Ruth Margraff's "The Cry Pitch Carrolls"
From the Austin American Statesman 12/8/99

THE CRY PITCH CARROLLS runs December 3 through 19, 1999 at Salvage Vanguard/John Henry Falk Living Theater in Austin, Texas.  Call (512) 454-TIXS for reservations.

Ruth E. Margraff's near-opera, "THE CRY PITCH CARROLLS," suspends normal time and action for 75 magical minutes at the John Henry Faulk Living Theatre.

The most imaginative show of the season - and the most unusual Christmas offering in many a year - it blurs the recognized boundaries of Austin performance.  Presented by Salvage Vanguard Theater, it operates completely within its own conventions, yet Margraff and director Jason Neulander never
completely lose touch with shared human experience and traditional artistic expression.

How to describe it?  First, scene designer Kristin T. Abhalter enclosed the minimal action in a large, crechelike box, curtained in white and sprinkled at times with snowlike flakes.  Ruth Hutson's color-dense lighting set the various moods.

A tableau:  A woman, draped in a blue mantle, stretches her arms above an adult male, who is swaddled like the Christ child.  She kneels in the foreground:  three women lie, partially obscured, upstage.  This alters only minutely during the play.

The plot - and there is one - involves the Bible Smuggler's Wife, her baby named Small Christus, and three widows, all meeting tangentially in the snowbound streets of Ishpeming, Michigan.  The women reject the mother and child, then search for a poodle, Snowball, as the wife and Christus freeze to death.  The widows revive the pair through an act of charity, then the Christus gives the three a chance to see their husbands one last time.

This makes intuitive sense, despite the oddness, because of the performances, which gravitate between states of enstartlement and introspection.  April Matthis was the embodiment of raw emotion as the wife; Joseph Meissner was uncanny, almost a space alien as the adult-sized Small Christus.  Shawn Sides, Lana Lesley, and Becky Stark, playing the widows, developed from singing scenery into full-blooded women in an astonishing transformation.

What ties it all together is the eerie music, which was composed, according to the program, by Golden Arm Trio, the librettist [Margraff], and the cast. It ranges from ethereal sweetness to barely human sounds.

We often refer to Austin as an incubator of artistic innovation, but only once in a very long while have we seen anything this mesmerizingly original, a show that would appeal to anyone interested in experimental theater, dance, music - or performance in any form."

- Michael Barnes