Arts

Recharged in Austin, Bartholomee is ready to take on New York once more

Austin producer/director/filmmaker/writer/actor Lowell Bartholomee nurtures a four-tier fantasy about his funny, dark collection of short plays, "Blah, Blah, Blah," which he transfers to New York's International Fringe Festival next month.

The bottom tier: Each of the five New York shows sells out, and everybody laughs a lot.

The second tier: Return to Austin at least having talked with some writing agents.

The third tier: Return to Austin with a writing agent.

The top tier: Tina Fey comes to see the show, hires Bartholomee to be a writer for 'Saturday Night Live,' which he does for one season only, returning to Austin to live on the money he makes on 'SNL' for the next five years.

Photos by Kelly West/AA-S

A double shift of lounging on the couch in Austin provided the impetus for Lowell Bartholomee to reclaim his stage time.

'Blah, Blah, Blah'
When: 8 p.m. Saturday
Where: Blue Theater, 916 Springdale Road
Tickets: $5 to $1 million (it's a benefit)
Information: info@bayou-radio.com


"Blah, Blah, Blah" -- which will be performed for a benefit Saturday -- was originally produced by Bartholomee's production company, Bayou Radio, in a blazing hot Austin warehouse two years ago. The production in New York will be in a cushier space.

Bartholomee sees serendipity in the randomly selected site for the New York premiere: the Black Box @ 440 Studios (on Astor Plaza), which is just one block from New York University's Tisch School of Arts, where Bartholomee studied filmmaking. After college, he rented a performance space at Tisch for his first effort as a producer and director, selecting an Australian farce -- "two words that should never go together," he says.

It was a production so bad that Bartholomee left the theater for a decade. Returning to the old neighborhood is sweet, "like you're going to be performing in the basement of the house you grew up in," Bartholomee says. "It feels like a privilege, feels like, 'Hello, I'm back, here's what I've been doing while I've been gone, Mom and Dad.' "

After graduating from NYU, Bartholomee came to Austin to make a movie that never got made. He went home to Baltimore and lived with his parents for a couple of years. He moved to Los Angeles.

On one lonely California night, he called his old friend from Texas, Allen Robertson, a composer/playwright/music director in Austin. Robertson invited Bartholomee to join a production of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" that Bartholomee had helped Robertson create when they were undergraduates at Abilene Christian University. Bartholomee wasn't sure if Robertson was joking, but he said "yes," quickly, and came to Austin for his first paying job as an actor. After the show closed, Bartholomee drove back to Los Angeles, packed his car and hightailed it back to Austin.

Austin doesn't cure everybody's blues, and it didn't bring Bartholomee out of his slump at first. He landed a job at Half-Price Books and spent a lot of time being one with his couch.

After one 16-hour day on his couch, he decided it was time to make a change. He found a list of UT's informal classes and signed up for improvisation. The class made him feel happy. So he took acting classes from Babs George and Ann Ciccolella at what was then known as Live Oak Theatre. Both encouraged him to audition and introduced him to local directors.

He was soon a fixture on Austin stages.

In Ciccolella's acting class, Bartholomee became friends with Gary Lipkowitz, who produced American versions of Japanese anime at ADV Films' Austin branch. It was a fortuitous friendship. Lipkowitz asked Bartholomee to write some of the series, taking the literal translations from Japanese and matching the animated lip flaps to American dialogue. Bartholomee soon became a full-time writer-producer, and now is an engineer/director for ADV.

Somewhere along the way, he also became a co-producing artistic director for the Dirigo Group, one of Austin's most daring young theatrical companies.

Bartholomee and the actors he's employing for "Blah, Blah, Blah" feel they are making a commando raid on the International Fringe Festival, which includes more than 200 productions in 20 different venues.

After several unsuccessful attempts to enter the fest, he sent the application off via UPS earlier this year. That night, someone broke into his apartment and stole his computer, most of his DVD collection, and a CD case containing backups of all the films he has created for various Austin theater companies' productions.

Bartholomee prefers to call the burglary a "heist." He likes to think it was a carefully cased job by career criminals, not just a couple of losers who took his stuff. "I like to think that there were maps, that there were blueprints of the air duct system," he says. "I'd like to think it involved a laser, that Donald Sutherland was in there somewhere."

But despite the procrastination, the discouragement and the "heist," Bartholomee is headed to New York with "Blah, Blah, Blah."

Most Austin actors, directors and playwrights face this question: Why aren't you in New York? Or at least Los Angeles.

"If I had stayed in L.A., I'd be dead," he says. "If I lived in New York, I'd be the angriest man alive. I'm here till further notice."