Recent Reviews
Review: The New Electric Ballroom by Renaissance Austin
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 25, 2015
Underwood and Jambon give a terrible urgency to this text and concept. Fiercely intimidating, Jennifer Underwood applies Walsh's words like fileting knives. Karen Jambon reacts with the confusion and exuberance of a child uncertain if she's about to be whipped or rewarded.
Enda Walsh's The New Electric Ballroom is an astonishing achievement, both for the Irishman's text and Renaissance Austin's staging of it. This is theatre deep and dark and harrowing, art that stands with the best of Beckett, and it's right here in Austin for two weekends more. Plain powerful language delivers images of a fishing village in remote Ireland. Walsh's wild imagining of the absurd places us inside a dark cottage with three women. Two …
Review: Our Town by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 20, 2015
Trinity Street Players take us far away for the evening and at the same time they bring us back home.
I'm still a bit out of kilter and pensive. Just days after Stage Manager Scot Friedman gave the audience his confiding opening-night tour of Our Town, Grover's Corners, NH, we spent a weekend in St. Joseph, Michigan. An extended family clustered around three nonogenarian brothers as they went back to the scenes of their 1930s boyhood. Their town's not a lot larger than Grover's Corners and it's equally well furnished with memories. Our Town is …
Review: Great Gold Bird, Great Dark Yawn, a wanderplay by Twin Alchemy Collective
by David Glen Robinson
Published on May 20, 2015
What are the visions of millenials in art? A short, incomplete list from Katie Green for Twin Alchemy list may include the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the life of Nicola Tesla, horses, the Land of the Midnight Sun, the aurora borealis, and conspiracy theories.
Twin Alchemy Collective’s Great Gold Bird, Great Dark Yawn, playing now, is a mixed digital combination of internet web pages, cell telephony, web video and a round of advanced digitally clued geo-caching. These media support content of visual art, music, voice theatrical work, and complex sound collages. The presentation is a montage of these artistic forms. It is all quite beautiful and well in keeping with Twin Alchemy’s abhorrence of conventionality and strong commitment to …
Review: Emma When You Need Her by Shrewd Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 15, 2015
There’s a protean churning in the cast, for these twelve actors gather as crowds, audiences, workforces and hounded dissident conspirators.
The immersive experience of an ensemble piece like Emma When You Need Her can be disconcerting. You walk into the black box of the Vortex Rep to find people milling around, and someone — who was it, now? — offers you a chunk of chalk and invites you to write on the unadorned walls. Well, why not? Chalk thoughts and images bloom as the seats fill. The cheerful troupe of actors in ragtag attire swirls …
Review 2: The Wars of Heaven, Pt. 1 by Trouble Puppet Theatre Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on May 12, 2015
Noel Gaulin’s shadow dance as The Almighty is exquisite. He sets forth the facts of Creation and Eternity and then withdraws to His throne in the Empyrean.
The Salvage Vanguard Theater, one of east Austin’s premier warehouse theaters, lends itself to darkness. An intentional, cultivated sense of gloom prefaces Trouble Puppet Theater’s vast imaginative updating of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. For the 21st century, the work is reentitled The Wars of Heaven, Part 1. The production is ambitious in taking on this monument of world literature, but Trouble Puppet has climbed monuments before and knows how to do it. Milton’s visionary 1667 …
Review: An Empty Plate in the Cafe du Grand Boeuf by Gaslight Baker Theatre
by Kara Bliss McGregor
Published on May 11, 2015
The plot is frothy and the characters broadly drawn, a satisfying blend of tragicomedy and slapstick, plus food for thought about life, sex and long goodbyes.
At center, Michael Hollinger’s An Empty Plate in the Café du Grand Boeuf celebrates the joys of appetite, the mysteries of attraction, and what makes a manly man, with a generous helping of the absurd and homage to Ernest Hemingway. The opening night production at the Gaslight-Baker Theater was a feast, served by a nimble cast under the direction of Robyn Gammill. The story unfolds in 1961 in a Paris restaurant owned by an eccentric …