Muses IV: Memories of A House
by Michael Meigs

The Vestige Group's annual Muses performance in a private residence is a fun evening outing.  It's a bit like supervised trick or treating, except that the ten encounters for your group of fewer than a dozen take place on the same property.  And you're not in disguise; the actors are. 

 

The experience is designed for about 30 persons each night.  We gathered on that big old porch for check-in as the evening shadows were gathering.  Refreshments were available for a donation and mosquito spray was available for free.  Susie Gidseg and companions divided us into three groups and accompanied to us to different starting points on the circuit.  The webmaster of TheatreAustin at Yahoo groups decided that ours with Susie would be the "banshees" (cf. Siouxsie and the same, the British rock group, fl. 1976-1988).

 

 

 

 

What you don't know as you're going into the experience is that you are going to see some of the same characters embodied by different actors.  The banshees went through the scenes in the order listed in the program.  Not until a ten-minute break after scene four, necessary for traffic flow, did we study out the fact that in the first three vignettes we had viewed Denise the tippling therapist  portrayed in turn, over the lapse of more than a year and in reverse chronological order, by Cathie Sheridan, Jen Brown and Kimberley Mead -- actresses of different shapes, styles and appearances.

 

 If these metamorphoses and the lack of oriention affected you, you could  feel puzzled or vaguely irritated or intrigued.  Most of us took it in friendly fashion.  After all, we were guests to some extent, even though most of us had paid for the privilege.  The owners of the house had provided a warm greeting in the program and a page of history about the 1922 farmhouse of the family that once had owned much of the area that is now ZIP Code 78704.  We found the yard, the porch, the dependencies and the high-ceilinged rooms  attractive and decorated in intimate and appropriate style, and any of us would have accepted readily an invitation to move right in.

 

Here's the orientation I would have appreciated as we frontgated on the porch before the start of the performances:

 

Tonight you're going to witness key moments in the lives of two generations who shared this house.  You may see them out of chronological order.  Denise and her husband Winston lived here as they started out in life.  Denise was a therapist with her own demons, a potential alcoholic.  You will see them at different points in their lives, played by different actors -- there will be three women portraying Denise and three men portraying Winston.  Their children will appear, as well -- the boy Shawn is older.  You'll see him three times, portrayed by two actors.  Their daughter Nora appears three times, portrayed by three women.  And you'll meet some of Denise's patients.  Tonight will span about thirty years, as one generation gives way to the next.

 

Taken as a whole, the ten scenes provided less than a satisfying story.  Tantalizing moments, however indicative, don't necessarily hang together in coherent fashion, except to underline the Big Theme:  we live, we struggle, we are wrapped up in the present moment, but life continues beyond us and beyond our reach.  Our affections and treasures are transitory.  This beautiful house will endure beyond the people who are living in it today.

 

 

I appreciated most the scene "Dandelons and Corn Teeth," a brother-sister non-squabble by Amory Castro featuring Gregory Orsack Ramirez and Hallie Chaney, with apt character touches and turns of language.  Charles Eichman's quietly humorous little scene "Myth Unfolding," featured Spiderman underpants and yearning adolescent dreams, with Ramirez again as Shawn and Evelyn LaLonde as housekeeper and ex-client of his mom the therapist. 

 

 

Jen Brown played Denise at the end of her rope -- a character whom she has interpreted bravely again and again under different names and in different crises.  Can't Jen get a little joy in her acting  life?  And Kimberley Mead, as in last year's Muses III, did a lonely solo -- making me wish I could see creating a relationship.  Cathie Sheridan was the most intent of the Denises, in Sarah Saltwick's piece confronting her with lapsed patient Brittany Droddy.  The play of emotion across Sheridan's face was so subtle and the immediacy of the relationship was so evident that one could readily believe that this woman was born, perhaps condemned, to be a therapist.

 

The most comic piece was the one with nothing invested directly in the family.  Marshall Ryan Maresca's "Pleasure to Meet You" gave us Karina Dominguez and Matthew Frazier as two patients in Denise's waiting room, coming together and coming to terms with one another before their respective appointments with the clinician.

 

Muses is a theatre of intimacy.  It delivered those bright moments as random collective memories over the generations.  I appreciated the experiment with new structure and hope that the Vestige group will refine it and develop it further next year.

 

 

 Review by Angela Garner for NowPlayingAustin's "A Team," September 1

Review by Cate Blouke for the Statesman's Austin360 "Seeing Things" blog, September 1

 Review by Elizabeth Cobbe for Austin Chronicle, September 9

 Review by webmaster, TheatreAustin, Yahoo groups, September 10

 

EXTRA

 

View program for Muses IV, Memories of a House by the Vestige Group

 

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Muses IV: Memories of A House
by Vestige Group ensemble
Vestige Group