If you think there is little to no serious theater in San Antonio, you’re not alone. Even business travelers dining at Bohanan’s must notice that the marquees of the venerable Majestic and Empire theaters most often announce comedy or music shows. If a play is listed, it’s likely a touring musical, such as The Addams Family, which appeared this month at the Majestic. Nearby, the opulent Aztec Theatre is shuttered; a sign on the door advertises it is available for event rentals.

If drama — other than the political sort at City Hall — ever graced downtown stages, there’s little record of it. The Charline McCombs Empire Theatre was built in 1916 as a vaudeville house, and then became a movie theater. The Majestic Theatre arrived in 1929, courtesy of the Interstate Theatres film chain. Eventually, both theaters were shuttered and since renovations brought them back to life in 1989, a variety of performances, including the San Antonio Symphony’s season at the Majestic, have been offered. But precious little serious theater, of the artistic quality demanded off Broadway, has been seen.

Bereft of a central theater district, San Antonio is instead home to more than two dozen small companies spread almost invisibly about the city — the majority would most appropriately be described as community theater. Though our city is yet to found an Actors Equity house guaranteeing professional level performances and actors’ pay, some companies, like the Classic Theatre of San Antonio and AtticRep muster remarkable performances, many recognized by The Alamo Theater Arts Council’s annual awards.

In the past, a favored destination for those seeking innovative, experimental work was the Blue Star Arts Complex where productions at the Overtime Theater and the Sterling Houston Theater at Jump-Start have attracted devoted, if small audiences. But, a little over a year ago the Overtime left Southtown, a casualty of new construction at the complex, and last month the arts community was shocked to hear that Jump-Start’s lease would not be renewed.

Though the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, being built within the gutted façade of the old Municipal Auditorium, promises a resurgence of artistic endeavor based on a few lucky tenants when it opens in fall of 2014, San Antonio’s theater community now seems under duress. But is theater being incrementally whittled away before it can mature to a professional level, or are changes in our local economy offering the possibility for a renaissance?

As the Current went to press on Monday, April 15, for our April 17 issue, we barely had time to insert news we confirmed that day: Jump-Start’s lease would not be renewed at the Blue Star Arts Complex. Since then, James Lifshutz, principal of the company that owns the property, signed papers with Jump-Start that allow them to stay through January, 2014, past the end of their lease in September. Even with the extra time, the transition won’t be easy for the theater company, one of the first tenants of the nearly 30-year-old arts complex. At present, neither Jump-Start, Classic Theatre, nor Celebration Circle — the third nonprofit sharing the space — know where they ultimately will land.

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Rex Hausmann, local artist and arts advocate, recently opened his latest exhibition in the massive showrooms of Gallery Nord with a cohort of more than 30 participants, quite a crowd for a solo show. But Hausmann, who runs Alta Vista studio and exhibition space Hausmann Millworks with his family, and has toured groups of SA artists to Kansas and New York, loves a big social mix. His paintings have been exhibited at institutions such as UTSA’s Institute of Texan Cultures, Southwest School of Art, and at galleries in Los Angeles and New York, but collaboration has long been at the heart of his work.

The evening opened with a reading by SA poet Jim LaVilla-Havelein and continued with subtle programming. Models in cosplay costumes milled about, attended by stylists and followed by photographers Kat E.V. Day and Ernesto Ibañez. Dresses made of paper, by SA-based fashion designer Samantha Plasencia, held positions next to mock-ups of window displays filled with bits of ephemera and studio notes. A film and a slide show rolled, while a group of enthusiasts played the table-top game Warhammer. And that was just part of the ground-floor happenings, which also included an almost manic dispensing of donuts, treats that were seen in paintings done in his chaotically colorful signature style.

Two new series express Hausmann’s fascination with child’s play. Deep, canvas-like mono-colored squares are embellished on the edges with tiny clusters of plastic figurines. One large work depicting, says Hausmann, a trip to China, has the toy people stuck upside down on the bottom edge of a bare canvas, an allusion to the childhood story of people on the other side of the world walking upside-down.

On the second floor is a set of 15 line drawings — simple, but deftly executed. Like much of Hausmann’s output, there is an air of nostalgia; happy scenes of fishing trips are mixed with a drawing of a woman striding buoyantly into the day.

But why this outpouring of disparate work, much of it no longer on view at the gallery? Not just part of an ambitious opening party, Day’s photography and Plasencia’s architecturally constructed dresses are featured in Hausmann’s central project: a 95-page book, his sixth in a series. Part comic book, designer’s flip-book, and artist’s rendering for a film, it is a celebration of collaborative art making. The book, on sale for $40, costs a fraction of what the drawings and paintings, props for the pamphlet, go for. Hausmann is a hustler indeed, but though he plays the game of selling art for a living, he’s a San Anto boy, a populist through-and-through.

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ARIES (March 21-April 19) “I’m still learning,” said Michelangelo when he was 87 years old. For now, he’s your patron saint. With his unflagging curiosity as your inspiration, maybe your hunger for new teachings will bloom. You will register the fact that you don’t already know everything there is to know … you have not yet acquired all the skills you were born to master … you’re still in the early stages of exploring whole swaths of experience that will be important to you as you become the person you want to be. Even if you’re not enrolled in a formal school, it’s time to take your education to the next level.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20) Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman admitted that physicists can’t really define “energy,” let alone understand it. “We have no knowledge of what energy is,” he said. “We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount.” While it’s unlikely that in the coming weeks you will advance the scientific understanding of energy, you will almost certainly boost your natural grasp of what energy feels like both inside and outside of your body. You will develop a more intuitive knack for how it ebbs and flows. You will discover useful tips about how to make it work for you rather than against you. You’re already a pretty smart animal, but soon you’ll get even smarter.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20) Giant Sequoias are the biggest trees on the planet. Many are more than 300 feet tall and 30 feet wide. Their longevity is legendary, too. They can live for 2,000 years. And yet their seeds are tiny. If you had a bag of 91,000 seeds, it would weigh one pound. I suspect there’s currently a resemblance between you and the Giant Sequoia. You’re close to acquiring a small kernel that has the potential to grow into a strong and enduring creation. Do you know what I’m talking about? Identify it. Start nurturing it.

CANCER (June 21-July 22) Don’t take yourself too seriously. The more willing you are to make fun of your problems, the greater the likelihood is that you will actually solve them. If you’re blithe and breezy and buoyant, you will be less of a magnet for suffering. To this end, say the following affirmations out loud. 1) “I’m willing to make the mistakes if someone else is willing to learn from them.” 2) “I’m sorry, but I’m not apologizing any more.” 3) “Suffering makes you deep. Travel makes you broad. I’d rather travel.” 4) “My commitment is to truth, not consistency.” 5) “The hell with enlightenment, I want to have a tantrum.” 6) “I stopped fighting my inner demons.  We’re on the same side now.”

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22) Would you buy a stuffed bunny or a baby blanket that was handcrafted by a prisoner on death row? Would you go to a café and eat a sandwich that was made by an employee who was screaming angrily at another employee while he made your food? Would you wear a shirt that was sewn by a 10-year-old Bangladeshi girl who works 12 hours every day with a machine that could cut off her fingers if she makes one wrong move? Questions like these will be good for you to ask yourself. It’s important for you to evaluate the origins of all the things you welcome into your life – and to make sure they are in alignment with your highest values and supportive of your well-being.

A quarter of the way through The Flu Season, Will Eno’s 2003 absurdist exercise set in a psychiatric hospital, patients in the TV room watch a report on how an entire family fell through early-winter ice and died. Skating on a thin dramatic surface, the play itself hovers on the verge of its own destruction.  Like Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy, which concludes with the statement: “It was not midnight. It was not raining,” nullifying the earlier assertion: “It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows,” The Flu Season performs a pas de deux between self-creation and self-negation.

Two metafictional figures, identified as Prologue (Sophie Bolles) and Epilogue (Stephen Poer), materialize at the beginning and, ignoring fourth-wall conventions, speak directly to the audience. Prologue is buoyant and rhapsodizes about the scene she sets for a play she calls The Snow Romance. But Epilogue, a jittery cynic, contradicts her and states that the play has been renamed The Flu Season. Prologue and Epilogue will repeatedly interrupt the proceedings with commentary. Prologue’s is exuberant and lyrical, immediately deflated by Epilogue’s tart disclaimers. “I’m sick of this story,“ Epilogue ultimately tells Prologue, “and I’m sick of you.”

The story, such as it is, involves a male patient, called Man (Nathan Thurman), and a female patient, called Woman (Kaitlin Graves), who meet and fall in love in the hospital. They are attended by an officious physician, called Doctor (Aaron Aguilar, who also directs), and a self-absorbed nurse, called Nurse (Halen George). Beyond that, a plot summary would be irrelevant, because verbal frolic is more important than events and because Epilogue – the author’s eraser – continually deletes what Prologue affirms and what we see on stage. “Life is a word game,” insists Epilogue, and, true to life in a loony way, The Flu Season, whose title is an ailing lark, is composed not of significant actions but verbal flummery and non sequiturs. “Buck teeth are buck teeth,” proclaims Nurse. “There’s only so much cocoa left,” declares Doctor, who is more deranged than his patients. ”That’s my philosophy.”

Since the fictional characters in the play are manifestly fictional characters, the challenge to Proxy Theatre’s talented cast is to make them not believable but memorable. For a suicidal soliloquy with echoes of Ophelia, Graves’ Woman stands out, as does Aguilar’s Doctor, especially when, swathed in bandages after a bee attack, he makes his drivel almost unintelligible. Epilogue asks: “It is entertaining to watch people in pain, yes?” Yes. Though The Flu Season skates over depression, rejection, loneliness, and death, it never quite falls through the ice. The spirited execution of lines and gestures that Epilogue pronounces “useless” generates a kind of morbid exhilaration.

In what might have brought down the curtain if there were a curtain marking off the minimalist set, Prologue, grievously disappointed in the turn her play has taken, finally announces: “The end.” But Epilogue immediately declares: “There is no end.” The players simply disappear, with no opportunity for the ovation they have richly earned. With this, the third production of its second season, an adventurous, audacious repertory company proves again that in San Antonio theater there is no substitute for Proxy.