying attention: We Are Normal, Cha Cha Chaaa: a new dance epic from the Yellow Tape Construction Co featuring Cari P from Fancy Feast and Belaire. Read our preview, or check out our photos. At Home With Dick 2: the Dick Price musical. All singing, all dancing, Alzheimer’s. Check... more ›

As mentioned in last week's TWIT, the Black Arts Movement Festival, presented by ProArts Collective, is Austinist's Pick of the Week this week. The Chronicle and the Statesman have also made good mention of the fest, but to catch up the few of you who've yet to get the skinny on this event, here's what's going on. For the next two weeks, BAM brings to Austin an awesome smorgasbord of performance art by African... more ›

Because most performance companies create their budgets on a fall-to-spring season, September and October generally see hordes of productions by our local theatre-makers chompin’ at the bit after a summer of relative tranquility. With the B. Iden Payne nominations and Austinist’s own Best Theatre in Austin picks officially announced, it’s time to leave 05/06 behind us, and head charging off into new theatrical waters. (Or something.) This week’s Austinist Pick of the Week is... more ›

I was going to launch into an all-out, play-by-play description of everything that went down over the weekend. You know: the booze, parties, music, and whatever. How it was “all so crazy! And then [boom!] and then [Pow!!] and ohhhh snap: [BAM!!!!]” But there are two things that are really holding me back. more ›