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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2008 > April > 30
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Update: Arts on Real offered new lease
Arts on Real has been offered a new lease for the property at 2826 Real St., the East Austin property it has called home for the past five years.
Cathy Tabor, attorney with Tabor Law Firm, who is providing pro bono legal services to the theater, said that she is “cautiously optimistic” that by the end of Wednesday the theater would be able to sign a 12-month lease on the former warehouse that Arts on Real founder Blake Yelavich converted into a theater.
Yesterday, the theater reported that its occupancy was threatened when the LWR Family Partnership, the owner of the property, said they would not offer the theater group a new lease. An attorney for LWR Partnership said in a statement Tuesday that a continuation of the lease was not offered because of arrears in rent payments.
Tabor said that she received a new one-year lease agreement this morning.
She said that $6,000 was needed by the theater by the end of the day to pay outstanding debt LWR Family Partnership says it is owed. She said that although an exact accounting of what LWR Family Partnership is owed has still not been provided, the theater was willing to make the additional $6,000 payment in order to secure a new lease. “Part of the confusion seems to be not fully understanding the (monthly payment) calculations and the fact that the property taxes and the insurance have fluctuated,” she said. The initial lease required the tenant to cover property taxes in addition to a monthly rent payment.
“We have donors that have come forward and are willing to keep the theater open,” said Tabor. “We just need to bring in those donor pledges.”
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Fusebox review: ‘Terrible Things’
Hundreds of marshmallows spread across a stage make compelling theater. Austin favorites director/performer Katie Pearl and playwright Lisa d’Amour bank on the beauty of marshmallows in the works-in-progress showing of “Terrible Things” Sunday at the Blue Theatre, which closed the first weekend of the Fusebox Festival. The marshmallows did their job: the piece has a kinesthetic, visual draw, even though it is obviously still under construction.
The play loosely follows Pearl’s life, tracking her childhood in Oklahoma, and then gesturing to her adult life as an artist. The show is a solo show and it is not a solo show. Seven women swirl around Pearl throughout the play, painting pictures with marshmallows and shadowing Pearl’s gestures. Their largely silent, slowly sculpted movements, choreographed by Minneapolis-based dancer Emily Johnson, expand Pearl’s presence.
The text, delivered by Pearl playing herself, is at its most poetic when stories are told absent context. After recollecting her parents enticing her 5-year-old self to sleep, Pearl curls up against the theater’s back wall, telling stories that seem to reference frustrating intimate relationships: wanting to tell someone she would move in with her and nursing someone in a hospital. These stories give a more natural sense of jumbled emotion and desire than Pearl’s more straightforward childhood anecdotes. As Pearl jokes throughout the show, “Terrible Things” teaches others how to feel like Katie Pearl for a half an hour. It’s funny that it’s easiest to empathize with Pearl in the moments where it is least clear why she feels the way she does.
