MU COMPANY NEWS

Mildred's Umbrella in 'Stage Directions' Magazine.

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 15:28:03 -0600

Collecting for Crows
Written by Kelly D. Robertson

Nov 26, 2008

A designer goes low-tech to costume A Murder of Crows.

When I began working with an avant-garde theatre company, Mildred’s Umbrella, I knew that I was in for a bumpy ride. Small budgets and big ideas often bring the best out in designers and technicians. When we began working on A Murder of Crows by Mac Wellman, I felt the familiar thrill up the spine that you get when approaching a big production with few resources — whether it is fear or anticipation, I’m never quite sure.

With a cast of nine consisting of three larger-than-life crows, a tap-dancing dead man, a gold-covered soldier and an assortment of social misfits and stereotypes, I knew that this would not be a show I could simply pull and then walk away from. The crows were the knottiest problem, and fortunately, the director was willing to indulge my vision for them.

The script is mercifully mute on the crows — merely noting that they don’t look like actual crows, which is a good thing because I wasn’t sure how I’d pull off three 5-foot-by-6-inch “real-istic” crows. After ruminating on the script and the nature of the scenery (a dilapidated front porch littered with beer cans and dead vegetation set cozily against a jumbled trash heap pro-vided by set designer Rebecca Ayers), the director Jennifer Decker and I reached the conclusion that perhaps these crows were more akin to magpies. Maybe they had gone so far as to array themselves in bits of human detritus: shiny, noisy, slinky bits of trash. Perhaps they were even made of trash bags and scraps!

One of Robertson's costume sketches for her crows
One of Robertson's costume sketches for her crows
With this in mind, I began with a black, long-sleeved leotard as my base. I attached several lay-ers of irregularly cut trash bags and scraps of black fabrics of varying textures and patterns. The end result was a softening on the actor’s silhouette and a slight rustling of trash bag “feathers” with the actor’s movement. To simulate wings, a 39-gallon black trash bag was attached to the backs of the leotard’s arm and the top of the back neckline. The wings were then slashed, gouged, stretched and trimmed to resemble old, well-used garbage bags. I began to attach pieces of waste among the feathers and on the wings themselves, including bottle caps, broken jewelry, food wrappers, condom wrappers, beads, soda can tabs — basically anything I could get my hands on.

It is here that a willing and helpful cast comes in handy and from them I quickly had Ziploc bag-gies full of beer bottle caps, old coins, luggage tags, bells and other small pieces of their lives that were destined for the trash or the over-full junk drawer. I added these pieces to the crow cos-tumes, creating a cluttered collage.

In the end, the crows, who danced throughout the play, became very tribal and alien. The rhyth-mic jingling of the junk attached to their costumes was reminiscent of castanets and tambourines. Even when they stood stock-still (which was rare), pieces of their costume caught the light or swayed slightly. This junkiness and clutter was carried through to the human characters in the script, creating a design that comments on American consumerism and artifice. With our shiny iPods and flashing Bluetooth earpieces, aren’t we a little like magpies covering ourselves with bits of this and that?

Kelly D. Robertson is assistant professor of Drama/Technical Theatre at the University of Houston-Downtown.

Best Theatre Company on a Shoestring Budget!

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 09:51:41 -0600

Best Theater on a Shoestring Budget
Mildred's Umbrella Theater Company
http://www.mildredsumbrella.com/

Give a theater $100,000 and you expect something great, but the real test of a group of artists is what they can do with a next-to-nothing budget. We could all take a lesson from Mildred's Umbrella, a company dedicated to the strangeness of theater that manages to keep its artistic integrity on a shoestring budget. Many of their provocative productions are built around original scripts — this year, the group toured Rot, written by their resident playwright John Harvey with Bobbindoctrin Puppet Theatre, across Texas. They also produced innovative scripts like the Obie Award-winning One Flea Spare by Naomi Wallace. If anyone deserves a big fat grant, it's these very hardworking and dedicated artists, currently fabricating whole theatrical worlds out of dreams.

The Houston Press Agrees!

Thu, 4 Sep 2008 11:56:09 -0500

Mildred's Umbrella explores A Murder of Crows
Mustardy Musings on Life, Death and Ugly Americans
The world is a bleak place in Mac Wellman's hilarious invective A Murder of Crows, now in the hands of Mildred's Umbrella. The apocalyptic tale imagines a landscape ravished by pollution and the empty desires of man. The ocean is "like a big bowl of wiggly custard," "the air's all mustardy" and the rivers "look like bubble baths." As one character says, "No matter where you are, you're always downwind of something peculiar." In this devastation swirls Wellman's strange, whacked-out poetry about the meaning of life, death and ugly Americans.
We first meet Nella (Karen Schlag), a woman who's lost her husband — he somehow ended up headfirst in an "avalanche of radioactive chicken shit" — and is trying to get along without him. Since she also lost her house, she's had to move in with relatives, and now she's stuck with Howard (Tom Vaughan) and his Klan-loving wife Georgia (Amy Warren).
Howard and Georgia are very lucky people, spending their days at the track and always coming back with bags of money, literally. They are everything that's wrong with America. Wearing tight white pants, big hair and gold high-heeled shoes, Georgia is greedy consumption personified. And she's sick and tired of Nella, who's been at her house for six weeks.
Nella by herself wouldn't be so bad, but she's brought along her son (Bobby Haworth), who's come back from Desert Storm as a "public monument," literally a gold statue, that Nella leaves in the garden for "photosynthesis." There's also Nella's wild-child daughter Susannah (Christie Guidry Stryk), who speaks in poetry and hates everyone. "The weather's turning itself inside out," she says, and "It smells like the empty rooms of God." And Raymond (Alan Hall), the dad, has come back from the dead to haunt his daughter, dressed like he's risen from the dump.
And then there are those three black crows (Bobbi-Jo Davis, Karina Pal Montaño-Bowers, Dana Pike) who flock around the house like a new-world Greek chorus, discussing ontology, epistemology and the myriad possibilities of language.
This odd bunch of characters tell an even weirder story, which we can piece together out of the language Wellman uses. He sees Americans like Georgia as having no imagination. She can't say much without a series of hackneyed phrases like "down in the dumps," "not up to snuff" and "crying shame." Her small mind is filled with the day-to-day stuff of "local politics, taxes and the price of oil." She's a racist who loves money and thinks she's better than people who don't have it. And she's got a "rivet" in her head, implying that she's been pieced together out of all the stuff Americans consume.
Susannah, on the other hand, understands history and sees a future that is interesting, if not happy. She believes that people will become "more murderous but much more spiritual." But in this play, "America is not a safe place for people who have ideas." And so Susannah has to decide what she wants to do with herself when her father returns from the dead to tell her about living with the crows.
This is not easy theater. It takes concentration and attention. But the play is filled with odd and bizarre jokes that director Jennifer Decker's cast hits. Schlag's Nella is the voice of reason as a plain-speaking woman who doesn't understand her children. Haworth, as Nella's gold-plated son, is terrific once he steps down off his podium to speak about the devastating "high" of war. Montano-Bowers, as a philosophical crow, makes strange and poetic sense as she runs through the Hegelian limits of knowledge. Vaughan and Warren's Howard and Georgia are wonderfully hateful, though their dialogue could and should be speeded up. Hall's Raymond is paternal and pious, and Stryk makes a beautifully troubled teen.
Rebecca Ayres's set, combined with Mike Mullins's video, with their broken-down porch and its creepy red sky, imagine a world that's been destroyed by unending consumption. This uninterrupted hour of anxiety might be too much for some, but it's quintessential Wellman — who won the 2003 lifetime achievement Obie Award — at his strangest and darkest.

Houston Chronicle Recommends A Murder of Crows

Thu, 4 Sep 2008 11:49:18 -0500

Weirdness abounds in offbeat Crows
Weirdness abounds for the unfortunate family depicted in A Murder of Crows, the Mac Wellman play making its Houston debut in an often fervent rendition by the Mildred's Umbrella Theatre Company.
Dad Raymond (Alan Hall) has been killed by an avalanche of radioactive chicken droppings — a disaster that goes mercifully unexplained.
Son Andy (Bobby Haworth) has turned into a statue after exposure to something very bad while serving in the Iraq War (the first one, as the play premiered off-Broadway in 1992.) The family has set Andy on a pedestal in the yard and turns him periodically to even out his "oxidation."
Mom Nella (Karen Schlag) strives desperately to project an air of normalcy as she chatters compulsively about the bubble-bath rivers, mustardy air, oily ocean and perils of living downwind from the big reactor and bigger landfill.
Daughter Susannah (Christie Guidry Stryk) has visions of impending cataclysm, of the human race passing through an ordeal so extreme that when it emerges on the other side, it will be something different — maybe not even human any more.
Following Dad's accident, the family has come to live with Nella's casually loutish brother Howard (Tom Vaughan) and his slatternly wife Georgia (Amy Warren), who accuses their refugee kin of smelling bad.
That's the situation in Murder of Crows, an absurdist, tragicomic portrait of a family (and world) being destroyed by pollution. And it's just the beginning of its weirdness.
A stalwart of the avant-garde, Wellman has won three Obies (off-Broadway's equivalent of the Tonys), including a 2003 lifetime achievement award. Here, he's treating a pet topic (as defined by the The Poetry Project Newsletter): "low-rent rural America festering in the backwater pollution from the urban environment." Sometimes, he tips his hand: calling society "chronically short-sighted," or referencing "John Q. Fed-Up" (instead of John Q. Public.)
Murder really is less a play than a medley of metaphors for planetary destruction. This mutant species of theater showcases Wellman's flair for nonsensical lines that somehow make a strange kind of sense: "I have a vision of how good America could be if only it weren't for your family." He applies quirky comic grace notes, such as Nella consoling herself that, although her son has ossified, "he makes a fine sundial."
Jennifer Decker has directed a feisty if not completely consistent rendition.
With her big, waiflike, heavily shadowed eyes, Stryk is properly distraught as visionary Susannah. Schlag's chattery Nella throws off nervous energy. Vaughan's regular guy Howard, Warren as his unabashedly bitchy mate and Hall's ominous, eccentric Raymond have their potent moments.
Bobbi-Jo Davis, Dana Pike and Karina Pal Montaño-Bowers are fun as the bizarre avian trio, in cool crow costumes by Kelly Robertson. Rebecca Ayres' simple set certainly suggests deterioration.
A Murder of Crows advances in fits and starts, has its forced moments and ends inconclusively. But it has original ideas and valid purpose.
Its provocative and unsettling aspects exert a strange fascination.
Those seeking an offbeat outing with a point will likely appreciate A Murder of Crows.
everett.evans@chron.com

New Playwriting Workshop Announced

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 10:43:38 -0500

Mildred’s Umbrella Theatre Company in conjunction with Inprint announce a 10 week playwriting workshop on Thursday nights from 6pm to 9pm beginning September 18th, 2008. The workshop will be taught by Mildred’s Umbrella company member Tom Vaughan.

This workshop is designed to develop both aspiring playwrights and to help take the more experienced writer to the next level. It will cover story structure and scene construction, as well as dialogue and characterization. Students can work on previously written material or pieces written while taking the class. Readings with working Houston actors will help the playwrights get a better feel for their own work, and special guests from Houston's theatre community will give the students a better sense of the playwright's role in the theatre.

The class was created to further advance Mildred’s Umbrella’s mission to develop more Houston theatre artist. Through developing more playwrights, the hope is generate more quality original work from Houston.

Visit the Inprint Website HERE for details about registration.

http://www.inprinthouston.org/inprint.cfm?a=cms,c,34,3,13

ABOUT INPRINT

The mission of Inprint is to inspire readers and writers in Houston.

A nonprofit organization founded in 1983, Inprint fulfills this mission through the nationally renowned Inprint Brown Reading Series, through literary and educational activities in the community that demonstrate the value and impact of creative writing, and through support for the UH Creative Writing Program. Today Inprint programs and events provide something for everyone and play a vital role in Houston's rich and diverse cultural life.

ABOUT TOM VAUGHAN

Tom Vaughan is a playwright and screenwriter. He studied at the University of Houston with Broadway legend Jose Quintero and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Albee. His plays have been seen in both Houston and Los Angeles. It was his work in Houston that got him recognized by Hollywood. He was soon writing screenplays for, among others, Phoenix Pictures, Spelling Films, Rysher Entertainment, TNT, MTV Films, Warner Brothers Pictures and Castle Rock Entertainment. Most recently he wrote THE ORIGINAL, a suspense thriller for Disney/Touchstone. His productions include BLACKOUT with Jane Seymour for CBS, and CRITICAL ASSEMBLY for NBC starring Katherine Heigl. He served as writer as well as Co-Producer on ATOMIC TWISTER with Sharon Lawrence and DEAD IN A HEARTBEAT with Penelope Anne Miller and Judge Reinhold, both for TBS. His feature film debut was UNSTOPPABLE, starring Wesley Snipes. His next feature project is BRONWYN AND CLYDE, written with Kris Dobkin, which is schedule for production next year. Since returning to Houston he has dedicated himself to small organizations aimed at expanding Houston’s theatre and film community.