360 ARTS

A heavy metal-tinged, multimedia, Zen-like theatrical consideration of time?

Sure. For playwright Beth Burns, 'The Long Now' is the right kind of now

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Thursday, May 21, 2009

What if you and time were best friends? So much so that time — or Time — was willing to indulge your every escapist neuroses and let you return, again and again, to those past moments that most please you?

Austin playwright Beth Burns imagines such a situation in her new multimedia play 'The Long Now,' which opens this weekend at the Blue Theater.

It's a dark, heavy-metal-laced fairy tale of sorts, Burns says.

'The Long Now' finds a 20-something woman, Tess, compulsively returning to her carefree school days when she and her first love, Larry, were innocent, uncomplicated young things. Tess likes the backward time travel; Time begins to grow fond of it, too. You see, Time, as Burns imagines it, is a fully anthropomorphized character complete with vulnerabilities and foibles and uncertainties. And when the adult Tess actually meets up with the adult Larry and begins to move forward in her life, Time wants to hold Tess in the past.

So is 'The Long Now' a cautionary tale, too, a little theatrical advisory on the dangers of living in the past?

'Yeah, it is,' Burns says. 'And it's a little Zen in concept, too. But I think we're always trying to capture the moment – the now— but the now is fleeting. What if we just let the now be and let ourselves move forward with it?'

Over coffee recently, Burns admits it's not easy for her to feel relaxed and 'in the now' since she's just days away from premiering a very technically layered production. She's spent five years working on, and then reworking, this script.

Collaborating with Shrewd Productions, Burns, a Houston native and veteran of Los Angeles' theater scene who relocated to Austin a couple of years ago, has conceived her contemporary fairy tale as a grunge/metal-infused spectacle that blends characters played by live actors and shadow puppet characters on a set created by rear-projected video images.

Burns tapped her longtime pal, Grammy-nominated heavy metal musician Burton C. Bell (of bands such as Fear Factory, City of Fire and Ascension of the Watchers), to write a driving metal score. Another friend, L.A.-based puppeteer Jesse Kingsley (who has worked with the Walt Disney Company) designed an eerie grandfather clocklike shadow puppet to represent the character Time.

This is the first of Burns' scripts to get a production in Austin. And she's trying to relish the experience and, yes, live in the now.

'I used to feel like I was at time's mercy,' she says. 'But now, it's like I'm on this ride and I will go forward no matter what.'

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699