VORTEX Season 19: Ring Rip Rent

ARCHIVE: SEASON 19 | October 2006

review

| photos

Ring Rip Rent
by Martha Lynn Coon | Presented by the VORTEX

B. Iden Payne Nomination for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Drama: Elizabeth Doss

VORTEX presents the world premiere production of Ring Rip Rent by Martha Lynn Coon, directed by Heather Barfield Cole. Set in a futuristic, institutional dystopia that strictly scrutinizes women’s sexual and reproductive lifestyles and choices, this dark comedy explores the story of five women as they navigate friendship, unity, and betrayal within the suffocating grip of an increasingly radical, totalitarian agenda. A stylistic montage of burlesque circus, nightmarish memory, and cautionary tale, Ring Rip Rent confronts the bureaucratic authorities that control the lives and bodies of women as they seek freedom. Its a conscious-altering, 3-ring circus asylum.

Photo by Kimberley Mead

Ring Rip Rent stars: Betsy McCann, Tiffany Nicely-Williams, Elizabeth Doss, Amie Elyn, Josephine D. Mays

Directed by Heather Barfield Cole, Scenic Design by Ann Marie Gordon, Lighting Design by Jason Amato, Costume Design by Pam Fletcher Friday, Sound Design by Chad Salvata, Production Photos by Kimberley Mead

Director Heather Barfield Cole, has been an active player in Austin theatre for 15 years. She wrote and directed an original production based on the life of Antonin Artaud, avant-garde theatre theorist and madman. Wake for the Dark Poet: The Antonin Artaud Project received the 2005 B. Iden Payne Award for Outstanding Production of a Drama. Cole is currently pursuing a PhD in Theatre with an emphasis on Performance as Public Practice at UT Austin.

Playwright, Martha Lynn Coon, is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in Playwriting at UT Austin. Coon’s previous plays have been produced at the David Mark Cohen New Works Festival, Ft. Worth’s ACT Festival, and FronteraFest.

Ring Rip Rent is funded in part by The Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin, the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division and by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts.