Reviews for FronteraFest Performances
Review: The Island of Dr. Moreau by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 09, 2014
Vigorous, brash, opinionated and witty, Charles P. Stites would be an entertainment all by himself if you had regular access to him. He posts frequently on Facebook, celebrating books, poems, actors, artists, authors, incidents of daily life, Half Price Books, his favorite coffeeshop and family and friends. Actor and director, he has appeared on Austin stages (most recently in La Bute's Fat Pig and in Shakespeare's Coriolanus but earlier for City Theatre as Tartuffe and as the odious Ricky …
Review: Iced Tea in Texas by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 02, 2014
Everybody loves Bernie, judging from the theatre crowd turnout for Bernadette Nason's third autobiographical one-woman show. I'm no exception. Checking the files, I find that I positively gushed when I reviewed installment no. 2, Dinner in Dubai in 2012. I missed the opener Tea in Tripoli in July 2011, but I have some vague hope that one of these days she'll provide us all a four-pack, perhaps on successive evenings serving tea in Tripoli, dinner in Dubai, iced tea …
Review: Mad & A Goat by Diana Lynn Small, FronteraFest 2014
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 23, 2014
Once they begin to speak and move, mirroring one another, complementing one another, delivering the lengthy shaggy goat story written by Small (whichever one she is), it doesn't matter. They are the same woman.
Two women appear, standing side by side, each dressed in a frumpy oversized T-shirt and holding a portable tape recorder. Expressionless -- or is that ironic? -- they take turns jabbing buttons so that the machines blurt forth, a phrase at a time, the intro. (Oh, gosh, is this going to be an endless evening of pseudosmart absurdity?) (The answer is triumphantly 'no.') One of those women is …
Review: Women in Search of Love by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 02, 2012
Ah, though, the women! They captured my heart.
Last Saturday's FronteraFest "Best of Week 3" brought us a lot of yin and very little yang. Of the five pieces brought forward, four were solos by actresses. Yang did hold its own. The six "Confidence Guys" who did improvised Mamet gave us that playwright's expletives, elisions, incomplete understoods and macho pushiness to the life. After a quick poll of the audience they played it as salesmen in a failing car dealership. Maybe it was …
Review: Four Square by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 02, 2012
Zarate's choice of an extremely strong and experienced cast helps the audience past those blurs. This piece is rationally irrational, one that keeps you guessing and wraps you up emotionally.
Inevitably, Manuel Zarate's one-act play Four Squarereminds one of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story. There's a chance encounter in a public place with no one else around. A chat between two strangers starts with simple exchanges, courtesies, really, then progresses until we eventually see that one of them is a psychotic and the other is a victim. There's something of the bull ring to the concept, except that instead of the ceremonial squads to do the tormenting, …
Review: Somewhere in Utopia (A Travesty) by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 31, 2012
Face it: there's no use getting annoyed with the theatre of the absurd, no matter how confusing it may seen. Go ahead, get out of your comfort zone and stretch your mind. Maybe getting annoyed will do you good.
Face it: there's no use getting annoyed with the theatre of the absurd, no matter how confusing it may seen. Or even with the neo-theatre of the absurd such as this piece by Jared J. Stein, produced a good 50 years after the audacious thumbing-its-nose-at-the-bourgeois art style hit the European stages. In Somewhere in Utopia Stein portrays a dystopia: two principal characters are fixed unthinkingly before a television screen as the audience files into the black …