Beyond Arcadia Part 2

Here is another little bit from the on-line E-zine discovered by our stage manager Debs. The Sidley Park garden is practically another character in ARCADIA. Just beyond our view through the windows (looking out over the East Section) is the garden being reborn to much controversy in the 1800s and resulting in much mystery in the present. Here is a little more reflection on the changing styles of the Sidley Park Garden.

Classicism vs. Romanticism in the Sidley Park Garden

Hannah: “The whole Romantic sham. It’s what happened to the Enlightenment, isn’t it? A century of intellectual rigor turned in on itself. The history of the garden says it all beautifully.”

The grounds of Sidley Park, the house which provides the setting for Arcadia, are a canvas on which all three of the main styles of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century landscape gardening have at one time or another been inscribed.

These three different styles of gardening were treated by some contemporary commentators as mere changes in fashion, and they were frequently compared with changing fashions in dress, particularly in women's dress. For others, however, they were like fashion itself -- part of a complicated story of social and political change.

The Classical Italian Garden
The formal Italian garden reflects the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment. It was probably planted by Thomasina’s great-grandfather.

Until the 1740s, the garden was laid out according to an aesthetic which saw beauty only in symmetry, in the geometrical pattern made by circular pools and the intersecting straight lines of avenues, alleys, terraces, hedges.

Hannah says: “The house had a formal Italian garden until about 1740 …that makes you want to weep. Paradise in the Age of Reason….topiary, pools and terraces, fountains, an avenue of limes. sublime geometry…the best box hedge in Derbyshire….”

1740-1809: The Natural English Park
The formal Italian garden is replaced by the “natural English park” for which Launcelot “Capability” Brown was famous. This was probably done at the instigation of Thomasina’s grandfather.

Around 1740 or so tastes changed and this formal Italian design was dug up and “improved” by Lancelot "Capability" Brown. Brown’s goal was to create open vistas which made the park and its surrounding countryside seem part of one harmonious landscape which ran unbroken to the horizon and beyond.

One way to make the landscape appear to flow seamlessly, was to remove anything that appeared “unnatural” or “man made” like topiary, pools and terraces, fountains and an avenue of limes. The” best box hedge in Derbyshire” was dug up and replaced by a “ha ha” (a ditch used to keep cows off the lawn.) “The grass went from the doorstep to the horizon… so the fools could pretend they were living in God’s countryside….”

This is the way the garden looks in Lady Croom’s time, and it is just to her taste.

1810 The Fake Gothic Wilderness
The Gothic Garden reflects the Age of Romance.
Lord Croom, Thomasina’s father, has hired Mr. Noakes, the landscape gardener to tear up the natural English landscape that Lady Croom so cherishes and replace it with a faux Gothic wilderness in the “picturesque” style.

As Arcadia opens in 1809, the English park that Lady Croom so admires is about to give way to the "picturesque" or “Romantic” style favored by Mr. Noakes. The picturesque was an aesthetic of irregularity, of "Romantic" wildness, in which the natural, flowing lines of Capability Brown were deliberately broken and obscured by sudden declivities, jagged shapes, ruined buildings and statuary, and the shadows of rocks and unkempt trees.

Lady Croom finds it utterly distasteful but her protests were obviously in vain, because by 1812, the process of transformation is under way, under the auspices of Mr. Noakes and his noisy “Newcomen steam pump”. .

Hannah, who is all geometry and reason, hates the whole “Romantic sham” of the Gothic landscape. She particularly dislikes the fact that the Gothic landscape, when plunked down in England, stands out like a sore thumb -- stagy and fake and artificial.
“…a setting of cheap thrills and false emotion”.


Playing to sold out houses, ARCADIA has been extended until June 20th!

And that's the word on the street!

The MST Q&A: Philip Lehl

Philip Lehl makes his MST debut playing Bernard Nightingale in our hit production of ARCADIA. Get to know a little more about Philip as he answers MST's Q&A ...

Full given name: Philip Eric Lehl

Hometown: Des Moines, IA

Zodiac sign: Taurus

Audition Monologue/Song: "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?"

Special skills: making a living as an actor

First Houston show ever saw: "Art" at the Alley

Current show you have been recommending to friends: Arcadia!

Favorite show tune: Finishing the Hat from Sunday in the Park with George

MAC or PC? MAC!!!!!

Most played song on your iPod: Murder in the City - Avett Brothers

Last book you read: The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbary

Must-see TV show: don't watch TV much, but, um, when I did, I really liked Hill Street Blues

Last good movie you saw: District 9

Pop culture guilty pleasure: Gilligan's Island

Favorite board game: blebracS, er, I mean Scrabble

Favorite cereal: carbs? are you kidding?

Performer you would drop everything to go see: Richard Burbage

Who would play you in the movie? Richard Dreyfuss 20 years ago

First stage kiss: well, it was backstage, and I was 14, and I was playing a lost boy in Peter Pan, and she was an Indian Princess. But onstage, as Lt. Cable in South Pacific in high school. Ah, Liat. She was a senior, I was a sophomore - also the answer to: why did you first get into theatre?

Worst onstage mishap: Playing Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Worst “day” job you ever had: taking telephone polls for the Louis Harris company.

Favorite post-show meal: carbs

ARCADIA, by Tom Stoppard, has been extended through June 20th! Don't miss out on the greatest play of the 20th Centruy!

And that's the word on the street!

Beyond Arcadia Part 1

Stage Manager for ARCADIA and Tom Stoppard aficionado Debs Ramser discovered a little gem of an on-line E-Zine with some interesting insight on the play. Here are some interesting reflections from the director of that production.

“What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense.”

Rehearsal is a process of discovery. And interestingly enough, what we discovered, as we rehearsed Arcadia is that the play itself is about the process of discovery.

It asks the questions mankind has been asking ever since we wiped the primordial soup of our shoes. Who are we? Why are we here? What’s it all about?

But fear not. Since it’s Tom Stoppard who’s doing the asking, the funny bone is engaged as frequently as the mind.

Part detective story, part love story, part comedy of errors, Arcadia is also a crash course in mathematics, landscape gardening, literature, Romantic poetry, the second law of thermodynamics, oh, and lest things should get dull, chaos theory. The action is set in the schoolroom of Sidley Park, Derbyshire, inhabited by the Coverly family in the early 19th century, and simultaneously in the present day by their descendants Valentine, Chloe and the ever-silent Gus.

While a wildly comic series of events unfolds in 1809 and 1812, involving, among other things, Romantic trysts in gazebos, duels at dawn, mysterious hermits, rice pudding, mediocre poets, steam heated engines and overheated aristocrats, a pair of rival literary researchers works doggedly and with haphazard success, to unravel them in the present.

Will we ever find out what really happened? Is it possible to really know the past?

Is it possible to really know anything? What Arcadia taught us is it’s not the answers that matter. It’s asking the questions. As Hannah Jarvis observes, “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter.”

It doesn’t matter that we’re all looking for different things. And that being human and fallible, we don’t always get it right. That we chase after red herrings and chimera, led by our hearts as often as our heads. Faced with the possibility that, after all our striving, we may never know the answers. That the “theory of everything” will always elude us. That there will always be an unknowable mystery at the heart of things -- like a fifteen year old boy who never speaks.

But we keep looking because we want to know.

We hope you find the search as exhilarating as we do.

Ave Lawyer


ARCADIA plays at our Rice Village Location through June 6.

And that's the word on the street!

The MST Q&A: Matt Tramel Reduex

Last year Matt Tramel answered our Q&A while appearing in our Theater for Youth production of THE RELUCTANT DRAGON. Matt returns this year as the wacky and mysterious Willy Wonka in CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, now playing at our Chelsea Market location. Let us see how much has changed for Matt as he once again answers MST's Q&A ...


Full given name: Matthew Shane Tramel

Hometown: Mesquite, TX

Zodiac sign: Leo

Audition Monologue/Song: Still haven't settled. Open to suggestions .

Special skills: Aquatic Sports (skiing/knee-boarding/tubing), Juggling, Running, Frisbee, Horseback Riding, Vehicle Maintenance, Whip Cracking, Hiking, Singing (Tenor), Swing Dancing, Basic Harmonica

First Houston show ever saw: I really do have a horrible memory.

Current show you have been recommending to friends: I'm looking forward to ARCADIA!

Favorite show tune: "Purpose" from AVENUE Q.

MAC or PC? MAC

Must-see TV show: Lost, 24, US of Tara, Firefly

Last good movie you saw: The Hurt Locker

Favorite board game: Balderdash or Apples to Apples

Performer you would drop everything to go see: Eddie Izzard

Pop culture guilty pleasure: Facebook

First stage kiss: I think it was when I was a freshman in college and played Anthony in THE HOUSE OF YES, but like I said before... I have a horrible memory.

Favorite post-show meal: A cold beer.

Worst onstage mishap: I'd have to say it was the time I was performing WORDS, WORDS, WORDS by David Ives with John Dunn at The Country Playhouse and he sliced open his hand on our tire swing (which was part of the set) while we were in the middle of a performance. He was a trooper though and saw it through until the end... clenching his fist the entire time with smears of blood painting the papers we used in our typewriters.

Worst costume ever: I once played a frog prince with an over-sized paper-mâché head that was lined on the inside with obituaries.

Favorite cereal: Honey Bunches of Oats

Who would play you in the movie? Well, Tyson Ritter is my doppelgnger .

Worst job you ever had: I was not a big fan of mowing yards when I was growing up. Does that count?

TV or commercial gig you most enjoyed: Well, if we're sticking to only TV or commercial gigs and excluding film then I'd probably go with a Darque Tan commercial that I was featured in. No, I did not play the role of "before".

CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, from the book by Roald Dahl plays our Chelsea Market location Saturdays, now through May 15th.

And that's the word on the street!

A Word from the Playwright

DRIFTWOOD, by playwright Lans Traverse, is making its world premiere now at Main Street Theater. Here are a few notes from Lans, who now lives in London with her husband, actor Ronald Pickup, and their family.

I began writing Driftwood in 2008. It is my third play, and like the two preceding it, it is loosely autobiographical. Or rather, the protagonist is based on someone in my family. In Driftwood, it is my grandfather that prompted the story.

Although I am an American, grew up in Oklahoma, I have lived almost all of my adult life in England, with the exception of a few months spent in Rome. Whilst living there I once met an Italian gentleman who travelled to London regularly on business and he told me how much he loved England. “You English people are so lucky”, he said, “your country is so new and exciting and Italy is so old”. I found that amusing, to love England for its modernity. Every day I look out on London and feel the centuries of kings and queens and age-old empires and am reminded constantly of just how new my America is. It is incredible to think that my own grandfather, age six, sat next to his father on an old buckboard and raced for one hundred and sixty acres of Oklahoma territory and that I grew up with this rich and wondrous piece of oral history handed to me on a plate.

If I were making a film, I would begin with the actual race. Alas, on stage, Orville can only tell and re-tell the story to his three children. But his passion for the land, and his relentless struggle to hold onto it, runs throughout the play. The story is just that, a fiction, for the most part. But the dust storms happened. And the soil erosion was a fact. And people survived the years of the Great Depression.

The present global financial crisis that is staring us all in the face began in 2007, and I wish that it had been my prophetic vision to see this coming and write my play as a cautionary tale. But I must admit to ignorance and cannot take credit for that. However, as greed (both personal and national) drives the plot and leads to tragedy ultimately, hopefully it might strike some as relevant at this particular moment in time. I have quoted novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren, in the frontispiece of the script: “The past is always a rebuke to the present”. History is, indeed, cyclical and here we come round again, eighty years on, to recessions and threats of depressions and man’s abuse of the land and we wonder: of what use is a rebuke if we are never able to learn from the past?

First and last though, this is a story about the family, about the foolishness of some, and the heartache caused by others, about acts of betrayal that are sometimes committed by our nearest and dearest, and about strength and loyalty and steadfastness.
--Lans Traverse

DRIFTWOOD plays at our Rice Village Location through April 24. Some performances are sold out, so don't delay when getting your tickets!

And that's the word on the street!

The Answer My Friend, is Blowing in the Wind...

Many audience members have commented on the soundtrack for Lans Traverse’s DRIFTWOOD, now having its world premiere at Main Street Theater.

Sound designer Janel Badrina sent us some of her sources for the bluegrass, country, swing and gospel music of the 1930s-1950s.

Oklahoma Hills by Jack Guthrie

Can the Circle Be Unbroken?: Country Music’s First Family by the Carter Family

Swing From Paris by Django Reinhardt & Stephane Grappelli

The Essential Bob Wills 1935 – 1947 by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys

The Best of the Andrews Sisters by The Andrews Sisters

Blues Stay Away from Me by the Delmore Brothers

Selected Sides 1947 – 1953 by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers

Born to Lose by Ted Daffan and His Texans

Molly O'Day and the Cumberland Mountain Folks

DRIFTWOOD plays at our Rice Village Location through April 24. Some performances are sold out, so don't delay when getting your tickets!

And that's the word on the street!

The Origins of Driftwood

Playwright Lans Traverse and director Cheryl L. Kaplan give us some great insight and background on MST's world premiere of DRIFTWOOD. Based in both family fact and fiction of the imagination, an Oklahoma family deals with the worst economic downturn of the last century!

DRIFTWOOD plays at our Rice Village Location April 1 - April 24.

And that's the word on the street!

The Show Must Go On!

Below is the set model of the Up Right Corner of our Rice Village Theater (as designed by Jodi Bobrovsky) for Sophie Treadwell's Machinal.

Set Model

Seems simple enough, yes? Couple of walls, shaded windows and a door. Well, this weekend, during previews, it wasn't so simple!

Somehow, the door went past its closing point during Sunday afternoon's preview and could not be opened normally. A couple of actors had to force it open the wrong way just to get off stage. Shortly after, with some quick thinking from Technical Director (and Machinal Actor) Mark Roberts, the door was quickly pried off at the hinges and stowed back stage! After all, the show must got on, right?

Today, all is well. Door is restored and problem fixed in anticipation of Thursday's opening night.

MACHINAL (along with Caryl Churchill's Houston Premiere of A NUMBER) plays the Rice Village location now through March 19th. Tickets are only $10 for the final preview this Wednesday the 17th!

And that's the word on the street!

Junie B. Jones is Back!

Junie B. Jones returns to MST this week with an all new production of Junie B. Jones and a Little Monkey Business. To give you a sneak peek of what to expect, take a look at the set and costume renderings by the wonderfully talented Meghan C. Hakes (Sets) and Macy Perrone (Costumes).

Set Model


Costume Renderings

Junie B. Jones and a Little Monkey Business plays on the Theater for Youth stage at our Chelsea Market location on Saturdays at 1pm and 4pm, February 13th - March 27th. Special Spring Break performances March 15th - 18th at 11:30am.

Target Family Day on Friday, March 19th. All tickets are 2 for 1! Special pre-show activities begin at 10:30am with snacks provided by Target.

And that's the word on the street!

The MST Q&A: Celeste Roberts

She may play one of the greatest Diva's of all time on stage, but off stage Celeste is far from it. A busy mother of two she balances acting, recruiting and schooling and still manages to simply wow us with her performance as Maria Callas in MASTER CLASS. Get to know a little more about Celeste as she answers MST's Q&A...

Full given name: Celeste Cheramie Roberts

Hometown: New Orleans, La.

Zodiac sign: Gemini

Audition Monologue/Song: What? Argh…The claw from Search and Destroy and “I Could Have Danced All Night” from My Fair Lady. And don’t even ask when is the last time I did those!

Special skills: What? Acting? Maybe? Ok, I can sing and dance but nobody every really asks me to. Oh and I’m a decent recruiter. You know, the “day job”.

First Houston show ever saw: The Heidi Chronicles at MST. Made me want to act again and especially on the MST stage.

Current show you have been recommending to friends: Master Class :>

Favorite show tune: Oklahoma, “Oh What a Beautiful Morning”

MAC or PC? PC, MAC is way too expensive

Most played song on your iPod: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata

Last book you read: Kate Chopin, The Awakening (for like the fourth time! Depressing but oh so worth it)

Must-see TV show: Anything on The History Channel

Last good movie you saw: The Blind Side with Sandra Bullock and I loved it!!

Favorite board game: Pictionary

Performer you would drop everything to go see: Meryl Streep

Pop culture guilty pleasure: Taylor Swift

First stage kiss: Ugh! Not even worth mentioning.

Favorite post-show meal: Wine with everything!

Worst onstage mishap: Opening my mouth to say my line and no sound comes out, during An Ideal Husband on stage with Erica Garrison. I left the stage to get water and she thought I’d simply left!

Worst costume ever: Must we do this? Ok, probably the 80’s red satin prom dress/supposed to be early 1900 period costume with a scarf draped round the top just in case anyone was paying close attention in Experiment with an Air Pump. Hope the costumer isn’t reading this? And it wasn’t Becky so I know I’m kinda safe here.

Favorite cereal: Granola

Who would play you in the movie? Maria Callas

Worst job you ever had: Washing police cars at the Mississippi River Bridge Authority. Ugh!

TV or commercial gig you most enjoyed: Murphy’s Deli commercial where I got to copy the famous When Harry Met Sally line: “I’ll have what she’s having”. Though not nearly as good as the movie’s bit.

MASTER CLASS is playing a limited engagement at our Chelsea Market location, now through January 24th. You will not want to miss one of Houston's favorite actresses in a performance of a lifetime!

And that's the word on the street!