thoughtful theatre

Glass Half Full Theatre's wordless journey: The Orchid Flotilla drifts through asea of isolation

Orchid Flotilla at Glass Half Full Theatre

A woman wakes alone, on a pile of trash, in the middle of the ocean. That might sound like the beginning of a Beckett play — the seabound woman an inheritor to sand-buried Winnie in Happy Days. But unlike Winnie, who at least has her husband, in Glass Half Full Theatre’s second full-length production, The Orchid Flotilla, the nameless protagonist is quite alone — nobody to talk with, nobody to hold close at night, nobody to ignore.

Conceived by Glass Half Full Artistic Director Caroline Reck (Austin puppetry fans will recognize her from many Trouble Puppet productions), who plays the woman, The Orchid Flotilla is a wordless, confined, beautiful exploration of loneliness and survival.

Here, the main stage at Salvage Vanguard is transformed into the surface of the ocean, far from shore, using just a few scenic elements, lights, and a subtle soundtrack of slapping waves, gusts of wind and an occasional bird cry to convey the setting’s isolation. Spending the entire piece tethered to her home — a tricked-out shopping carriage atop an island of trash — the woman goes about her day, washing up, eating food and plundering other floating garbage islands for useful or aesthetically pleasing junk.

At the outset, she may well be the saddest woman in the world, emotional exhaustion in her every gesture. But there are many moments of humor, especially as the audience recognizes her modified implements: a multi-pronged tool for a hairbrush, kitchen items rigged up as a makeshift shower, improvised hair decorations.

And then there are the orchids. The piece is divided into several distinct episodes, intercut with shadow puppets on projections (by Erin Meyer) and a voiceover that recalls a video in high school science class. The interludes set up the next day in the woman’s life, describing an orchid behavior that is echoed in the onstage action. There’s potential for confusion in the link between plant behavior and the woman the audience connects with on stage, but the metaphor holds up, through the action and through a few hardy orchids surviving on the woman’s rig.

As I think about The Orchid Flotilla, I don’t want to call it theatre, at least not in the naturalistic sense. The performance felt more meditative performance art than a traditional play. Yet there is a narrative line, and its use of episodic chapters isn’t unfamiliar. Characters interact, though sometimes they’re a pair of pecking gulls formed out of Reck’s own feet as nobody in the play speaks aloud.

Most importantly, the loneliness on stage is moving. It’s palpable, in Reck’s forlorn face, as she replies to a passing gull, and even in moments of humor, like when she finds a stone-faced castaway to connect with.

There is, eventually, a second performer onstage, Gricelda Silva (I suspect she makes an appearance long before the audience can actually see her). She and Reck make a lovely contrast: Reck is tall, with long hair, long legs, and a long face (literally and, in this piece, idiomatically), while Silva is tiny, younger looking than Reck, with short, wavy hair and a compact body that lets her fit in places the other inhabitant of the flotilla can’t.

Appropriately dressed for their castaway state, Silva wears a loose romper made of bunchy red plastic, knotted at the neck, halter style, while Reck wears a coarser-looking yellow plastic bikini. But is the first woman there to nurture the second, or to be replaced by her?

The nature of their relationship becomes clearer, and by play’s end, the flotilla has basically returned to its original state. With its strange, isolated setting and playful performances, The Orchid Flotilla is a genuinely unique production. Check it out, and bring a life vest or a friend to keep you from floating off with the flotilla.

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The Orchid Flotilla is at Salvage Vanguard through April 6. Performances are March 29 - 31 at 8 p.m., April 1 at 6 p.m., and April 4 - 6 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $12-25.

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In Depth Interviews

KUT looks at the Unsung secret history of women in Texas music for new audiodocumentary

Shawn Colvin
Sarah Jaffe
Photo by Chris Phelps
Marcia Ball
Sarah Hickman
Robyn Ludwick

The legend of Texas music has been well-told: the dusky cowboy — or at least cowboy fashion enthusiast — with a guitar on his back and a song in his heart, conveying feelings of heartache and whiskey through music, maybe with his buddies in the band, or maybe by himself in an old roadhouse somewhere. It’s one of the National Myths of Texas, from Bob Wills and Willie Nelson to the Geto Boys and Bun B.

There’s just one problem. Like most myths, it ignores reality. In this case, the truth that women — from Cindy Walker, who wrote countless classics of the Texas songbook, to Sarah Jaffe, Denton’s rising indie rock star — have been vital to the identity of Texas music from day one. Thankfully, KUT’s Texas Music Matters aims to set the record straight in their new audio documentary, Unsung: The Stories Of Women In Texas Music, which airs Friday, March 30 at noon (and again at 11 p.m.) on 90.5.

CultureMap caught up with producer David Brown to learn where the project originated (hint: it’s with a woman), why it was important to make sure that the women could tell their own stories, and how Shawn Colvin torpedoed her career by getting pregnant.

How did you get interested in this project?

One of our interns, Haley Howle, she has been working with us since fall of last year, and she suggested around December that we do a feature on women in Texas music. We’d kicked around the idea, but it seemed so big that I didn’t know how or whether to get my head around it, or how we would do it.

We began blue-skying possibilities, and one of the more obvious ones was the idea of dedicating one hour to women in Texas music. And even then it wouldn’t be enough, but we could at least start telling some stories. [Howle] was really excited about it, and others in our team were really enthusiastic. We started calling everyone we could, and told them, “Hey, we want to talk with you.” Some of them weren’t available, some of them were — we ended up with more than a dozen interviews.

We could keep this going, too, but we felt like there was a need to put something down on tape in a more concise form. Especially given that [March] is Women’s History Month. But I’ll be honest with you, given the stories we’ve been collecting, and the greatness of the theme, I feel like this is going to be an ongoing thing, and this is just the start of something. I’m not sure, but it feels like that.

Were there stories you were surprised by?

Shawn Colvin was surprisingly candid. She shared with us — and I’m loathe to paraphrase, because they tell their own stories so well, and we try to let them do their own talking — but for instance, Shawn Colvin talked about how around ’99, when she had this hit “Sunny Came Home,” she was at the Grammys. And she was lumped up there with a bunch of female singers for a little medley, each doing their songs for 40 seconds. Like a “flavor of the year” showcase... “Here are the Lilith Fair women!” And she won the award for Song Of The Year.

"I think it’s dangerous to look for patterns of bias. I think it’s much more important to pull back and look at these individual stories. I’m reluctant to characterize or condense a narrative onto this." - Producer David Brown

She said, “There I was, accepting a Grammy for the Song Of The Year, and I was pregnant, and then I realized after the fact, that you don’t accept the Grammy for Song Of The Year and be pregnant. I was toast — the label wanted me to go out there and start promoting more material. But I was pregnant, I was starting a family.”

I realized in the course of these conversations, since we were focusing a lot not just on what it means to be a musician, but specifically what it means to be a woman and a musician, I thought it was important not to stereotype the story. “Oh, you women have it tough, it must be difficult to be sexualized.” That’s sort of the stereotype. But as we talked with women, and shared their stories and reflections, they gave us an insight on their experience.

Sarah Hickman was amazing, too. She shared a candid story about shooting a music video when she was on Elektra. The costumes were really overly-sexualized. She was faced with a choice: Do you do what the label wants or what’s true to you? And she asked the costume designer, “Can I wear what you’re wearing?” And the designer gave her the clothes, so she wouldn’t be in a push-up and this lacy whatever. And I asked her if she thought that [refusal] affected her career, and she said, “Yeah.”

This is another side of Texas music, and there’s not really a frame for it in Texas music. It’s been a real revelation for me. There were some who were quite candid, and said, “I don’t feel any sense of discrimination today.” Marcia Ball said that. But she also acknowledged that, like, when Pinetop Perkins died, she wasn’t getting any calls. Because she could have never gotten that close to a bluesman. She couldn’t have been on the bus. Those with the most intimate knowledge of the blues greats are men. They’re the ones backstage telling the jokes.

Is it easier outside of Texas, do you think?

I tried to get at that, and I don’t know how to answer it. There’s not an easy answer about whether a woman in Texas music has more opportunities or faces more discrimination. But here’s an example: Robyn Ludwick is the sister of Bruce and Charlie Robison, and she has tried really hard... even her name, Ludwick, is because she wants to distance herself from her brothers’ career, because she wants to stand on her own.

She was on a radio interview, and they were talking about her new album, and they asked, “Why are so many of these songs written from the standpoint of a man?” And at first, she was like, “What do you mean?” And then she looked at the lyrics, and realized that what she might have been doing subconsciously was tailoring her music to fit the perspective that’s dominant in Texas music today. That sort of red-dirt, good ol’ boy perspective. And men don’t have to do that, but for her to be successful, she has to tailor her songs to that perspective.

Is there an overarching narrative to the story of Texas women in music?

I’m not sure how clear it is, to be honest. I’ll be honest with you, that’s something I’ve wrestled with in terms of how the structure of the show is coming together. I feel uniquely unqualified to draw that connection. I was mentioning Robyn Ludwick, and she said that a lot of these things were invisible to her until it was brought up to her, but I think it’s dangerous to look for patterns of bias. I think it’s much more important to pull back and look at these individual stories. I’m reluctant to characterize or condense a narrative onto this.

Look at someone like Sarah Jaffe. I think a lot of people don’t appreciate the fact that even though she’s written such amazing songs, having that bar raised for her [after the debut album] left her with some severe writer’s block. She had a terrific album in 2009, got so much attention, then encountered this “How do you top it?” kind of attitude, and didn’t know what to do with that. She ultimately turned it into something great, but I don’t know how much gender plays into that.

I don’t know, and I suspect that a lot of the individuals we’ve spoken to don’t know how to put their fingers on it. But does it play a role? It’s worth thinking about.

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