Recent Reviews
Review: The Amish Project by AtticRep
by Kurt Gardner
Published on February 14, 2016
Jessica Dickey's shattering solo piece comes to San Antonio's AtticRep in a superlative production starring the marvelous Sarah Gise.
Originally presented to great acclaim at New York’s Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Jessica Dickey’s 2009 solo work The Amish Project comes to AtticRep in a superlative production starring a marvelous Sarah Gise. In a role — well, actually roles — originated by Dickey, Gise masterfully portrays seven characters in a piece inspired by the real-life 2006 killing of five Amish girls in their schoolhouse in Lancaster County, PA. The characters here are creations of Dickey’s imagination, …
Review: Tribes by Zach Theatre, January 27 - February 28, 2016
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 06, 2016
Dave Steakley picked a winner with this script, successfully courted a fine ensemble and placed them in a soaring circular Palace of Ozymandias.
Nina Raine's Tribes deals with language. Make that plural: languages. First and predominant at the opening is the sharp back-and-forth of a comfortably middle-class English family, a couple with three grown children, all living at home. Christopher the father is particularly abrasive and foul-mouthed. Wife Beth puts up with it, and two of the children are uncowed by their dad's bantering sneers. The other, Billy, is quiet most of the time, and the prominent hearing …
Review: Exit 27 by Southwest Theatre Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 01, 2016
Message: Those worshipped FLSD elders imprisoned their women and, like cannibals, consumed their own many children, both female and male.
Exit 27 starts dark and gets darker. Much darker. Like just about everyone else I'd heard of the abuses of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLSD) church headed by Warren Jeffs -- traditionally polygamous and in some cases abusive of underage girls. That's why the man is serving a much deserved twenty-year prison sentence. Alex Merilo's 2013 play, which premiered in Houston, looks at the other horrific aspect of systematic abuse: the 'lost boys,' those …
Review: Top Dog/Underdog by Viceroys
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 31, 2016
Playwright Parks' talent is such that she makes a grotesque concept largely irrelevant n an extended, harsh and convincing portrayal of the serial defeats of the bottom one percent.
Matthew Frazier and Jarrett King, the self-styled Viceroys, delivered to initiates and fans a four-performance in camara production of Suzan-Lori Parks' fascinatingly grim drama Topdog/Underdog during the final days of January. The studio theatre at the Salvage Vanguard, a close and dark little space with perhaps fifty seats, lent itself to the creation of the barren and junk-furnished squat shared by two brothers. Lincoln and Booth, so named by sardonic father and overwhelmed mother who …
Review: Love/Sick by John Cariani, done by Diane Irwin and friends, January 24 - 31, 2016
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 30, 2016
This gang of friends, of an age keenly exposed to the sweet dangers of sentiment, presents these nuggets clearly and convincingly with a minimum of props in a chill last-minute venue.
Playwright John Cariani's gift is his ability to sketch in whimsical lines of ever so lightly ironic dialogue the longings and disappointments of the human heart. In Love/Sick, currently premiering in Austin as part of the displaced FronteraFest Long Fringe, Cariani uses exactly the same theatrical format as his wildly successful Almost, Maine in 2004 --a succession of short scenes performed by different pairs of actors, each turning on a quirk or surprise that spotlights …
Review: The Boys Next Door by City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 29, 2016
We in the audience leave the City Theatre somewhat lightened and enlightened by the chuckles of our evening with the boys next door.
Tom Griffith's 1986 comedy The Boys Next Door is a classic -- a light classic, granted, somewhat more like the fare featured at Houston's KUHA than that at Austin's generally more brainy KMFA. This adroitly scripted tale of a group home for four variously mentally handicapped men is a staple of community theatres (3500 productions so far and counting) but unlike other similarly popular works of light stage comedy, it hasn't been turned into a …