High Heels and Cowboy Boots
by Jaston Williams

Feb. 01, 2025
Saturday

In his latest solo show High Heels & Cowboy Boots Jaston Williams takes the audience through a hysterical journey in time remembering the first time he wore a dress for strictly theatrical purposes. The small-town homecoming parade themed “The States of America” had him playing an Ozark lady in a rocking chair, in a just-below-the-knee white linen dress. That was the first time he felt a cooling tempered autumn breeze search into a therebefore enclothed area and he was forever after sold on the concept. Known as the co-creator of the Greater Tuna plays, Jaston will have you in stitches. 

“This is going to sound odd, but I knew I had become a success in my father’s eyes when he came backstage after a show in which I played several female characters and said, ‘Son, you probably should have put that dress on a long time ago,’” recalls Williams. “I didn’t have the nerve to tell him that I had.”

Written and performed by Jaston Williams. Lighting design by Luke Moyer. Sound design by Ken Huncovsky. Produced by MB Artists.

Jaston Williams is the author and co-actor of the two-person Greater Tuna plays, Greater Tuna, A Tuna Christmas, Red, White and Tuna and Tuna Does Vegas. All four played across the U.S. for over thirty years, with stops off and on Broadway and in such venues as the Kennedy Center, Ford’s Theatre, The Alley Theatre in Houston, Pasadena Playhouse in L.A, American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, The American Spoleto Festival and as an official American entry to the Edinburgh Festival, as well as two command performances at the White House.

He also wrote the screenplay and performed in the Norman Lear H.B.O. version of Greater Tuna. The Tuna plays are still among the most produced scripts in America offered in the Samuel French catalogue and A Tuna Christmas was chosen for inclusion in Best Plays of 1995. In a forty-year career, he has performed in plays running the gamut from the avant-garde works of Eugène Ionesco to the joy of musical comedy.

For his solo work, Jaston was awarded the national Marquee Award for Outstanding Contribution to Historical Theatres.  He is a seven-time nominee for the prestigious Helen Hayes Awards, which recognize and celebrate excellence in professional theatre, a recipient of the L.A. Drama-Logue Award, and the San Francisco Bay Area Critics Award. He has also received the Texas Governor’s Award for Contribution to the Arts in Texas, and the Texas Medal of Arts. He holds an Outstanding Alumnus Award from Texas Tech University, where he is guest lecturer on the subject of playwriting. 

Jaston’s post-Tuna career has featured a number of original performance pieces presented coast to coast and which range in subject matter from his father’s nervous breakdown the night the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, to escaping down a rumbling Guatemalan volcano while being pursued by armed kidnappers, to showing up at a 1970s Renaissance Fair held at Dennis Hopper’s house while wearing a chicken suit and passing himself off as Michelangelo. It’s been every kind of life but boring.

Jaston lives in Lockhart, Texas, which is well within the Austin sphere of influence, with his husband, Kevin, and their son, Song.

 

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High Heels and Cowboy Boots
by Jaston Williams
Jaston Williams

February 1, 2025

State Theatre, Congress Avenue, Austin

Tickets available HERE from November 22, 2024