Category: Brazosport Center for the Arts and Sciences

The Lion in Winter: Opening Friday Night at Brazosport Center Stages

Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine give us their family dysfunction with such a combination of loving and loathing, tenderness and violence, and whiplashing from one to the other so adeptly that they become fearful to the extreme. Fearful to each other, to the lands they contest to rule, and to us in the audience.

Why should they frighten the audience, you ask? Well, maybe it’s just me but I kept seeing King Donald and Melania of Slovenia on the stage with the kids and dad’s chief paramour, all contending for a slice of the pie.

Well, set that aside and stay focused on the Twelfth Century. Just relax and enjoy family dysfunction as entertainment. This play, this director (Judi James) and this cast deliver.

For example, here’s an argument at the dinner table.

Arguing at the dinner table. The kids at play in Henry and Eleanor’s dysfunctional family.

Much of it has to do with the complicated relationships involving Pop and the lady they picked when she was younger (a lot younger) to be married to one of the sons.

Maybe the coolest head on the stage, Dad’s not-so-secret girlfriend, Alais, played by Lisa Chapa.

And if you thought Mama was taking her incarceration lightly (her loving hubby’s doing), she will remind you that she carries a switchblade.

But believe me, this is serious drama and the cast is fantastic. If you are a BCS follower and fan, you will know Susan Moss (Mummy, aka Eleanor of Aquitaine), Devon Smith (Pops, aka Henry II), Craig Fritz (as one of the conniving sons), Lisa Chapa (as Alais), and lots of new ones. And the newbies are very good.

If you enjoyed the photographs, thank the lighting designer. (I’m not sure who that is, but I think one of the actors may have been involved. I’m guessing Lisa Chapa.) Also the costumers, set designers, builders, and all the people it takes to put on a production of this quality. Thank them all. They have done a superb job under the most difficult mid-pandemic conditions.

It opens Friday in the Freeport LNG Theater in the Brazosport Center for the Arts and Sciences. But only about a quarter of the seats are being sold to reduce the risk of spreading Covid. They won’t tell you this, but I don’t care what the guvner won’t allow, I’m gonna tell you anyhow: Wear a mask, dammit.

Make your reservations here. See more rehearsal photographs here.

Remembering Theresa Jackson

Today we remember Theresa Jackson and the smile that would warm the darkest of days and penetrate the darkest of hearts. We will miss her.

Theresa Jackson 1945 – 2021

This is a picture I took the last time I saw her on February 26 of this year at the Say Their Names Memorial exhibition at the Brazosport Center for the Arts and Sciences. She was there as one of the organizers. Of course.

Read more about her life in today’s edition of The Facts.

A Workshop Made to Order for SOTLJ Readers

The Brazosport Fine Arts Council is sponsoring a workshop by Ron Rozelle that is designed to help people with memoir writing.

It will be held online with remote sessions via Zoom. Mr. Rozelle is a published memoirist and historian. I have signed up and I hope readers of sotlj.com will also sign up. If you are serious about writing interestingly of your own life for the sake of your children, grandchildren or just for the sake of satisfying your ego, it will be worth a hundred bucks or so. (It will be $125 if you are not a member of BFAC.)

Mr. Rozelle has done it successfully and I am sure he can help us. Here is a link to the workshop information and registration. Please join me there on January 2.

I can see us all having a great time and learning a lot from Mr. Rozelle and from each other. The writing should make for some interesting sharing among some of the most interesting people who inhabit this charming South of Town place we call home. I know a few of you who read here and I know that you have had interesting lives and careers. I would like know more about you.

If you don’t know Ron Rozelle, just Google the name or, better yet, put it into an Amazon book search. You can read samples of some of his writing. And you will wish you were able to write like him.

https://bcfas.org/event/ron-rozelle-memoir-workshop/2022-01-02/

Brazosport Center Stages: “An Iliad” opens March 19 in The Glen at Brazosport College

Tickets on sale now for “An Iliad”

Monday night I watched the invited dress rehearsal of An Iliad, a solo play about war and the toxin of rage which lives so near the surface in humanity. If you are like me, your exposure to the classics of Greek literature is very limited. This is a re-telling of Homer’s great epic poem about the Trojan War. The play’s authors, Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, have done a nice job of putting the action into modern language and making it relevant to the warring world we have lived in, yes, ever since the Trojan War.

As a solo performer script, it requires an outstanding actor. Monday night I was able to see Wes Copeland in the role of The Poet. Brazosport Center Stages presents the play with three such outstanding actors taking turns in the role of The Poet. (When you go to buy your tickets, you can choose your own Poet, either Wes Copeland, Bobby Britton, Jr. or Jeremy Todd. I have seen all of them perform in BCS productions and they are all excellent.

Here are a couple of shots I took at the dress rehearsal of Mr. Copeland performing.

Wes Copeland rehearsing a dramatic re-telling of The Iliad. He performs the role opening night, Friday, March 19.

This is no dry recitation of the epic poem you tried to dodge reading in college. The driving theme here is that humankind never learns the great cost and sorrow of war. At one point in this telling, The Poet runs through a list of all the wars since the Trojan War, all with the same burden of tragedy and and senseless loss. In the script, the list runs four full pages. A friend said, “I kept thinking he would get to the wars of our time. But he just kept citing more wars.” That in itself gives the audience a staggering moment of realization of the persistence of rage and violence in the human heart.

These three fine actors, Copeland, Britton and Todd, learned 56 pages of difficult and emotional script including a few lines in Greek as The Poet goes back to his roots. That in itself is quite a challenge, but what they do with it is one of those little miracles that happens in live theater – you learn a little more about who you are, what humanity is, and how we manage to live together – or not.

The actors are accompanied on stage by a muse, a solo guitarist, who has no lines but who does share a haunting accompaniment with the audience and a drink with The Poet. I would give you the Muse’s name if I knew it. Maybe I will learn it and update this piece when I get my own copy of the program on opening night. (His name is Jonathan Peachey. See Connie’s comment below.)

Get your tickets now. Six performances, weather permitting, outdoors in The Glen at Brazosport College. Masks, social distancing, and outdoor venue make theater possible in the Age of Pandemic. Please come prepared to comply with the simple rules meant to get us to The Other Side.

Say Their Names: Solemn Reminders of the Cost of Systemic Racism

The MLK Celebration Committee of Southern Brazoria County and the Brazosport Center for the Arts and Sciences have teamed to present the Say Their Names Memorial in celebration of Black History Month.

The communicative power of simplicity, silence and visual presence has been matched, at least in my experience, only by the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. The first thing that struck me was the number of memorial pillars arranged in The Center’s outdoor viewing area.

Then you see that there are photographs memorializing other victims on each of the four sides of the pillars. Fifty pillars, 200 victims. And, of course, they could not include, or even know, the thousands of victims of lynchings and other fatal injustices Black Americans have suffered in this country.

The presentation touches one deeply as you see the beautiful faces of Americans, young and old, who had no place to look for justice when confronted with the reality of America’s deep and persisting racism.

Please go, see and feel the presence of these Americans. Their years were stolen but their memories live as an ever-present reminder of the miles we have to travel before we become the nation we must become. The memorial is at the Brazosport Center for the Arts and Sciences at 400 College Drive in Clute. It will remain there through March 13, 2021.