Results tagged “willhollissnider”

Austinist theater writer Dan Solomon recently made his directorial debut with Katherine Craft's No One Else Will Ever Love You, which runs through September 12th at private residences in Austin. In the interest of turnabout being fair play, we offered the opportunity to review his production to the directors of the plays that Solomon has reviewed so far in 2009. All theatermakers who directed a full-length play reviewed by Solomon before mid-August were invited to participate, and two of them—Touch's Susie Gidseg and Orestes' Will Hollis Snider—agreed to offer their thoughts.

Frenetically paced and shouted more than it's spoken, Will Hollis Snider's adaptation of Orestes seems focused on dusting off the myth, sleeking it down, and putting it directly in an audience's face. The thing just fucking starts, no time wasted, with Orestes dragging Helen into Apollo's temple, and the intensity doesn't really drop off for the next hour and a half. It's a little bit strange—Snider, who clearly spent a great deal of time ripping pages out of his copy of Euripedes' script, employed sound designer Adam Hilton to add contemporary flourishes to the production; even the publicity shot on the cover of the program looks like it could well be the poster for a Fantastic Fest thriller. So the fact that the go-go-go-go-GO nature of the performances—cranked up to 11 for nearly the entire run-time—is so reminiscent of what we've come to think of as the boilerplate rendering of Greek myth is a little bit disappointing.

It's a useful reminder that creating powerful, memorable art and revering the canonical figures can be a pair of clashing objectives. It's also a lesson that Will Hollis Snider of Cambiare Productions, whose new interpretation of the story of Orestes, opens at the Off-Center this weekend, has taken to heart. Rather than simply stage a modernization of Euripedes' classic, Snider gutted the script, ripped out the boring parts, replaced the scenes in which the messenger runs on to tell the audience what's happened with new scenes that show exactly what that was, and placed it all in a post-apocalyptic setting. With that accomplished, and the show set to open, he sat down with Austinist to tell us about improving on the Greeks, the movement in Austin theater back toward the classics, and what Orestes has in common with the brave men and women of the Battlestar Galactica.