The Vortex Theater is a small, innovative theatre company located on Manor Road in East Austin that continually pushes the boundaries of experimental theatre. In business for three decades (a long time for a city that only became a known entity to the rest of the world a few years ago), this regional theater puts on unabashed performances, not for the faint of heart. Although some of these performances are not the caliber one would expect from indie theater, credit must be given to the unique theater landscape here in Austin.
There are over 80, yes, that’s right, eight zero, theater companies in this town of one million. That’s a heck of a lot of unknown and unpublicized theatrical productions. From the neophyte just out of college to the more significant stages at the Long Center, Bass Concert Hall, and everything in between, let’s appreciate theater for all the joy and intense emotions it brings out in theatergoers. To get an overview of what’s happening in town, visit https://www.atxtheatre.org/, a free service for all who want to learn more about the shows in town on any given day/night.
Now, back to the Vortex. Sunny Days premiered on August 22 and ran for about a month until September 14. It was directed by Rudy Ramirez and written by Reina Hardy. Hardy’s plays have been performed across the country, in the UK, Australia, and Greece. She’s won awards for this play, including Premiere Stages, the professional Equity theatre in residence at Kean University, recognizing Sunny Days as a Semi-Finalist for the 2023 Premiere Play Festival. Sunny Days rose through a competitive selection process conducted by Premiere staff and a panel of outside theatre professionals to become one of 40 Semi-Finalists out of 701 submissions. The panel was particularly impressed by the play’s inventive use of puppetry to explore pressing war, trauma, and climate change issues.
The theme and content of the play – America’s role in war and peacekeeping efforts and how cultures, individuals, and families are torn apart and degraded by war – need to be heard, especially in America, where world politics are pushed aside in favor of nightly TV dramas that dress like news.
This play takes place in 1998 when the war raged between Kosovo and ethnic Albanians who fought ethnic Serbs and the government of Yugoslavia in Kosovo. The conflict gained widespread international attention and was resolved with the intervention of the North Atlantic Treaty. The play uses a puppeteer whose Sesame Street-like puppets communicate between disparate warring factions of representatives who represent their people, Albanians and Kosovans, respectively, imploring them to come to a compromise, some sort of agreement to end the conflict. The Americans represented the nation in the play as UN peacekeepers or some such NGO, which would’ve been satirical. The “peacekeeper” had no clue about the difference in cultures between the Albanians, their history, and that of the former Yugoslavians, which belied the point that our nation and some of its representatives are clueless about geopolitics, insensitive to history or in denial about how other cultures handle past hurt, war crimes, and pain. It’s probably safe to say one of the reasons is that a majority of white Americans are in deep denial about their past and brush it under the rug.
I wasn’t sure of some of the details in the show. Very few people in 1998 owned a cell phone, and certainly, those who did did not text and look at it 24/7 as we do now. The iPhone was introduced in 2008. The fact that cell phones were used in the play threw me for a loop. The actors played their parts convincingly, and one of the lead actors spoke Russian.
If you missed the show in Austin, do try to see it elsewhere in the state or nationally; it is well worth it.