At Fusebox 2010, Austin's fearless theatermakers Rubber Repertory interviewed dozens of people for a new show based on a random person's life. Asking questions and taking "something that smells like you" from each interviewee, they selected Jamie Damon as their subject. After more conversations and sifting through the cache of belongings she offered up, Biography of Physical Sensation opened at Salvage Vanguard last fall. (Austinist's original review is here.) The show is back - this time at the Off Center's secondary space, the Off Shoot for Fusebox, with the final performances running from tonight through Saturday. Choose a small, medium, or large chair (the bigger the seat the more intense the experience) to be exposed to bits and pieces of one woman's life - purely through sensory inputs. There's no narrative, and every chair gets a different experience. more ›

The Casket of Passing Fancy is not a play, and it’s not, in any conventional sense, improv. It’s a hyper-participatory extravaganza of perpetual surprise, culminating in a theatrical experience that, like a psychedelic Choose Your Own Adventure story, tailors to each individual audience member’s taste, curiosity, or hunger. more ›

Salvage Vanguard Theater has announced its new season! // Rubber Repertory has started airing their dirty laundry in a new, recurring series called From the Dumpster, in which they confess to madcap ideas they seriously considered staging. // There's more than music to SXSW. more ›

Thirteen years after founding Salvage Vanguard Theater, Artistic Director Jason Neulander is stepping down. Neulander has grown SVT from a crazy little fringe collective to a powerhouse producer of cutting-edge works. No doubt it'll be very exciting to see what he gets into next. more ›

FRIDAY [25] party • The Onion's "Summer Fun Blast Blowout Extravaganza!" Party with Clap!Clap!, Crash Gallery, Devil in the Choir, DJ Rubix, Prince Klassen, and a chance to win a scooter from Scooter Revolution at Beauty Bar ($2, 9:30pm) theatre • Rubber Repertory presents A Thought in Three Parts at The Vortex (8pm) music • Emissions From the Monolith Fest at Emo's music • Voxtrot, Au Revoir Simone, The Black, Zykos at Emo's music... more ›

So much has been written about Rubber Repertory's US premiere of the Wallace Shawn play, A Thought in Three Parts, that you'd have to have been buried under a pile of rocks not to have heard of it. Closing this weekend at the Vortex, this naughty little show has garnered an unprecedented amount of press. So we're a bit late to the party, but we finally managed to get our butts in a seat at... more ›

THURSDAY [24] theatre • Rubber Repertory presents A Thought in Three Parts at The Vortex (8pm) music • Emissions From the Monolith Fest at Emo's music • Small Stars, Sounds Under Radio at Stubb's music • DJ Qbert, DJ Craze, DJ Klever, Table Manners Crew at The Parish music • Winovino, Bourbon Legends, Jett Mullens, Jaime Thomas at Beerland music • Morrissey Pre-Party with Andy Rourke! at The Mohawk music • Gulf of Mexico,... more ›

FRIDAY [18] festival • Asian Pacific American Heritage Month celebrations at Palmer Events Center (11:30am-1pm) party • Nightster Launch Party with Riverboat Gamblers at Scoot Inn (Free Bud 8-9pm, Show at 10pm, 21+) art • Closing Reception: The Puppet Show - Puppets and portraits of Mexican artists by fourth-grade students at Sanchez Elementary at Las Manitas Avenue Cafe, 211 Congress (4:30-6pm) books • Milton Burton presents The Sweet and the Dead at BookPeople (7:00pm)... more ›

THURSDAY [17] theatre • Rubber Repertory presents A Thought in Three Parts at The Vortex (8pm) art • Opening Reception: Denise Prince Martin: Things I Never Told You at Women and Their Work, 1710 Lavaca Street (6-8pm, the artist will discuss her work at 6:30pm) art • Downtown Art Night at Participating Galleries (6-9pm) art • Artist Talk: Ann Connor at Flatbed Press, 2830 E. MLK (6pm) art • Art Fix: Printmaking at The... more ›

FRIDAY [4] party/bikes • Yellow Bike Project's Second Annual Bike Art Show with music by DJ Orion, DJ Katherine at Gallery 1906 (Free, 7pm-Midnight) art • Opening Reception: memoria/memoir: Carol Flax at Volitant Gallery, 320 Congress Ave., Ste 100 (6-9pm) art • B Scene at the Blanton Museum of Art 1st Anniversary Celebration at Blanton Museum of Art, MLK at Congress ($5 members, $10 non-members, 6-11pm) art • Opening Reception: Tunnel Vision: Parading Down the... more ›

Some exciting news made its way to us earlier this week, and we've been remiss in keeping it from you! Rubber Repertory has added several holdover shows to the run of their smash hit At Home With Dick 2. Trust us, this is not a show you want to miss. And if for some odd reason you're not sure what we're talking about, check out our rave review. more ›

Welcome to the Halloween edition of This Week in Theatre, and the first time since we’ve been in Austin that some company hasn’t produced a play about mystical and spooky stuff to commemorate this festive occasion. So, in lieu of seeing a “horror” play this weekend—an event where busty blondes disappear for no reason, only to return later after a highly unfortunate series of events has stripped them down to their underwear; or, you... more ›

In spite of a rave review in the Austin Chronicle, we neglected to see last year's multi-nominated production, At Home With Dick. T'was a shame, so we were pleased to learn we'd get the chance to experience the Dick Price phenomenon after all. The boys at Rubber Repertory have once again palled up with Austin's master of the whippy-quick ditty to deliver an all-new musical treat to eager audiences. more ›

Dick. Price. The man featured regularly featured on Dr. Demento's radio show, the man who used to release new, weird-ass songs every day, free to all by calling his personal voicemail (he's since upgraded to posting them on the internet) -- this man, this great man, has teamed up with local underground theatre mayhem-makers, Rubber Repertory, and written a musical. Again. more ›

Spoiler alert: in this show, actors dress up like red cans and do stuff. That’s the long and the short of Rubber Repertory’s latest production with the straightforward title. For a show boldly proclaimed to the crowd as a “new breed of performance” by the guy that took our tickets (actor Lowell Bartholomee), the show is surprisingly safe (artistically speaking) – amounting to a rudimentary investigation of group dynamics, some X-Files moments, adolescent scare... more ›

A couple of shows with big phatty hype open this week. So ph-ph-phatty, that we’re bringing back the word phat (with a p.h. homeslice!) just to emphasize how phatty it really is. PHAT. PH. AT. Ok. Our Austinist Pick of the Week is a toss-up. Red Cans is the show the press just can’t get enough of. Josh Meyer and Matt Hislope, the delightful duo behind Rubber Repertory – the company producing the project... more ›

(Photo by Matt Wright) As children, we were a car trip family. Five of us would pack into a Subaru and set sail from Cleveland for other, even more Midwestern destinations. Places like Lawrence, Kansas, where great grandmother lived until her death in 2004. In high school, we'd stand in the alley behind Grandma's house, sneaking cigarettes where the family couldn't see. Back there we saw the sordid underbelly of Lawrence -- kids up... more ›

Elizabeth Cobbe, our esteemed colleague over at the Austin Chronicle, has put together a great article profiling the top ten up-and-comers in Austin's "rebel" theatre scene. As you may have noticed, Austinist has a weak spot for rebellious types, so we were excited to find the new punks on the block listed in one handy, helpful spot. (And to give full disclosure we were indeed pleased the company co-helmed by Austinist's own Jonathon Morgan... more ›

We’ll just come right out and say it: it’s a slow week in Austin performance. Our normally buoyant theatre and dance communities seem to be taking a break, gearing up for what looks to be an amazing summer. Before the UT kids come traipsing back into town in August, we’ll have seen productions from Rude Mechs’ Second Stage, Salvage Vanguard, Yellow Tape Construction Co, Dirigo Group, Rubber Repertory, Hyde Park Theatre, Zach Scott Theatre,... more ›

Austinist was at The Vortex on Friday for their opening night performance of Dan Basila's wickedly surreal play, Holes Before Bedtime. The short of it is: go and see it before the three-week run ends!Produced by the talented folks of Rubber Repertory in association with the Vortex Repertory Company, Holes Before Bedtime is a riotous, hilarious sex opera that rudely tramples your traditional family values and then promptly relieves itself over the quivering heap. We should have anticipated this by the tagline, which promised "A Matricidal, Sodomidic Cancer Riddle"; certainly, the frighteningly realistic painting of a giant anus greeting us in the dimmed theatre might have clued us off. But we're either hopelessly dense or were simply too busy admiring the lovely Vortex theatre space beforehand, because we still spent the entire show gawking at the sordid spectacle onstage.Holes Before Bedtime isn't presented as a linear narrative so much as a series of spasmodic vignettes. It takes place in a womb, peopled with depraved characters who converse in short, incomprehensible phrases that sound as though written by an infant on an acid trip with the liberal aid of a Webster's Dictionary. While inspired by the biological phenomenom of Fetus in Fetu, wherein the remnants of an undeveloped fetus are trapped in the body of its twin (recall the Aunt in My Big Fat Greek Wedding?), this is merely the route Basila selects to describe the morally-bankrupt hilarities of this incestuous family. Review continues after the jump, along with potentially NSFW pictures! more ›