[ This Just In! ]

For Immediate Release
Date: February 23, 2000

Terminal Hip to Open in One Month!

Salvage Vanguard Theater presents Dan Dietz in Mac Wellman's solo performance play Terminal Hip, directed by Jason Neulander. The show opens Friday March 24 and runs Saturday March 25 and Thursday through Sunday, March 29 - April 8. All performances are at 8:00 PM at the Hideout, 617 Congress Avenue. Tickets are $12.00 ($8.50 students/seniors/ACoT). Thursdays are "Starving Artist Nite": half-price with a canned food donation. For reservations, call 474-SVT-6.

Terminal Hip is the first collaboration directly between the co-Artistic Directors of Salvage Vanguard Theater and represents a big change for the company (picture shifting from a monarchy to a democracy). Rather than directing in the traditional autocratic way, Neulander sees himself as "more of a facilitator for the project." He says, "This piece is really about Dan as a performer. I see my role as a sounding board for his performance instincts. I don't have a grand concept here, I simply want to enable Dan to perform the show to the best of his abilities." Says Dietz: "Terminal Hip is probably the most challenging script I've worked on since Ruth Margraff's Centaur Battle of San Jacinto [for which Dietz won the Austin Critics' Table Award for Best Actor in a Drama]. It's a linguistic roller-coaster with only one stage direction–a 'pause'. The rest is left entirely up to us, so it requires a great deal of flexibility and collaboration between me, Jason, and the designers. Together we're crafting a theatrical experience I'm pretty excited about."

Terminal Hip is a non-narrative monologue based in "bad language". The piece takes sound bites from 20th-Century media (radio, film, and television) and mixes them together in a schizophrenic pastiche. The Speaker talks about what he loves and hates about America and being an American, but is thwarted in his communicative efforts by his inability to come up with words the audience can understand. In his monologue he desperately tries to explain his views on the New World, the war on drugs, television, the Bill of Rights, religion, education, economics, Manifest Destiny, and even death. The Speaker realizes that the only solution is to lead a revolution against the "hegemony, [the] ledge of bedrock beneath the wide Silurian wedge of slate." Ultimately, with no other weapon at his disposal but language, he is left with the classic "Who's on First" comedy routine, culminating in the line "I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!" His words burst outward in a figurative nuclear explosion of language that signifies the tragic end of the nuclear age. Ultimately, he is left alone -- a "ghost [who] sinks to the center of the world and sits there and sings."

Salvage Vanguard Theater is a nonprofit arts organization located in Austin, Texas, committed to fostering a dynamic exchange between visionary artists and audiences new to their work. To that end, Salvage Vanguard Theater seeks to combine explosive energy with expert technique, creating forms which defy theatrical traditions and define a new American avant garde.

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