The Audience/El Público
by Paper Chairs
Jul. 26 - Aug. 11, 2018
Thursdays-Saturdays
paper chairs excitedly announces The Audience,
a bold new adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s El Público,
re-imagined by Austin playwright Elizabeth Doss.
paper chairs’ production of The Audience infuses Lorca’s unfinished play with pertinent details from his life and murder, depicting the military coup in Spain in 1936 in which Lorca was captured and assassinated in his hometown Granada. It draws on the Fascist take-down of a burgeoning republic that led to the poet/playwright’s death. This context illuminates the urgency and significance of Lorca’s most abstract and free-form play.
The Audience depicts a dangerous world where personal freedoms and self-expression can get you killed. It borrows facts from Lorca’s life, his artistic journey from the celebrated dramatist and theatre director of a proud nation to a bold and fearless artist determined to uproot tradition and reclaim the theatrical form. But Lorca’s intentions collide with the rise of a repressive regime who takes him prisoner. paper chairs’ adaptation of El Público runs with his themes of repressed sexuality and philosophical conundrums while offering the audience a human portrait of an iconic figure whose story speaks volumes to our present political climate.
Interview with playwright Elizabeth Doss, SightlinesMag.com, July 20, 2018
The Audience
Original text: Federico García Lorca
Adaptation by: Elizabeth Doss
Co-directors: Elizabeth Doss and Lisa Laratta
Performers: Vincent Tomasino, Zac Crofford, Cassandra Reveles, Kelly Hasandras, Megan Tabaque, Jorge Sermini and Rommel Sulit
Costume Design: Benjamin Taylor Ridgeway
Lighting Design: Natalie George
Set Design: Lisa Laratta
Stage Manager: Joshua Secor
Co-Producers: Elizabeth Doss and Lisa Laratta
From a New York Times review by D.J.R. Bruckner of a 1998 staging by Repertorio Español:
This is the most wildly inventive play García Lorca wrote. It exists only in 62 manuscript pages dating from 1930, with serious sequencing problems and one missing scene (two later complete copies apparently perished in the Spanish civil war). ''El Publico'' was first printed and performed only 20 years ago, and is very rarely attempted even now. Thus a director must make radical decisions. Here Rene Buch fans the eroticism in the text into flames and exploits all the surprising laughter in it. But he guides the action to express an idea of expansive power that lies at the heart of the play.
A lot has been said recently about the playwright's exploration of homosexuality in ''El Publico.'' There is plenty, but it is not central. At the outset there is bestiality: three horses recall their masochistic love for a man and tell us a bed has been invented to accommodate such intercourse. Later there are startling presentations of men's desire for children, for women, for one another, and of the longing of one famous dead woman, Juliet, for even a moment's satisfaction with anybody, even those horses.
The play seethes with love: star love, moon love, an emperor's violent love, gooey snail love, beetle love, fly love, dung love. And the plangent theme of men desperate in their love for men runs right through it, including a scene that draws lines from the New Testament for a vision of a nude crucifixion of perfect love.
The Audience/El Público
by Federico García Lorca adapted by Elizabeth Doss
Paper Chairs
July 26 - August 11, 2018
July 26th- August 11th, 2018
Thursdays- Saturdays at 8 pm
at Austin Playhouse, 6001 Airport Blvd. Austin, Texas 78752
Tickets: $15-$35 sliding scale, All General Admission
Tickets available on-line via buyplaytix (click HERE)
