I was sitting in while Ryan Crowder rehearsed one of the most beautiful speeches we’ve ever had the pleasure to work on in our adventures with Shakespeare: Henry VI’s molehill speech from ROSE RAGE.  On the page, it’s already spectacular.  In the hands of Ryan Crowder, it’s transcendent.   I listened to it once, then again, and slowly we settled back into it, adjusted, fresh-minted, and it was pure, gorgeous gold.  So I cried a little, right there in a community basketball court (with anxious ballers waiting their turn behind us.)

Ryan will perform this extraordinary speech tonight at Aviary Decor in Austin (S. Lamar and Oltorf) as part of the Creative Fund’s Happy Hour.  The party starts at 6PM, and Ryan’s performance should start around 6:30 or a little thereafter.  The Creative Fund is a wonderful organization filled with cool folks that you’ll want to know, and perhaps even join, so it’s a win-win.

And as for your own possible venture into emotions at Henry’s plea for a simple life, bring a tissue, or at least come armed with your standard excuse of allergies.  Sniff.

- Beth Burns

Ryan Crowder as Henry VI in Rose Rage, photo by Kristen Wrzesniewski

On Sunday, January 19th, at 5 PM Central, we will be live streaming our performance of Paul Menzer’s Invisible, Inc., on this very page. Join us!

We are exploring using a new streaming platform and approach with this production, please be patient with technical issues that may arise. We will be viewing the twitter stream live and doing our best to address feedback and tech issues.

Share conversation with other viewers by tweeting to #InvInc

• 5PM – Central
• 11PM – UK
• 3PM – Los Angeles
• 6PM – New York

Tweets about “#InvInc”

The following Blackfriars Conference, Ms. Stern had another wide-eyed fan in me, and I squealed a little when she pulled up pictures of an ancient puppet.  Her thoughts on the importance of puppet shows in early modern theatre were incredibly exciting to everyone, especially me.  How could I see a show like the one that Ms. Stern was describing?  Who would the cool company be who would undertake such a production, and who would get the blessing of such a famous scholar/star like Stern?

Long story short is, the Hidden Room is now after much discussion, finger-crossing, and a trip to Oxford, officially that lucky company.  Let the girlish screams of ecstasy start…now.

Professor Stern was nice enough to agree to collaborate with us on creating an Original Practices puppet show, and our play will be an English translation of the oft-debated “Der Bestrafte Brudemord” or “Fratricide Revenged,” the mysterious German Hamlet variation.   To add to this delicious theatre-stew, the creepy and wonderful Trouble Puppet Theatre will also be joining us in the design, creation, and operation of the puppets.   As the show’s dates and travels are firmed up, we’ll be sure to pass the info along.

On my way back from Oxford this October, elated and exhausted, I stopped at an airport bookstore, trying desperately to stay awake.  I grabbed a book that caught my eye, cracked it open, and discovered that it was about an Oxford fellow who was being courted by a sexy vampire in the recesses of the Bodleian Library.   Reading it on the plane (don’t judge) I couldn’t help but think back to all the screaming sexy vampire fans out there, all of Tiffany Stern’s admiring scholars, and wondering if it could indeed be puppets that will bring those two groups of folks together happily on a fall evening of 2013.   I vote yes.  Squeal!           – Beth Burns

The Hidden Room has been exploring methods to cross-breed the immediacy, interactivity and synchronous aspects of traditional theatre with the geographic and numerical scalability of traditional cinema. With You Wouldn’t Know Him/Her, we innovated a fresh way of transacting live theater across a network and the globe in multiple synchronous locations. And now, for Rose Rage, the exploration and learning continues.

We are live-streaming several of our Rose Rage performances using the live stream.com platform. The stream will be visible here on this post. We encourage you to chat with your fellow audience in real-time using the twitter hashtag #roserage.

The Hidden Room is proud to be using HowlRound‘s NewPlayTV channel for our live streaming of Rose Rage and related events.

Globe to Globe (running now through June 9 at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London) is bringing theater companies together from all across the world to perform 37 of Shakespeare’s plays in 37 different languages. It’s a testament to how Shakespeare is revered in English- and non-English-speaking countries alike. There’s All’s Well That Ends Well in Gujarati, Hamlet in Lithuanian, Loves Labours Lost in British Sign Language, South Sudan’s Cymbeline in Juba-Arabic, and 33 more titles, all just as intriguing. Each performance runs an English subtitle that summarizes scenes, but the whole of the play’s communication rests in the native language and staging of the visiting company.

Now, when it comes to the language of Renaissance drama, I’m an ardent aficionado, or a stickler, if you will. And I was curious to see how Globe to Globe could succeed without Shakespeare’s actual words — those perfect English words. Turns out, the play really is the thing.

Globe to Globe celebrates the plays’ stories, characters, imagery, and emotions, but more importantly shows how wildly diverse societies examine themselves through Shakespeare. Despite the language barrier between audience and performer, the theater as a whole experiences a common link. Shakespeare belongs to all of us. Watching his work in this way, we share a new interpretation of ourselves, and get the chance to see, as Globe Artistic Director Dominic Dromgoole writes, “our almost infinite difference, and our strange and humbling commonality.”

So, my concerns about missing the most perfect turns of the English language were largely unfounded. The plays are so good, that in the hands of passionate performers they go beyond the need to comprehend the words to get their meaning. We are all Jaques, Juliet, Prince Hal, Beatrice…

I went outside last night, thinking about the amazing journey of the South Sudan Theatre Company, and the stories of people from all over the world finding their solace, their joy in Shakespeare. And I wondered, as I looked up at the sky, where else on the planet might someone also be saying, “There was a star danced, and under that was I born.”

View Original Article on Huffington Post