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(03/20/09 12:00am)
"I can do this, you see! Choose me!" urges one of the main characters in one of the most emotional scenes of Stop Kiss. So pleads the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts Theatre Program as its production opens this weekend alongside four college productions (Martel College's I Took My Gun And Vanished, Baker Shakespeare's The Tempest, Sid Richardson College's The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) and Wiess College's West Side Story) and, of course, Beer Bike. After one of the program's strongest years in recent memory, its plea is a legitimate one.Stop Kiss, a 1998 play by Diana Son, might be summarized as the story of a relationship between two women and the tragic results of an act of gay-bashing, but while such an explanation captures the play's main events it oversimplifies the depth of the script. The play is fundamentally about risk-taking and squeezing the most out of life and love - you know, that sort of carpe diem stuff which we're all supposed to love - and its place in the lives of two women, panicky traffic reporter Callie and no-nonsense Midwesterner Sara, as they live their lives in New York City.
(03/13/09 12:00am)
With tremendous productions like Urinetown (2007) and Hello, Hamlet! (2008), in recent years Wiess Tabletop Theater has established itself as the annual college musical theater powerhouse. But the reputation is double-edged: this year's production, West Side Story, carried with it fantastic potential and extraordinary expectations. When the stars align and all the gears within the production synchronize, the product is riveting. Unfortunately, these moments are spread too thin across the production's two-hour runtime. Wiess may have bitten off more than it can chew.West Side Story, written by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, is a 1957 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that replaces the feuding Montague and Capulet families with two Hell's Kitchen street gangs: the all-Anglo Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. The show has become one of the more influential works in the history of American musical theater, largely because of the unprecedented complexity of its choreography and innovative music. Producing the show necessitates a fastidious attention to the details of its dancing and its music, and for the most part Wiess's production succeeds with only a few lapses.
(02/20/09 12:00am)
Quick! Think of what makes you ecstatic.Not "happy." I don't want simple contentedness. I don't give a shit about warm bagels or chocolate or your iPod or how you feel when you make eye contact with that cutie in GenChem. I want ecstasy - a sensation so powerful, so moving, that it compels you to clench your toes so hard you can feel it in your soul. Think about bliss: What have you done recently that filled you so wholly with raw delight that you wanted to freeze time and space and never move again lest the slightest disturbance in the universe break that rapturous moment?
(02/06/09 12:00am)
Somewhere deep within the Rice Players' production of Wyrd Sisters, an entertaining and fast-paced show is struggling to break free.Unfortunately, its struggle is ill-fated. Trapped by static, repetitive staging and questionable direction by Brown College senior Thomas Mings, the performance constantly trips over itself and never manages to find a steady rhythm. The result is a haphazard, arduous test of audience endurance that generates more awkwardness than applause.
(01/30/09 12:00am)
If you're going to be at Rice for the 2009-'10 academic year and you're reading my column, then you're probably looking for one of two things: sage, unsolicited advice about how to live your life or sophomoric jokes about how awesome beer is. Today I have more of the former and less of the latter.The results of the next few weeks of this academic year constitute what is the most significant indication of how successful and fun the undergraduate population will find the next school year. Many colleges will soon elect a president and governing body; dozens of candidates and applicants are crossing their fingers and fighting for Orientation Week coordinator bids at the nine established colleges and the two mysterious new colleges; and an alarmingly charming Student Association Elections Chair announced the beginning of SA election season this past Monday.
(01/23/09 12:00am)
The residential college system is something so inseparable from the modern operation of Rice University, so ingrained into our personal habits and social traditions, that any change on the level of the addition of a new college becomes a matter of titanic significance that affects thousands of students. When two new colleges root themselves into this little patch of Houston - in the same year, even - the importance of their proper introduction into Rice life escalates exponentially. For this reason, groups of students, masters, administrators and faculty have worked eagerly for months to ensure that the opening of Duncan and McMurtry colleges next fall is as appropriate and effective a process as possible. Last year, a population committee headed by Dean of Undergraduates Robin Forman and comprised of college masters, resident associates, administrators and students drafted a series of proposals regarding possible ways to populate the two colleges. The committee sent these recommendations to President David Leebron, who ultimately chose a plan in which Baker and Will Rice colleges will move into Duncan and McMurtry, respectively, while their own facilities are renovated. Lovett College will remain in Lovett while its renovations occur. Forman appeared in front of the Student Association last semester to discuss the plan and promised to keep the student body abreast of its development.
(01/23/09 12:00am)
Hidden away in Lovett Hall, Entrance A, in a little alcove left of the drinking fountain and across from the floor-to-ceiling wooden doors of the office of the Dean of Undergraduates, new Director of First Year Programs, Shelah Crear, prepares to make history. With a record number of applicants for the class of 2013 ("10,818", Jan. 16) and the quickly-approaching opening of Duncan and McMurtry colleges, Orientation Week 2009 stands to be a larger and more complicated operation than any O-Week in recent memory.Her office is comfortable and well-lit, if a little bare, but Crear, a Dallas native and adopted Austinite and Longhorn by education, has an enthusiasm for her responsibilities that fills every corner of the room.
(01/09/09 12:00am)
In the movie Milk, anti-gay activist Anita Bryant condemns laws and statutes protecting gay Americans on the basis that permitting them to do whatever it is that gay Americans do - which, as far as I understand, are mostly the same boring things that straight Americans do - would decimate the country and plunge its citizens, perhaps overnight, into severe moral degradation. Bryant and several other characters in the movie (and in real life) make this assertion with the underlying argument that the religion of Christ is the religion of the United States. Unfortunately for them, we know that Christianity isn't the American religion. Sports are the real American religion, and it is our patriotic duty to celebrate them.Rice won a bowl game last week. Maybe you heard about it. Several dozen of Rice's finest (and also #94, kicker Brandon Yelovich) took to the field and punished a motley crew of Michiganders, who deserved to lose because they are bad people and even worse footballers.
(11/21/08 12:00am)
The success of Lovett College's deservedly well-received I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change ("Lovett's I Love You, You're Perfect needs little change", Feb. 22, 2008) seemed to many a dramatic revival of the college's once-stagnant theater program. Cabaret, directed by Lovett College senior and I Love You... cast member Paul Early, builds upon the spring show's forward momentum and brings a wide assortment of talent to the stage lights, but a few dark spots mar what is otherwise a very enjoyable performance.Cabaret, written by Joe Masteroff with John Kander's music and lyrics by Fred Ebb, explores the relationship between cabaret performer and general debauchée Sally Bowles and struggling young American author Clifford Bradshaw as they weave their way through the hedonistic excesses of Berlin's underbelly during the Nazi rise to power.
(11/21/08 12:00am)
Editing the Backpage is a wonderful job. I mosey into the Thresher office every once in a while, sit in one of our many comfortable chairs, make fun of our editors in chief, avoid my homework and occasionally write something which I pray my mother will never discover. Sometimes I even make people laugh, but those weeks are few and far between.In those rare moments when I'm not busy scaling the mountain of humor godhood or trying to figure out how to turn my weekly flirtation with libel into a real-life job, I enjoy nothing more than attending the weekly Monday meeting of the Student Association Senate. As elections chair I'm technically required to attend all SA meetings, but this responsibility is its own reward: Nothing gets my blood a-pumping like glancing at the steely, determined gaze of presiding officer Matt Youn or admiring the sharp focus of the nine enthusiastic college presidents or playing "World of Goo" on my laptop while External Affairs Vice President Nick Muscara talks about some tailgate or another.
(11/14/08 12:00am)
Two guys who steal their Wi-Fi from coffee shops are about to destroy your GPA, and you're going to thank them for it. As the new independent game studio 2D Boy, Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel, formerly of Electronic Arts, have lovingly crafted World of Goo into one of this generation's most innovative, accessible and entertaining games.World of Goo was released in October with a simple premise and a terrifying amount of detail. The main gameplay mechanism is easy to figure out. Each level is full of wide-eyed, amorphous Goos of varying colors and qualities. The player picks up a Goo and drags it toward a pre-placed cluster of other Goos, where the Goo grows appendages and affixes itself to the structure. Ultimately, the player seeks to move all the Goos to an exit pipe on the other side of the level. Each new Goo changes the weight and balance of the whole construction, making the game a limited physics simulator.
(11/07/08 12:00am)
Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts shows, which have tremendous financial and professional backing, have traditionally suffered low audition turnout because most experienced or talented performers are wooed or pressured into joining their friends' or college's shows months, even semesters, before auditions. On the other hand, the student-run Rice Players are sometimes able to pull a significant amount of talent to auditions but have never been blessed with beaucoup budgets.For the first time, in an effort to bridge the performance gap on a campus already saturated with shows, the two groups collaborated for the first time to produce Ted Dietz's Private Eyes. Hopefully, this is only the first collaboration of many.
(10/24/08 12:00am)
The sun was bright and the humidity high when Backpage coeditor Timothy Faust climbed to the top of 180 one recent bright Tuesday afternoon. A few minutes later, he was joined by Advisor to the Dean of Undergraduates Dr. Matthew Taylor. The birds chirped overhead and more than one professor walking past looked quizzically at the two figures atop the crown of the Engineering Quad. The Backpage Interview Series had officially started.Taylor maintains a reputation as an administrator who understands student needs - which makes sense, when you consider his past. After attending Southern Methodist University with a stint at Oxford, Taylor earned his Ph.D. and taught history here at Rice, where he was a Resident Associate at Brown College. But it was not a straight shot from graduate school to Forman's right-hand guy. Taylor was dean of student life at Pomona University - with a few national tours with a rock band peppered in between.
(10/24/08 12:00am)
Featuring its horde of frenzied women, cross-dressing and a gruesome act of infanticide, Euripides's The Bacchae is a bizarre standout in the broad realm of Greek tragedy, but a perfectly-timed spectacle for NOD- or Halloween-crazed Rice students. While the Baker College production is entertaining and strives admirably to do justice to the classic text, it is hindered by several technical and performance issues and does not quite succeed in its pursuit of instilling in the audience the ferocious ecstasy presented by its Maenad women and suggested by its advertising, which alludes misleadingly to glam rock outfits and David Bowie.The Bacchae tells the story of Dionysus (Baker sophomore Jeremiah Bolinsky) as he punishes his half-cousin, cynical young Theban ruler Pentheus (Baker sophomore Tomas Lafferriere) for refusing to recognize the former's divinity. Dionysus sets the stage for his plan as the show opens: He has possessed all of the Theban women, driven them into orgiastic madness and sent them into the wild. In taking on one of Euripedes's final works, directors Cat Coombes and Guy Weissinger, Baker College seniors, have chosen a work of dizzying complexity that challenged ancient Greek societal ideas and continues to be relevant today.
(09/19/08 12:00am)
In the span of one weekend sometime in the early 2000s, I watched both A Walk to Remember with a then-girlfriend and the DVD of the Green Bay Packers' 1997 Super Bowl victory. Contented with these emotional highs and lows, I thought I was pretty square with the whole "sentimental depth" thing. How terrifyingly foolish! It is only because I lived in a frat house that I have learned the painful error of my ways and discovered the true poignancies of life. It turns out that we humans had it wrong the entire time: Life's emotional benchmarks don't come from love, hate, trauma or success. They come from a can, and the only way to get them out is through the greatest of all mankind's devices: by shotgunning a cheap beer.The first frat brother with whom I lived taught me about beer and, as a result, turned me into one of those people. You know which people I mean - there's one at every party. A dude, probably wearing a shirt with some sort of collar, leaning against a wall and holding a bottle label-side-out staring down everyone else in the room. A beer elitist. A beerlitist. One of those guys who shows up to a party, puts his own personal six-pack of Three Floyds or Dogfish Head in the common room fridge, and then gets pissy when some dumb freshman, breath bathed in the odor of Natty Light, grabs it for a game of Flip Cup. Good beer was for drinking, I thought, and bad beer was as useful as a second Rice CoffeeHouse.
