Articulations

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Awards Party Roundup

If nothing else, the Austin Theatre Critics Table boosted its street cred a bit by holding its annual awards ceremony and hooch slam at the Continental Club this year. The crowd this past Monday, May 29, heartily endorsed the new venue (succeeding defunct original site Top of the Marc), demonstrating its approval to Table members by heckling the hell out of them all through the two-hour presentation. While that may sound like an odd way to show support, I figure, hey, the looser and louder folks are at this affair, the more it shows how comfortable they are. At least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

In addition to the awards (for a full list of recipients, see page 42), the affair was awash in good news and goodbyes. Among the folks spreading the latter were Catherine Glynn, winner of this year's Supporting Actress in a Comedy award for her work in In the House of the Moles, who announced she's leaving town for the University of Delaware, where she's been accepted into a three-year program to study the classics; and 1999 honoree Josh Frank (whose Theaterless Theater Corps was cited for Best New Theatre Company), who's returning to his old New York City stomping grounds to take part in the prestigious Directors Lab at Lincoln Center. Frank also plans to stage his Critics Table-nominated adaptation of Werner Herzog's Stroszek as part of the NYC Summer Theatre Fringe Festival. As fate would have it, TTC member Andi Teran will have moved to New York by then, as will most of the cast from the Austin premiere.

New York also figured heavily in much of the good news being shared on Monday. Director Katie Pearl, who staged this year's Critics Table award-winner for Touring Show, the Lisa D'Amour work SLABBER, was just back from NYC, where she and the playwright-performer had mounted a workshop production of a new D'Amour work and appeared in one of the BAM Dialogues hosted by playwright Mac Wellman at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Theirs was titled "Theatre of the Perfectly Harmless, or How Can We Make Plays Not Suck?"). After a brief spell in Austin, Pearl returns to New York for a directing fellowship. Also fresh from Gotham was Kirk Smith, a Critics Table nominee this year for his musical Despair's Book of Dreams and the Sometimes Radio, who met with the New York Theatre Workshop folks about mounting the show, assuring them that, despite its long title, he says, it "would earn them easily as much money as Rent had." The second hour of the meeting, Smith says, "we spent laughing." Beaming is what Smith and partner Rose Hansen were doing Monday at the Continental, and not because of Smith's musical. The couple have a creative project of their own on the way: a child due August 22.

Also beaming was playwright and Chronicle contributor C. Denby Swanson, who had her Critics Table-nominated play Waterless Places score big in the PEN USA West Literary Awards in Los Angeles: It was one of just five plays to make the finals. That honor comes on top of news that her play Mae was one of 12 finalists (out of 200) for Perishable Theatre's Women's Playwriting Festival this year and her self-described "wedding/apocalypse/Texas militia/skin-care farce" God Is Kind to Some Women is one of 15 finalists (also out of 200) for PlayLabs 2000 at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. Congratulations to all!