Review: Self Portraits 5 by Bottle Alley Theatre Company, Austin
by Michael Meigs

Self Portraits produces anonymous eternal ephemera in intense interactive staging.

 

Bottle Alley Theatre's founder Chris Fontanes began the series in 2014. He was inspired by the late-night theatre of Chicago's Neo-Futurists, who originated the notion of thirty plays in sixty minutes back in 1988. The Neo-Futurists have run the show—or, more precisely, the technique—continuously since then; it's currently under the title The Infinite Wrench. The concept is simple but irresistible: members of an ensemble prepare short pieces for stage presentation to an audience encouraged to interact with the players. Thirty scenettes are ready and numbered; an algorithm is invented by which the numbered pieces are presented in random order. And by the way, there's a greatest hits script put together by Greg Allen, entitled Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (TMLMTBGB)

 

The concept is so appealing that Texas Lutheran University in Seguin staged TMLMTBGB the same weekend that Bottle Alley did Self-Portaits 5, and Concordia University in Austin presented TMLMTBGT last weekend, April 3 - 6.

 

Bottle Alley's portraits don't come from a playbook. These are worldviews, conundrums, insecurities, and wonderings elaborated and made vivid by the members of the ensemble. For this fifth edition, there were nine of them: two men and seven women . The program was furnished by thirty sceme titles pasted onto paper fans passed out to audience members. The flip sides of those fans were marked with numbers.

 

 

The performance sequence for each of the three evenings at the Dougherty Arts Center was a double random walk. A wire tumble cage with numbered marbles generated a number and the audence member holding the fan inscribed with it chose a number between 1 and 30. A cast member seized the corresponding page from the clothesline stretched across the stage and announced the title. Players positioned themselves. One called "Go!" and we were off to the races. At the end of each, a cast member announced "Curtain!" The scenettes were short but there was no two-minute limit; the ensemble did eighteen for the first act, took an intermission, then came back and worked the rest of the way through.

 

 

Ensemble members wrote these scenes. Many expressed urgent and intimate concerns. Mortality; sexuality; health and medicine; relationships; language; addiction; body awareness. These players, all apparently aged in their twenties or early thirties, invited you deep into their psyches. The almost strobe-like intensity of their enactments clearly appealed to audience members, mostly their contemporaries. The sixty onlookers were engaged and enthusiastic throughout.

 

 

Curiously, despite the intimacy of their revelations, the players remained essentially anonymous. Names of authors and participants weren't given in menu pasted on the fans. Only in passing were any personal names dropped or potentially identifying details given. Even the cryptic multi-exposure photos posted at the company's Facebook page were essentially anonymous.

 

There was a "tell," if you didn't know them but were determined to seek them out. The Bottle Alley ticketing announcement provided their names:

Self Portraits is written and performed by:

Madi Luebbers

Emily Green

Meg Hobgood

Hashir Wallace

Mon Darter

Ciara Cook

Aurora Villarreal

Lligany Otaduy

Iliana Griffth-Suarez

 

Emily Green's inventions were detectable only because she put her name onto one (number 20). I counted three she'd authored: a short, unexplained sequence in which a spectator called out ominous medical terms from a list and Emily defined them (she's not a doctor); the wild incongruity of usng a recording of Aaron Copeland's swelling Fanfare for the Common Man as a background for her series of dad jokes delivered with the panache of a Borscht Belt comedian; and a stickily comic contest in which she and a volunteer from the audience mirrored one another while stuffing their mouths full of marshmallows. Those, my friends, constituted a variety show in and of themselves.

 

Other favorites: an elegantly slim woman's lengthy rant entirely in Spanish about the frustrations of a highly educated professional obliged to wrestle with the intricacies of authenticating herself and her abilities in a language not her own, delivered while stalking through an audience, eighty percent of whom have no idea of what I'm saying! (Villareal? Griffith-Suarez? In any case, the audience responded with enthusiastc applause.) And the droll, unexpected gymnastics of "The Cat Above & the Mouse Below" done by the duo of the smilingly confident woman and the charismatic stocky gentleman with those heavy red-framed glasses.

 

In brief, like all of the four preceding productions of Bottle Alley's Self Portraits, it was like a box of chocolates.

 

You just never knew . . .  

 

 

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Self Portraits
by Organized by Bottle Alley Theatre Company
Bottle Alley Theatre Company

March 27 - 29, 2025

Dougherty Arts Center, Austin

Doors will be at 7:30 pm and performances will take place at 8 pm nightly (Thursday, March 27th; Friday, March 28th; Saturday, March 29th) on the mainstage at the Dougherty Arts Center. There is a parking lot for our attendees, as well as nearby street parking. We do not offer refunds after tickets are purchased but are happy to exchange tickets for another performance date if available. Concessions will be available for purchase (please note that no food or drinks are allowed inside the auditorium).