Review: There is a Happiness that Morning is by Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs

There is a space that theatre is,

 Unknown except to the hip and 

cognoscenti --

 where verse and blood, ironic plenty,

 dearth, death, desire and wit

 conjured forth from air, direct

 our eyes to great and lesser things

 unseen, unknown, unspoken in our media.

Hyde Park, Cap T, Mick' Maher, Blake,

 knife-sharp, wit-full, astounding, take

 our souls in dance and squeeze our hearts,

 unglaze our eyes. Innocence? Experience?

 Groves of academe, Pierian springs, our lives, our parts,

 our desperate loves, impending ends and dreams:

 theatre, pure, unbounded, sings in Hyde Park's

 flickering space as Ellen and Bernard 

 Resist the rush of time. Deliverance!

Verse, and to a lesser extent poetry, have distinctly faded from our Western culture since the valiant days. Now they're studied mostly by the diminishing number of undergraduate English majors and scribbled mostly by the constant supply of self-absorbed teenagers. This is a long-term cultural fading out, accelerating since the late twentieth century because of technologies, the shortening of attention spans, passivity and the increasing dominance of the visual and the sound bite.

Several decades back in the last century the enthusiastic professor who lectured on Don Quijote to us undergraduates commented that our modern eyes tend to skip past the verse with which that particular epic is so lovingly filled. We've lost the delight -- that lovin' feeling -- for the music of language unadorned with instruments. The modern mind wants prose, wants narrative, wants closure, and is impatient with the lift and rhythm of meter.

Case in point: before beginning to read the narrative, did you listen with your mind's ear to the italicized opening lines above?

Katherine Catmull, who plays Prof. Ellen in Maher's tasty script, is a natural here, a snug fit in a character who's so devoted to the verse of William Blake that she has taught in an obscure little college for decades, just to be near her loves: Blake and Bernard, her fellow enthusiast.

As a writer, actor, publicist and Austin personality, Catmull is one essential element of the Hyde Park Theatre, the cramped former post office at 43rd Street and Guadalupe where this magic takes place. In fact, it turns out that Mickle Maher's innovation of returning to dramatic verse may be due at least in part to the HPT. It's said that Maher was in the audience in this same space for an evening of the FronteraFest Short Fringe some years ago, and for one of the evening's five 25-minute performances an Austin group performed its own original piece in rhyming verse.

Chicago-based Maher liked the approach. He wrote There Is A Happiness That Morning Is for his home company, Theatre Oobleck, and they premiered it at the City of Chicago's DCA Theatre space (think of Austin's Dougherty Arts Center, but in the Loop). Catastrophic Theatre in Houston presented it in September of this year. Capital T's artistic director Mark Pickell, who'd already nabbed Maher's Spirits to Enforce in 2011, had also signed up for the Blake play.

Maher's 80-minute one act piece is exciting, dramatic, funny and deep -- an impressive script, and it's performed with élan, aplomb, assurance and feeling by the two leads, Catmull and Jason Phelps, who also has a long history with this venue. This evening bears repeating, for on the first pass through it you're surprised by the language and by the twists of plot. A second evening with these professors would offer the opportunity to relish Maher's graceful turns of language and their canny delivery of it.

That ecstatic coupling was prologue; at the opening Phelps strides onstage, beaming before a dusty blackboard, to deliver his morning lecture on one of Blake's Songs of Innocence.His enthusiasm bubbles as he walks us through the twelve lines of Infant Joy, after dutifully apologizing for the previous day's adventure without appearing the least repentant. 

Maher's lines are clever, and if you're not expecting it, the verse is at first almost unperceived, so natural and appropriate is Phelps's delivery. Soon enough, though, the rhymes in these iambics manifest themselves and tickle your attention You blink, you smile, you begin to anticipate and then to relish the wit. Accepting the concept that Phelps is the lecturer and you are the students, you're drawn to admire the man and his conceits (in all senses of that word). He ackowledges that he hasn't seen Ellen since she fled into the woods immediately after their decisive encounter, but he's cheerfully serene that all will be well.

Bernard eclipses himself and Catmull takes the stage for her afternoon class. She's intent, spited by the college administrator's insistence on an apology. Her lines in verse are just as much a pleasure to hear, all the more so when she delivers some stinging four-letter comments on the affront she feels. She lectures on the Songs of Experience, with sharp, perceptive comments on the eight lines of A Sick Rose. In constrained fury she fills in the back story and makes Blake's creation, deceptively styled almost as a nursery rhyme, a stark evocation both of transcendent themes and of present anguish.

 

Innocence on one side, experience on the other, linked in the hothouse refuge of obscure academe. The powerful, graceful ending brings the separated, alienated lovers back together, confusing college, students and administrators alike and infusing doomed love with passion. This is a remarkable script and a remarkable evening, yet another score by Capital T, artistic director Pickell and the cohesive, coherent creative team.

Review by Cate Blouke, Statesman, Oct 28

 Review by Jeff Davis, Broadway World, Nov 3

 Review by Elizabeth Cobbe, Austin Chronicle, Nov 7

 EXTRA

Click to view the program for Capital T's There Is A Happiness That Morning Is by Mickle Maher

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There is a Happiness that Morning is
by Mickle Maher
Capital T Theatre