Reviews for Austin Playhouse Performances
Review: Time Stands Still by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 15, 2014
I don't watch television. I don't have cable TV service in the house, and I especially avoid television news. Even when the editors strive for balance in face of controversy, TV reporting makes you stupid. Most of it is essentially entertainment, so the programmers can't resist lurid exploitation of violence and catastrophe. That's what the public wants and has wanted since the days of Aristotle: stories that arouse pity and fear. So you'll understand my …
Review: Roaring by Austin Playhouse
by David Glen Robinson
Published on April 14, 2014
Austin Playhouse is producing the premiere run of Cyndi Williams’ Roaring at their Highland Mall theatre in central Austin. Balancing their recent trend of producing contemporary plays by international playwrights (David Ives’ Venus in Fur and The Liar), Austin Playhouse has given an impressive opportunity to a long-time Austin theatre playwright, Cyndi Williams. The multi-talented Williams is most often seen on stage or gaining laudable credits in the design fields. Her play Roaring is now onstage until May 4th. Program credit went …
Review: The Liar by Austin Playhouse
by David Glen Robinson
Published on February 10, 2014
Playwright David Ives is surfing a crest of popularity in Austin and Texas, as his Venus in Fur closed its marvelous run two weeks ago at Austin Playhouse and continues to run in other Texas cities. Ives’ adaptation of The Liar has just opened at Austin Playhouse in Highland Mall, playing until March 9. Ives seems to specialize in fastening on works of literature and historical theatre and adapting them to contemporary tastes. Venus in Fur was structured as a …
Review: Venus in Fur by Austin Playhouse
by David Glen Robinson
Published on January 06, 2014
The humor in the play is sharp contemporary adult dialogue. Someday this topical humor may date Venus in Fur to the early ought-teens of the twenty-first century, but so be it.
Venus in Fur by David Ives is a new, highly regarded American play making the rounds of theatres in Texas and across the nation. It's currently playing at Austin Playhouse, Austin’s singular shopping mall theatre through January 25th. Austin Playhouse is calling it an off-season play and discounting its ticket price for its initial run. Theatre-goers won’t want to miss this one. The setting is a rented rehearsal studio in Manhattan, where a young playwright named …
Review: Venus in Fur by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 06, 2014
Karrasch's transformations of costume and personae are by turns amusing, alluring and alarming; Haddock is fatigued, then intrigued, then confused, then spellbound. Karrasch is a chameleon but she's also a shape-shifter, an enchantress or an illusion.
What is desire? The attraction to a pair of long legs in black high-heeled boots and fishnet stockings? The fascination with a pair of bright eyes with heavy mascara, a mane of blond hair, and lips coated with a gloss as luscious and thick as blood-colored chocolate? The yearning for physical contact and the hypnotic intensity of mystery? Or perhaps the transmutation of half-understood, deep-buried memories from childhood? Or maybe the enigma of the Other, …
Review: And Then There Were None by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 09, 2013
You've arrived at an estate on an otherwise uninhabited island somewhere off the English coast along with nine strangers. Your host hasn't shown up. The weather has been steadily deteriorating. You spend the first hours tentatively making the acquaintance of this odd collection of mostly upper middle class individuals. The polite tedium is shattered when a voice from the next room sternly names each of you and accuses each of homicide. Ten lines of doggerel …