Catastrophic Theatre's renewed production of last year's Hunter Gatherers is a welcome dose of humor to help get us through the long, hot days of summer. We weren't lucky enough to catch last summer's run, but the new show is a thoroughly enjoyable two-act comedy that oscillates between craven fits of passion and self-doubting ennui. Filled with memorable one-liners, spontaneous wit, and bouts of perverse physical humor, the script finds two couples of long-time friends faced with the equally-long-awaited moment when social propriety just isn't going to be enough to keep them from showing their true, animalistic natures.
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Results tagged “catastrophictheater”
This weekend there won't be so much running about town, but what's going on is an amazing concentration of events at some of Houstonist's favorite venues. On top of what are sure to be great opening parties at labotanica, The Joannex, and The Temporary Space, there are a number of great film, dance, and performance festivals going on this weekend. The Houston Fringe Festival continues its smorgasbord of events at various venues across town — check out their schedule. The Slant Film Festival returns for their tenth year to bring the city a selection of the best short films by up-and-coming Asian American artists. And the Palestine Film Festival is picking up where they left off last weekend and moving their show to the MFAH. And of course, if you haven't checked out Catastrophic Theatre's new production, it is a must see.
Last Friday night, as thunderstorms rolled in and out of the city, Catastrophic Theatre premiered their production of Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner in the converted living room space of their offices. And though I am sure the difficulties it supplied the company where not much appreciated, the intermittent rain helped to magnify the haunting and carefully moving nature of the play. Not to say that it was a "dreary" play or that lightning struck at the moment of some criminal act or even that the script mentions the weather that much, but, you see, the play progresses not through a series of actions but of definitions — definitions of beauty, of meaning, of morality, of pleasure, of contempt, of culture — definitions that try, amidst all the wild complications of human society, to either keep things together or mark them as being apart. The rain kept the audience together, cozy in our seats during the performance, packed on the porch at all points before, between, and after — the rain kept the audience apart from the wicked world on the other side of the wall.
Join Catastrophic Theatre tonight at the Big! Bang! Catastrophe! gala as the troupe celebrates another great year and raises funds for future seasons of some of the the most thoughtful and original theatre productions in Houston. This year's special guest is actor Jim Parsons, Infernal Bridegroom alum, who has made it to the big time as Sheldon Cooper on CBS's The Big Bang Theory.
Catastrophic Theatre debuted their production of Wallace Shawn's Our Late Night at DiverseWorks last Friday night to great reception. The play is an at-times-dark, at-times-comedic string of conversations circling the absurdities and difficulties of sexual and personal connection. Our Late Night was Shawn's first produced play, first put on in New York in 1975, and despite the awards and recognition it garnered at the time, the script's difficulty and potential to offend kept it unpublished until only recently. Catastrophic's production is only the fourth run world-wide and marks another step in director and founder Jason Nodler's mission to ultimately have put on all of Shawn's plays.
Houstonist would like to preface this article with a simple fact: you need to go see this play. Anybody who takes the time to invest a bit of themselves digging into the arts scene in Houston knows that there is a veritable treasure trove of secret gems waiting to be found - often right in front of our faces. Life Is Happy & Sad is definitely one of those secret gems.
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