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Tag: Catastrophic Theatre

  • Beautiful Princess Disorder Will Knock Your Tiara Off – Houston Press

    Here it is the day after Kathy Ng’s World Premiere of Beautiful Princess Disorder at Catastrophic Theatre and the vertigo from the mood swings is still hanging around. Beautiful Princess Disorder might not be in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but maybe it should be. Or maybe you will just know it when you see it after this will-never-get-out-of-your-head production.

    First of all, get used to “heaven” having the required fluffy and puffy cloud coverage, but also a 1971 dilapidated once super deluxe station wagon sitting in the parking lot where entrants to heaven await being processed. “God is procrastinating His judgment.”

    And who is waiting in this parking lot? Triangle Person (A mind-blowingly funny but also serious as a heart attack actress T Lavois Thiebaud), Mother Theresa (Amy Bruce, proving that only the best actresses can pull off showing the Most Famous Nun in the World at her worst), and infamous killer whale Tilikum, also known as Tilly (a vivacious Kyle Sturdivant, who is so meow-meow funny one minute, and then the next is answering interrogation questions to get into heaven that will punch you in the gut). This is quite the trio of actors, and they make the avante-garde-ing that Catastrophic is known for look easy—but of course it’s not, and that kind of risky business never is.

    Triangle Person DEMANDS that she is a beautiful princess, and Disney is one of her many homes. But she’s not in Disney Land, she is in the Heaven Can Wait Parking lot, breaking the 4th Wall with a sledgehammer, demanding the audience coach her as a competitive swimmer for external success and saccharine photos of a fabulous elite-swimmer-coach relationship. It’s the kind of pie-in-the-sky delusion on demand that Triangle Person welcome us to, literally: “Welcome to the Sky.” And what is the sky? No borders, and one anticlimax after another. This surreal psychological and physical landscape is bonkers: a killer whale has a better chance than Mother Theresa of getting into heaven! But is that really so different than anything else in the world? Hmmm.

    Did I mention that Triangle Person has a big yellow triangle for a head while in a “no-nonsense” swimsuit ready for intense competition and external validation sown through obsessive hard work to model after the loved/hated freak of nature Michael Phelps? You might be thinking the yellow triangle is an ironic yield sign for the Beautiful Princess Disorder in which there is no filter and no yielding, because that would get in the way of some serious Bi-Polar or Borderline Personality Disorderly conduct. Or you might just think “Constant Triangulation to up the drama quotient, as in on stage, right now?” Don’t stress too much about it—you are going to try to allegorize, but better just to float on the water of the show and hope that you are not in a pool near Tilly.

    Expertly directed by Founding Artistic Director Jason Nodler, this production had extensive consultations and deep revisions with the playwright, Kathy Ng, who was present for an illuminating talk-back after Sunday’s performance. In the play, Ng appears in a filmed backdrop of her discussing herself in a way that illuminates the autobiographical elements in the play.

    Maybe this is Theatre of the Absurd, but who cares what you call it? The world is a little too much with us, reality showing through too much for the dodge of that label. Mother Theresa is a hot mess of insecurity and not-enough-ness paired with cruelty and a big empathy deficit. You might think she was the best nun in the world, but Christopher Hitchens’ book expose of her, The Missionary Position, is tossed around and there’s no unringing that bell. Your formerly favorite nun is a sketchy fraud who says she is pro-life, but she won’t even entertain Triangle Person’s pleas for her to care about all the “Thought Babies” that are killed. If a nun won’t care about your aborted dreams, who will?

    In Ng’s liminal waiting room, God is right next door to heaven, but he never visits. He wants people to do Netflix specials that are more to his liking. But what has replaced God in this play? Well, the internet and podcasts—they provide the answers to everything, right? One of the best scenes is when Triangle Person tries to reach the pinnacle of her head mentioning all sorts of triangles of improvement that we have shoved into our own triangle heads, like that ridiculous food pyramid and even Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which is such a struggle, impossible really, to reach.

    Amy Bruce as Mother Teresa and Kyle Sturdivant as Tilikum Credit: Anthony Rathbun

    Matt Fries’ set design, the spot-on costumes by Macy Lyne, the pendulum of soft and harsh lighting by Roma Flowers, and the music, video and sound design by James Templeton all dovetail to create a theatrical experience that keeps you engaged and in a state of constant interpretive schizophrenia, but in a good way.

    Triangle Person is a Beautiful Princess but has “never been treated like one.” Maybe she is a petulant brat, maybe she has one of the types of bipolar disorder, or maybe it is a just a big case of “Welcome to the Sky,” where there are no borders, but plenty of room for borderline personality disorder. But who doesn’t have THAT in this play, where a killer whale is shamed for killing, even though he “loves” his victims? They just trigger major splitting as they fail to give the external validation that keeps the performing animal doing their bidding. You wouldn’t think that Sturdivant’s interrogation answers in a full Orca costume would move you so much, but they do. Plus, the bonus that this play probably dramatizes BPD better than any college course or podcast ever will.

    Trigger warnings: there is lots of sexual innuendo, hilarious physical demands on the actors, obsessions with sushi and Californication, compulsory blasphemy, accusations against the audience by Triangle Person that make you feel like maybe you are guilty. But mainly the trigger warning is for the revelation that it is a Never Enough World—two medical miracles won’t get you into heaven, you need to look down and eat dirt all the time, you have to swim and swim and swim and never stop unless you think you are about to have a heart attack. You might not know that from the internet and all.

    It’s The Catastrophic Theatre being The Catastrophic Theatre, just like a killer whale has to be a killer whale. You know: that animal we take our kids to see in case they might want to be a marine biologist.

    Beautiful Princess Disorder continues through December 13  at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2:30 p.m. Sundays at the Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston (MATCH), 3400 Main. Special Monday Night performance on December 1 at 7:30pm.  This production is recommended for audiences 12 and older, but this reviewer recommends older. For more information, call 713-521-4533 or visit   matchouston.org. Pay What You Can.

    This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.

    Doni Wilson

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  • End Game at Catastrophic Theatre: Despair Not. There is Hope and Comedy in This Samuel Beckett Work.

    Hamm is blind, paralyzed, and can’t stand. Despite this, he’s the one who sets the rules in his living quarters in a post apocalyptic world. Clov, who cannot sit down because of crippl9ing pains in his legs, is his ever present attendant and a very tired one.

    Completing the household are Nagg and Nell, Hamm’s parents who have no legs at all and live in garbage bins filled with sand. They lost them in a tandem bicycling accident.

    It’s all part of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame which Catastrophic Theatre co-Artistic Director Jason Nodler will be directing for the third time when it opens this weekend at the MATCH. And no, Nodler insists, Beckett’s plays (Waiting for Godot, Happy Days) are not about despair, but hope.

    “Even in Waiting for Godot,  Didi and Gogo show up every day on this road as for what they’re waiting for, we know this is a mystery. But they continue to return in spite of any distress they might experience. That’s also true of the characters in Endgame,” Nodler says.

    “His plays are not particularly dour. They’re certainly often considered to be about despair and they really aren’t. None of Beckett’s characters are without hope or they wouldn’t continue.”

    “They’re not tragedies but tragic comedies. Clov is probably ready for his servitude to Hamm to be over with, but “just because someone is ready for something to end, that’s not despair when it doesn’t,” Nodler says.

    “Hamm and Clov talk about how they’re handling the ending. What will come at the end. Clov is suffering quite a lot and has a sort of romanticism about the ending because he’s performed the same routine everyday at the orders of Hamm and he seems ready for things to end. That’s not despairing because he keeps doing it. He doesn’t leave. At the end of the play there’s an open question about this.

    “The difference with Hamm is he’s ready for things to end, but not quite yet.”

    Nodler compares what happens in Endgame to a game of chess. “You have a certain number of pieces left on the board and you’re essentially moving them around and you’re avoiding the end of the game. You’re putting it off. And that’s what I think we do quite a lot in life.”

    At this point, Nodler catches himself, saying: “And now I’m talking about the play like it’s a very very serious thing.”

    Actually, Beckett was a big fan of silent movie comedians, Nodler says. “There was no one that Beckett loved better than the silent film comics like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keeton.”

    Beckett wrote Endgame over several years and there are radically different drafts, Nodler says. He believes it is a wonderful start for anyone who hasn’t seen a Beckett play, calling it the funniest one he did. “There are laughs all over the place.”

    Catastrophic Theatre attracts a lot of what Nodler calls “non-traditional theater audiences,” many of whom find things to like about it that they may not have embraced in other more realistic theaters. Nodler is not against Houston’s more traditional theaters, in fact, he celebrates them, sees and respects their work. But part of the reason they have the pay-what-you-can philosophy is to attract people who might otherwise never go to the theater and discover it has something that speaks to them, just as he found when he was 13 years old.

    Performances are scheduled for September 19 through October 11 at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. at the MATCH, 3400 Main. For more information, call 713-521-4533 or matchouston.org. Pay what you can.

    Margaret Downing

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  • At The Catastrophic Theatre: Cleansed? Who Says?

    At The Catastrophic Theatre: Cleansed? Who Says?


    Who exactly is purified, absolved, or made clean in Sarah Kane’s brutal, sexually audacious Cleansed (1998)?

    Grace receives a phalloplasty and a mastectomy; psychologically abused Robin hangs himself; Rod has his throat sliced; sadistic Tinker makes love to a transvestite sex worker; Grace’s twin brother Graham is euthanized by a needle to his eye; and poor Carl, Rod’s lover, not only has his tongue cut out, but his hands and feet chopped off previous to being raped by a steel pole.

    There are no fun and games in this play. There may be tender moments, a bit of quixotic poetic dialogue, very fine acting, a visceral physical production with searing soundtrack and projections, a provocative set, but for what end? What the hell are we watching?

    Yes, we know it’s about love: subversive, nihilistic, narcissistic, even mean and vile. It’s about abuse and debasement in the face of finding oneself. It may even be about the redemption of love through pain. It may be…but Kane’s third play seems devoid of humanity, even though Kane wants us to believe it’s there beneath the nightmares. The drama flies in the face of love. Salvation comes with a terrible price.

    Young English playwright Kane, branded the mother of “in yer face” theater, exploded onto London’s theater scene in 1995 with her radical, experimental Blasted, a dystopian fever dream about war and its atrocities. It contains violent rape, incredible toxic masculinity, sodomy, eye gouging, starvation, cannibalism, and other forms of man’s inhumanity. In its juggernaut of sensory confrontation, the staid British critics called it grotesque, an abomination, and filth.

    Overnight, Kane became a star and went on to mystify and enrage with Phaedra’s Love, Cleansed, Crave, and her final work, 4:48 Psychosis. (Blasted is the only Kane play Catastrophic has not produced.) She was the hot new voice in theater, raw yet poetic, wild yet contained in some skewed classical way. Suffering from years of depression, she hung herself with a pair of shoelaces at King’s College Hospital in 1999 at the age of 28.

    While it may bat about the various forms of love that shall not be named – or those the Greeks had a word for – the drama reeks of torture porn dialed to 11. Cleansed is a contemporary remix of Jacobean Webster, fin de siécle French Grand Guignol, and Dickensian Punch and Judy. There’s a Dantean beauty in its horror, but also unforced comedy in its overabundance of atrocity. Kane relishes rubbing our face in the vileness of man.

    Needless to say, this is not a play for your fusty Aunt Fanny. With dispassion, I shall describe briefly what it’s about. It’s then up to you if you want to see it.

    In a nameless, grimy institution, Tinker (Walt Zipprian, in perhaps in his most frightening and forceful performance) rules with sadistic furor. His last patient Graham (Bryan Kaplún), perhaps a former lover, is put to death in Tinker’s arms. Graham’s twin sister Grace (T Lavois Thiebaud, in a phenomenally detailed characterization) visits the asylum (?) to reclaim her brother’s body. When she dons his clothes, that fellow inmate Robin (a poignant Ruben Ramires in his US theater debut) has been given to wear, she experiences a shuddering rebirth. She’s so in love with her brother, she longs to be him. She stays under Tinker’s care.

    Fellow patients Carl (Chuck Vaughn) and Rod (Abraham Zapata) declare their love, overheard by Tinker. “I will never lie to you. I will die for you,” says devoted Carl. Tinker tortures Carl, cutting out his tongue with large shears. Sensitive Robin is in love with Grace, but Grace only has eyes for her deceased brother. She sees him, talks to him, wants to be him. She mimics his style, his walk, his mannerisms.

    Tinker visits a sex show, where he masturbates while Woman (Raymond Compton) gyrates in her protective glass box. There’s an obvious attraction. The Woman wants help with her conflicts; Tinker will unctuously oblige. After each sexual encounter with Rod, Carl is brutally assaulted, resulting in his hands chopped off, later his feet, and ultimately having his penis grafted onto Grace in her zombie-like transformation. “I’m not a doctor,” Tinker says with an evil wink.

    Rebuffed in his love, innocent Robin hangs himself with Gracie’s pantyhose. After sex with the Woman, who reveals he is a man, Tinker sobs in his arms, declaring his love. (This all can’t end well, we think.) Grace, after her operation under Tinker’s direction, finds a kind of peace with mutilated Carl.

    “Death isn’t the worst thing they can do to you. Tinker made a man bite off another man’s
    testicles. Can take away your life but not give you death instead.” This cryptic quote sums up Kane’s trajectory. Pain leads to love? Personal acceptance? Or just more sadism and kink?

    Throughout though, Catastrophic glosses Kane’s scandalous play with the utmost professionalism. Thiebaud, Zipprian, Ramires, and Zapata are spellbinding. Afsaneh Aayani’s creepy set design in dirty gray metal is Broadway-worthy; directors and Jason Nodler, Catastrophic’s artistic director, and Thiebaud’s direction is swift and pungent, wallowing in the horrors – sometimes a bit too much and too long – and overlaying the atmosphere with an eerie chill.

    But the true stars of Cleansed are the thumping electronic score by Sarah Moessner and James Templton; Hudson Davis’ evocative lighting; and the atmospheric projections by Templeton and Tim Thomson. What gorgeous work these magicians conjure. The music is loud and icy, raising hackles, the stuff of all the bad dreams you’ve ever had. While the projections, almost constant, are impressionistic raindrops, riots, burning buildings, childhood reveries, or a chrysalis morphing into a butterfly. It’s all tonally perfect for this hellish tale.

    The one disappointment is that Catastrophic, Houston’s premiere avant-garde theater, plays it safe with nudity. This is Sarah Kane “in-yer-face” in spades. Why be so genteel and prudish with dance belts, prosthetic breasts, painted pubic hair, and patently false phalluses. Kane means to shove this in our face; go ahead and shove it.

    Cleansed continues through April 27 at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Sundays at Catastrophic Theatre at MATCH, 3400 Main. For more information, call 713-521-4533 or visit catastrophictheatre.com. Pay what you can. Due to the subject matter, no one under the age of 16 will be permitted in the theater.

    D. L. Groover

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