That’s been true to for millennia. And in a smart re-imagining of Euripides’ ‘The Trojan Women’ by Meghan Kennedy and Kimber Lee. we’re reminded that the ravages of war dramatized in ancient Greece resonate with equal tragedy thousands of years later.

Produced by the University of Texas Department of Theatre & Dance and inventively staged by director Halena Kays, this edgy, visceral interpretation of the saga of the survivors of the Greeks’ 10-year war with Troy smartly updates the ancient story to read as a contemporary parable yet doesn’t forsake the classic drama.

Grimy, exhausted, bruised and their hair shorn, the Trojan women emerge from a smoky ruin and face their fate: to spend their lives as slaves and concubines to their Greek conquerors. (Scenic designer Peter Holtin and lighting designer Cheng-Wei Teng create a dark, ruined world of urban rubble. Music by Kevin O’Donnell, played by a quartet in formal wear, adds plenty of atmosphere.)

As the Trojan queen Hecuba, Kate deBuys is alternately beaten down and raw, the life scratched out of her, and then steely with the will to rebel. When she confronts Menelaus — played as swaggering corporate swell by Rodney Richardson — Hecuba unleashes her most powerful weapon: words. And in playwright Kennedy and Lee give Hecuba nuanced contemporary words that nevertheless deliver intelligent bite.

And the cause of this decade-long war and ensuing wreckage? As Helen of Troy Verity Branco is all classic Hollywood vixen with elbow-length gloves and coiffed long dark curls. Branco exudes sensuality. Bu she is also a modern queen resentful of how she’s been made a scapegoat for a war.

Here again, it’s that smart balance of modern psychology and sensibility blended nicely classic character and drama — a balance that makes this ‘Trojan Women’ a smart story for our times.

‘The Trojan Women’ continues through Nov. 8. www.texasperformingarts.org

A few years ago, when playwright Zayd Dohrn began writing ‘Sick,’ a quirky comedy about a Manhattan family and the absurd extremes they go through to protect themselves from pollution, he had plenty of material at hand. He was living in Beijing during the height of the SARS epidemic. Dohrn relocated to China from post-Sept. 11 New York, where health-threatening environmental fallout from the terrorists attacks was dreaded.

Now here in Austin — as H1N1 fears still makes headlines — Capital T Theatre is opening a new production of ‘Sick.’

In Dohrn’s offbeat play, a family of germaphobes believes they have allergies to everything from junk food to cleaning supplies to the Manhattan air. When their vacuum-sealed home is invaded by a visitor, chaos crescendos.

‘Sick’
8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through Dec. 5
Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd St.
$15-$25
www.capitalT.org

Now, the inimitable Watts returns with his one-man show of improvised music, absurdist comedy and his 300 distinct vocal styles. Prepare for the unexpected and the hiliarious.

Reggie Watts
9 p.m. Nov. 12
Scoot Inn, 1308 E. Fourth St.
$15 ($10 student/starving artist)
www.fuseboxfestival.com

This year, the annual East Austin Studio Tour expands from one weekend to nine days running Nov. 14-22.

Some 154 studios exhibiting the work of more than 280 artists will be open on the weekends of the event — 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Nov. 14 & 15 and Nov. 21 & 22.

And this year the tour will also feature 20 exhibition spaces, 49 happenings and 30 programs. That’s mind-boggling.

All that is EAST is free and open to the public.

Preview the list of events here.

Austin-based production house, LifeStories Alive, and publicity firm, Frost Media Relations, have announced that they are partnering with the Bullock in an effort to raise $2 million to launch the Texas Visual and Oral History Project, a statewide oral history video project.

Once the project is funded, the plan is send a mobile video booth to various regions around the state so that anyone can record his or her story for posterity.

Any Texan, that is.

“Tweed Scott, author of Texas in Her Own Words, coined the term the ‘T chromosome,’ where he expressed that Texas is different and the people from the state have a commonality…a Texas pride, that no other state can quite emulate,” said John Sneed, executive director of the State Preservation Board, which oversees the Bullock Museum. “There’s so much truth to the T chromosome mindset, which is why we’re so excited about this partnership in gathering the stories of the people who make Texas so rich, vibrant, and larger than life.”

Funding for the project is expected to come from public/private sponsorships and reaches out to Texans across the state. In the meantime, until the $2 million is raised, the project see will place a stationary video booth at the Bullock beginning mid-2010.

Wednesday night, Curtis is joined by a line-up of design and art talent — Burton Baldridge, Judy Birdsong, Cindy Black, Nicole Blair, Camille Urban Jobe, Kasey McCarty & Michelle Rossomando — and together the group will discuss will how architecture both dictates and responds to the way we wish to live in the world.

‘Architecture and Desire: A Panel Discussion’
7 p.m. Thursday Nov. 5
Free
Women and Their Work, 1710 Lavaca St.
www.womenandtheirwork.org


Erin Curtis’ “Kauffman Pool Set” part of her exhibit at Women and Their Work.

Jeanne and Michael Klein: Allies in Art | In visceral installations, artist Teresita Fernandez ask viewers to look - and look again | austin360.com arts coverage | Follow @artsinaustin on Twitter

Dying — well, murder — gets going from the get-go in this free-spirited if problematic production directed by Dustin Wills.

Doss, Wills and set designer Lisa Laratta place this wanna-be allegory in a stylized world that’s a kind of bayou/Southern gothic. Actors cavort in a shallow pool center stage or climb the sprawling platform structure that rings the center seating section. A motley four-piece bluegrass band strolls around, acting as clowns and chorus both. There’s a husband-killing tough ol’ gal, legendary murderer Stagger Lee, a Bonnie and Clyde-esque young couple and a pair of young backwoods sisters whose crashing boredom leads to — oh, take a guess.

The dead and the living, the past and the present, are intimately intwined in Doss and Wills’ Americana vaudeville-esque setting. And Mark Stewart and Andy Tindall’s twangy bluegrass music provides the aural atmosphere in the perpetually half-lit world. And the ensemble cast is full of energetic acting.

But with little linearity to it, ‘Murder Ballad Murder Mystery’ trades a little too much on atmosphere. Plenty is suggested and yes, quirky, delightful scenario after quirky, delightful scenario is unveiled and presented for our consideration.

But as imaginative as each of those scenarios are, they lack a kind of friction with each other. Never quite able to stick together, the individual pieces of ‘Murder Ballad Murder Myster’ just miss at being a whole.

‘Murder Ballad Murder Mystery’ continues through Nov. 7. www.tuttotheatre.org

With its 3.100-square-feet of blue tiles, the soaring two-story installation in the atrium of the Blanton Museum of Art is a bold and adventurous and has a sense of playfulness about it, much like the Kleins themselves.

Read a major profile of the Kleins here.

‘Teresita Fernandez: Blind Landscape,’ a retrospective of the artist’s work, opened Sunday at the Blanton and continues through Jan. 3. Read a review of the exhibit here.

And while the production presented by Austin Lyric Opera that opens this weekend keeps Puccini’s story in the 19th century (created by the San Diego Opera, the sets riff on the art of painter Toulouse-Lautrec), the cast for this “La Bohème” is most decidedly young

Here’s 30-year-old French tenor Sebastien Gueze who plays Rodolfo in a recent production of ‘La Boheme.’

After almost five years and lots of kudos, attention and even national press Art Palace Gallery is leaving Austin for Houston, gallery owner Arturo Palacious says. With its innovative shows and sophisticated roster of emerging artists, the East Austin gallery has been a mainstay of the developing indie gallery scene.

In Houston, Art Palace will set up its new home at 3913 Main Street in the Historic Isabella Court building. New neighbors will be Inman Gallery, Kinzelman Art Consulting and CTRL.

The $6.6 million architecturally adventurous re-design of the building comes at time when many arts groups have scaled back on programs and future plans. But with $5 million already raised, the Arthouse expansion is on schedule. Re-opening is planned for fall 2010.

New York architects Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis forward-thinking design promises to be a smart update of the historic downtown building. Check out the project web site.



A model of the Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis designs for Arthouse — with the multi-purpose roof amphiteatre — stands against a pile of debris leftover from the recent wildly popular ‘24 Roman Reconstruction Project,’ artist Liz Glyn’s participatory adventure that had the public building, and then destroying, a miniature version of ancient Rome.



Everything on the buildings first floor — including the staff offices, here just a pile of rubble — will be remodeled. However, the design calls for many features of the historic structure to be preserved.

The Butler School of Music collaborates with the Sibelius Academy of Finland in this new production.

Sometimes characterized as a mystic or romantic composer, Rautavaara nevertheless employs a fundamentally post-modern musical language in which theirs a blend of modern and traditional tonalities and elements.

‘The House of the Sun’
7:30 p.m. Thursday through Sunday
McCullough Theatre, UT campus
$10-$20
www.music.utexas.edu

Adams made history with his 1968 photo of a South Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong prisoner. “Saigon Execution” is widely considered one of the most influential images to come out of the Vietnam War.

The continuing story of the Saigon photograph became the subject of “An Unlikely Weapon,” directed by Susan Cooper and narrated by Kiefer Sutherland. A free screening of the film will be offered Wednesday followed by remarks by photojournalist David Hume Kennerly Alyssa Adams (Adams’ widow).

‘An Unlikely Weapon: The Eddie Adams Story’
6:30 p.m. Wednesday
Blanton Museum of Art Auditorium, Congress Ave. and Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Free

See a slide show of UT’s Eddie Adams collection.

He died at the hospital on Sunday morning, October 25 due to complications from pneumonia, a press release from Dallas Theatre Center reported. Baker was the founder of the Dallas Thearre Center as well as the founding principal of the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

Among Baker’s contributions to the fields of theater and education continue to be celebrated. Over a long career as chair of the drama department at Baylor University, Baker honed his ideas about an integrated approach to the study of the arts (theater in particular), an approach still upheld today.

Read anAmerican-Statesman profile of Baker.

The Baker Idea Institute at the Dallas Theatre Center continues his legacy.

A public memorial and celebration of the life and work of Dr. Baker is being planned to take place at Rosewood Center for Family Arts in Dallas in early December. Details to be announced.