Results tagged “vortexrepertorycompany”

Playwright Martin McDonagh loves making fun of America’s fascination with Ireland, and people in Austin love producing and attending his plays about Ireland—wherein he makes fun of America’s fascination with Ireland. O, the irony. But this city’s latest production of McDonagh’s work, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, staged by Renaissance Austin Theatre and the VORTEX Repertory Company, isn’t likely to end this vicious cycle.

[This post comes from Anna Hanks, who'll soon be joining the Austinist staff!] We admit that when it comes to being entertained, we have the attention span of a kitten. We’re happily distracted by bright shiny costumes, jingly bells, and the occasional gilded, squeaky rubber chicken, especially when said chicken is employed to excellent comedic effect. Put a capable, young, red-headed actress charmed with crazy comedic timing into a twinkly, jingly costume, and we’re smitten....

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!