FESTIVAL OF INDEPENDENT THEATRES 2007
The Boxer by Matt Lyle - WORLD PREMIERE
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| Director... |
Matt Lyle
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| Stage Manager... |
John Gordon
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| Costumes... |
Aaron Turner
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| Props/Set... |
Kim Lyle & Matt Lyle
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| Lighting... |
Russell Dyer |
| Projectionist... |
Kristin VanSickle |
| Videos by... |
Karl Schaeffer |
| Choreography... |
Nancy Schaeffer |
| Video Assistant... |
Phillip Schaeffer |
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| Musicians... |
B. Wolf |
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Johnny Sequenzia |
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| Featuring... |
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| Ben Bryant as Worker, Goon, Bavarian Beast |
| Tara Christensen as Dancing Girl, Fairy |
| Steve Jones as Boss Man, Announcer |
| Kim Lyle as Velma |
| Kineta Massey as Worker, Fairy, Ring Girl Gorilla |
| Joel McDonald as Worker, Trainer, Goon |
| Jeff Swearingen as The Boxer |
| Laurie Williamson as Dancing Girl, Fairy |
| Jennifer Youle as Sexy Waitress, Fairy |
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The mean streets. Turn of the Century. It's nearly impossible for a body to feed himself and if you are a herself, forget it. A woman can't make a living and keep her virtue (if you know what we mean). So the heroine becomes a hero (dresses like a man) to put bread in her belly. As chance would have it, she happens upon a big man beating a little man senseless. She intervenes and knocks the big man loopy. Big mistake! The little man is the titular Boxer and the big man was his trainer. Who will train The Boxer and his glass jaw for the "Big Fight" against the Bavarian Beast now that the big man has the brain damage? Hm? Smitten, Velma insists that she's just the wom-er-man for the job. Will The Boxer win the "Big Fight"? Will love bloom in the ring?
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Festival's independent plays present pleasure
July 20, 2007 By LAWSON TAITTE / The Dallas Morning News
The surprise hit of last year's festival was the comedy Matt Lyle wrote and starred in for Bootstraps Comedy Theater. Mr. Lyle has done it again – although the surprise has now thoroughly evaporated – by writing and directing The Boxer, a theatrical homage to the silent-movie greats, complete with superb live musical accompaniment by B. Wolf and Johnny Sequenzia.
This time Kim Lyle (the playwright's wife) stars as a woman who finds it hard to obtain honest work because of her gender. She befriends a boxer (Jeff Swearingen) and becomes his new trainer, as he prepares for his big bout with the fearful Bavarian Beast (Ben Bryant).
The Boxer feels a little like a romance between Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Ms. Lyle's character owes much to Chaplin's Little Tramp, and the always hilarious Mr. Swearingen borrows a lot of the deadpan Keaton charm. If pairing these icons up sexually sounds a little unsettling, that's half the fun of the play.
Mr. Lyle has come up with an endless fountain of visual jokes – sexy barmaids, elaborate cinematic montages, an actor in a monkey suit, chases by land and by water, and (perhaps best of all) a dream ballet that sets Rodgers and Hammerstein back 40 years. His performers execute the moves with the same sort of grace you find in the best silent films, and Ms. Wolf's musical commentary (which doesn't hesitate to borrow from sources more recent than 1929) consistently adds to the pleasure.
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Silent Treatment
A comedy knockout from The Boxer at FIT
July 26, 2007 By ELAINE LINER / The Dallas Observer
The less said, the better The Boxer is. The new play by Dallas writer and Bootstraps Comedy Theater founder Matt Lyles, who also directs this production, is a clear audience favorite at the current Festival of Independent Theatres at the Bath House Cultural Center. Its brilliance lies in how it manages to say things worth saying about the delicate use of low comedy to make high art and how to graft pathos onto humor—and it says it all without any actor uttering a word.
Inspired by the silent film comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Lyles spent two weeks writing 13 pages of detailed stage directions for a story about a pretty girl named Velma (played by Kim Lyle, Matt's wife) who must masquerade as a man to earn Depression-era wages. After a chance meeting with an up-and-coming lightweight (Jeff Swearingen), Velma, still in man-drag, turns fight trainer for his big bout with the fearsome Bavarian Beast (Ben Bryant).
Velma falls in love with her skinny palooka with the glass jaw, and the two survive some run-ins with goons (Bryant again and Joel McDonald) who want him to take a dive. The boxer is tempted—he needs the dough for his sick ma's operation—but Velma refuses to let him compromise his integrity. In the end, the wordless play is a romantic knockout complete with dream ballet and fluttery dancing fairies (Kineta Massey, Jennifer Youle, Tara Christensen, Laurie Williamson), just like in a Bugs Bunny or Mighty Mouse cartoon.
This set-up sounds deceptively simple. The beauty of The Boxer is in the actors' execution of scores of visual gags, each choreographed with split-second timing and leading to surprising pay-offs. Lyles pays homage to the inventive mechanical gags Keaton was known for—Velma getting tangled in a seatless chair; the sad-eyed boxer interacting with a film clip of his ailing mother. And he uses Chaplin's naturally arising gag style in Velma's awkward dance sequence—forgetting to pretend to be a boy, she puts her hands in all the wrong places on her female waltz partner. In another scene, Velma and the boxer turn their feet out sideways to scoot laterally into his tiny crackerbox of an apartment.
Watching each carefully worked out bit build into and on top of the next one, the audience reaction grows from snickers to guffaws to full-out belly-hugging laughs. We instantly accept Kim Lyle as a shoulder-shrugging, bowler-wearing Little Tramp character, and we root for her to win both her man and the championship fight. And stone-faced Swearingen, hopping around like Looney Tunes' Banty Rooster in his baggy red satin shorts, is her perfectly Keatonesque comic foil.
None of this would be half so funny without the onstage keyboard accompaniment of B. Wolf, who created the silent film score, jam-packed with jokey musical references to movies about prizefighters, spunky gals and other cartoon heroes. Next to her stage right is Johnny Sequenzia, playing stringed instruments and hitting funny sound effects right on cue. Karl Schaeffer made the film bits projected, along with old-timey "title cards," on an upstage screen.
This one's such a charmer it's almost a shame Lyle wrote it as a one-act. Unlike most new plays, The Boxer feels too brief.
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It's FIT to be square
August 4, 2007 MARK LOWRY/Fort Worth Star-Telegram
OK, on this final day of Dallas' Festival of Independent Theatres (FIT), I am finally reporting on my experiences seeing all 10 of the one-act plays (by nine local companies) over the past few weeks. Turns out, trying to find time to blog about them, while also doing my regular work duties, is more difficult than I thought it would be. But, here goes. I’ll start with my four favorites:
2. Bootstraps Comedy Theater: The Boxer by Matt Lyle. The local playwright (who also directed) ingeniously crafted an original silent film for the stage, about a Depression-era woman (Kim Lyle) who has to dress as a man to find work, and then falls in love with a scrawny boxer (Jeff Swearingen). She also trains him to fight the “Bavarian Beast” (Ben Bryant). The script is good, but here it's all about the performances, which demand (and get) perfect timing by the actors who lip the dialogue projected on old-fashioned title cards on an upstage screen. Lots of physical comic gags and a clever onstage original score (played on keyboards by B. Wolf, with strings and sound effects performed by Johnny Sequenzia) made this show an audience pleaser. Let’s hope Bootstraps puts this knockout in the ring again some day.
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Local playwrights nurture their scripts to the stage
Festival of Independent Theatres features works by newcomers and veterans
July 23, 2007 LAWSON TAITTE/Dallas Morning News
At the Bath House Cultural Center's Festival of Independent Theatres, works by local playwrights have always been a strong point. This year that's truer than ever. Six of the 10 plays for the ninth annual FIT are new and local. The writers range from pros who have had productions in New York to a first-time writer who is still a student.
FIT allows Dallas' enterprising smaller companies to take risks they might otherwise have to pass up. Among the experiments this year, Ylla uses puppets and projections and The Boxer mimics a silent film with improvised musical accompaniment. Some of the directors and actors are among our most established, but others are new to the local scene.
Here's what's behind the scripts they are unveiling.
Matt Lyle
Show: The Boxer, staged by Bootstraps Comedy Theater
Day job: Volunteer coordinator at Dallas Children's Theater, artistic director of Bootstraps, freelance director and actor
Plot: Work is scarce in the early 1900s; the only way Velma can get honest work is to dress as a man. She runs into a boxer and becomes his trainer.
Author's note: "Longtime Dallas theater musician B. Wolf worked with us on the last scene of our 2006 FIT show. She wrote the music in maybe 20 minutes – and it was perfect and so much fun. I wondered, could we do this for 40 minutes? So I came up with this show with no dialogue. I watched Bugs Bunny growing up, and loved the Marx Brothers, and in the last couple of years found Charlie Chaplin movies. We're not making fun of it [the silent movie style] in any way. We're paying homage to it, with a touch of modern sensibility."
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