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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2010 > February > 21 > Entry
Review: ‘A Brief Narrative of An Extraordinary Birth of Rabbits’
Where do we really come from? Is our imagination as procreative as, say, actual human procreation?
Those seem to be the questions which attempt to poke out from underneath the dark carnival of ‘A Brief Narrative of An Extraordinary Birth of Rabbits,’ C. Denby Swanson’s bumpy, imperfect new play getting its premiere at Salvage Vanguard Theater under the direction of Jenny Larson.
Swanson takes as her source material the odd but true tale of an early 18th-century English woman who claimed to have given birth to several rabbits or parts of rabbits. Some notable physicians of the time, including the King’s surgeon, confirmed the woman’s reports though she later recanted that her claims were a hoax, causing a terrific upheavel in the then-nascent medical profession.
Against a backdrop of striped sideshow tents, Swanson’s take on this tale involves a woman, Mare (an energetic, expressive Robin Grace Thompson), who has agreed to be artificially inseminated so that her sister, Kitty, (Halena Kays) may have a much-desired child. But Mare gives instead birth to rabbits — 24 of them.
Enter a stork who is a doctor or maybe it’s the other way around (the compelling and kinetic Josh Meyer). Add a trio of puppet German doctors (created by Connor Hopkins and played Hopkins and Matt Hislope) and a man who may or may not be dog (Shaun Patrick Tubbs).
Only the stork’s monologues tame the pace of the rapidly shifting and sometimes chaotic scenes.
But for all the absurdity, for all the manic theatrics and dark crazy artifice that flashes bright at time — and despite some uniformly good acting — Swanson’s script never quite scoops all bits together.
‘A Brief Narrative of An Extraordinary Birth of Rabbits’ continues 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through March 6 at Salvage Vanguard. www.salvagevanguard.org.
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