Beverly Weston, the elderly poet patriarch of a white collar Oklahoma family, hires a young Cheyenne woman, Johnna, as a live-in caretaker for the home he shares with his cancer-sick wife, Violet. His subsequent disappearance brings his three daughters, Barbara, Ivy, and Karen, back under their mother's hot, tomblike roof. Toss in their helmet-haired aunt Mattie Fae and the rest of the extended family and the house is a tinderbox by the time of the inevitable funeral. more ›

Someone must have liked Chuck Norris’s autobiography, right? Even if you’re a member of the NRA and just signed up for beginner Tae Kwon Do, in order to READ such a book you must be literate which suggests you have read other books. So you should be able to recognize how bad Norris’s book is. Still, someone must have read it and found something in it to enjoy. Right? As a matter of fact, writer/performer Eugene Pack and Dayle Reyfel are leading a new group of celebrity connoisseurs of perhaps the single worst genre of so-called literature in a wildly successful reality theater experiment: Celebrity Autobiography. more ›

The costumes! The cleavage! The shoes! All at House of Several Stories and that was just the audience. Okay, so maybe a review-of-crowd is not pertinent to review-of-show except, hello, this is Austin where dressing up usually means wearing your newest Crocs and maybe a t-shirt with sleeves. So it must be noted that the crowd that showed up to take in John Boulanger’s House of Several Stories at the Austin Playhouse last week was dressed to the nines (times ten). As was—at least for most of the evening, Lauren Lane, who, in the roll of Fuller Family Matriarch, Sue, sports some pretty fucking stunning duds courtesy of costumer Jillan Hanel. And let’s get a bit more about Lane on the table at the front end here. In a recent A.O. Scott review of Julie & Julia in NYT, Mr. Scott notes that Meryl Streep is so beyond outstanding in any role she takes that it’s almost a shame for those who must be in the same film—no matter how memorable they are in their own right, in Streep’s shadow, well, it’s impossible not to pale. Similarly, Lane is so enchanting, such an astonishing comic actress, such a gift to this city (nay—the stage that is the world!) that not only is she a hard act to follow, she’s a hard act to stand beside. more ›

Oh. My. God. People—you must, mustmustMUST go see The Clean House at Zach Scott Theater immediately. Whether you literally have some sort of OCD that prompts you into unstoppable cleaning sprees or are more of the metaphorical sort who's forever trying to tidy up this wicked, funny, messy thing called life, this show is for you. Smaranda Ciceu plays Mathilde, the hilariously sad twentysomething Brazilian housekeeper who hates to clean. This proves to be problematic for her power-achiever MD employer, Lane, played to perfection by Lauren Lane. On the other hand, it provides a thrill for Lane’s neatnik sister, Virginia (Barbara Chisolm) who lives to dust, scrub and rearrange. Tom Green who doubles as both the ghost of Mathilde’s father and as Charles, Lane’s nutty husband—also an MD— has got obsessions of his own. And Ana (Alicia Kaplan) also pulls double duty as the ghost of Mathilde’s mother and, among other things, Charles’ distracting (to put it mildly) patient. more ›