Students write, act Into the West

In 2 the West is a series of student written monologues put together into a play by directors Amparo Garcia Crow and Sidney Brammer, adjunct faculty in the Creative Writing Department. The play will make its debut on April 23 at 2 p.m. at the Rio Grande Campus Gallery Theater, with a second presentation on April 24 at 8 p.m.

The monologues were written by several ACC students, as a project on a creative writing class with the same name taught by Crow.

"All the pieces are very thoughtful, and it shows in the quality of the students' work. They have taken it seriously. It means something to them," said Sunny Davis, guest director of four monologues and actor in one.

The idea for the project came from the 1980 hit "In the West," the successful play by, locally based Big State Productions, where both Crow and Brammer worked.

The company, in order to avoid expenses with royalties, decided to create an original theater experiment, in which all the members of the company would be writers, directors and performers in one monologue.

"We decided that those pieces would be an artistic response to Richard Avedon's photo essays ‘In the American West'," said Brammer. "In the West" was a big hit, "it was performed all over the state."

It made to the Kennedy Center, in Washington D.C.; there was a movie made; it got reviewed in Variety, and it run for 10 years" remembered Brammer.

"20 years later, we ended up back in Austin, and we decided that we would do that workshop here again, only for our students" said Brammer.

The "2" in "In 2 the West" is not just a colloquialism intended to make the name of the creative writing class and play seam cooler. Rather, it is a reference to the 1980 hit, meant to remember that both projects have the same objective. "We wanted to do the theatrical equivalent to a photograph, and a monologue is like a snapshot of a character; a little glimpse into the soul of a person," explained Brammer.

"Back in the beginning of March, Sidney and Amparo invited actors to come to the writing class and read some of the things that the students had written. Then they matched the right actors with the right pieces", said Peg Patrone, a guest actress who performs on the monologue "Hair Cut."

The actress interprets a very religious old lady that finds herself in a complicated situation. She thinks her granddaughter Lily is a "Lesbian" - whispers Patrone in her monologue - and tries to convince her granddaughter to find a "fine young man" and grow her hair back. Patrone's character is something like a sweet grandma nobody wants to upset, but that seams almost psychopathic at moments.

The comic appeal of her act has everything to do with the normality of the situation.
The play is part of the second annual Carnival ah!