Shakespeare's Ophelia rises up out of the water, dreaming of Pop-Tarts and other sweet things. She finds herself in a neo-Elizabethan Appalachian setting where Gertrude runs a brothel, Hamlet is called a Rude Boy and nothing is what it seems. In this mirrored world of word-scraps and cold sex, Ophelia cuts a new path for herself.
The Cohen New Works Festival is a biennial, week-long showcase of new work created by students at The University of Texas at Austin held in various locations in and around UT campus. It is not just an event, but a celebration of a continuously ongoing process–the creation of new work.
Performed in collaboration with the audience, a place called the middle is a participatory journey to a mythical hometown called "the middle," a place where the earth moves so slowly that its inhabitants live for only half a day. The performance explores the idea of remembering, returning and reliving. Are we always traveling? How do we see and help each other in the middle of our own stories?
Three Shitty Sons is the story of three shitty sons who love the holidays, and in other news, they want their mother to hurry up and die already. Meanwhile, a frustrated narrator finds ways to insert herself into the family's dysfunction. This disheveled comedy is an homage to Our Town's theatrical examinations of life and afterlife.
What happens when a storm hits? Who leaves and who is left behind? And what happens when on the eve of your 30th Birthday? Do you go back to that small town that was flooded to see if you can find anything of your family, your past, or find the idea for your next best book? Telling the story of an unnamed usonian town devastated by floods, rebuilt by its inhabitants and exploited by its offspring, 30 Floods is an exploration of devastation, legacy and creation that asks what it means to be flooded, rebuild and turn 30.
UTNT (UT New Theatre) presents newly developed works from playwrights of Texas Theatre and Dance and Michener Center for Writers. Now in its twelfth season, this showcase exists as an incubator for new work, with many continuing on to be professionally produced across the country.
When Flo has a psychotic break in her first year at college, her itinerant uncle Ira shows up believing he has the cure for her illness. Ten months later, Flo is hiding out in her mom’s shed while she rethinks life with a new diagnosis, her parents Harriet and Matthew are navigating their “unrequited” divorce and Ira is trying to help Flo recover with his own idea of treatment. Flora Circular is a darkly comic family drama that spans from Amherst to Istanbul and back in search of a cure for the past.
Dance Repertory Theatre returns to the stage in Fortitude, a concert celebrating the enduring spirit of dance and the strength of those called to it as a field. Fortitude features work by renowned guest artists, faculty and students as well as the annual presentation of the Haruka Weiser Memorial Commission.
Inspired by Euripides' The Women of Troy, The Women of _______ (a song not song) invites the audience to join nameless ghosts on a multilingual journey through poems and tales. As a partially-devised work collecting voices of historically marginalized peoples, the play explores trauma and our political and personal battles against ourselves.
In Venice, a Jewish businesswoman tries to join a clique of power-brokers, a wealthy merchant tries to buy a young man's love and an heiress attempts to escape her dead father's will. Combining elements of satire, comedy and thriller, The Merchant of Venice asks us how far we're willing to go to achieve happiness.