Recent Reviews
Review: Rapture, Blister Burn, by Southwest Theatre Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 30, 2015
It's 15 years further down the road. You'd hardly think it a good idea for him to invite his former flame to teach a summer seminar on feminism at the college.
New on the scene, Southwest Theatre Productions provides an intimate experience with Gina Gionfriddo's 2012 play Rapture Blister Burn due both to the staging in the Salvage Vanguard's tiny studio theatre and to the subject matter: a middle-aged triangle of marital regrets served with lectures on the awakening of feminism in the twentieth century. Gionfriddo sets out to demonstrate that theories of sociology fall short of providing a philosophical basis for living one's life. Writer-lecturer …
Review: Thr3E Zisters, at Salvage Vanguard Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 27, 2015
The bloodless female bodies move and speak. One delivers an eerie wailing monologue insisting that the smell of cut flowers is really the flowers screaming in pain. It's an exquisitely scary moment.
Robert Matney's solo appearance for the first eight minutes or so of Three Zisters is a pure delight. Attentively silent and diffident in his vaguely Russian garb, he greets the audience with his eyes, nibbles a pickle, checks the samovar, works through an exquisite sequence of business and gestures that leaves the audience rapt, fascinated by his subtle pantomime, reminiscent of Chaplin in the silents. Once he finds his voice we learn that he's there …
DNA, Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 26, 2015
Big Phil tells them what to do so as to escape detection. Things get out of hand. When Phil's first plan runs aground, he's unperturbed; he provides a new set of instructions. And then another. No one questions him. No one tells the police or any of the grownups the truth.
The Off Center's a pretty dark place, as is any black box theatre, so it's an appropriate setting for Capital T's production of Dennis Kelly's sardonic little play DNA. Mark Pickell's simple set makes the most of that void. You spend just over an hour in a stretch of nondescript forest, defined only by a line of young trees and a random rock and lump of ground. This is a long way from anywhere, and …
The Biscuiteater by Jim Loucks
by David Glen Robinson
Published on January 24, 2015
Loucks is an excellent performer, and the highest mark of his skill is his ability to flash back and forth between two characters in dialogue, a chameleon changing colors while trapped in a kaleidoscope.
Austin’s newest theatre venue, the Ground Floor Theater, opened its performance doors to the world on January 19 with the first performances of the 2015 edition of FronteraFest Long Fringe. The theater is the brainchild of Lisa Scheps and Patti Neff-Tiven, producers who envisioned a theater to meet a dire need: an independent, community-collaborative theater to counter the recent shutterings of east side theaters. Robert Faires of the Austin Chronicle has called the independent east …
Review: The Insomniacs' Ball by Chris Fontanes
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 22, 2015
The insomniacs' late sleepless night breathed not of angst but of ennui. . . . In his millenial neo-Romantic script Fontanes moves his characters toward communion, if not toward hope or optimism.
Theatre, in the concept of this website, isn't an industry or an institution. It's a way of experiencing and reporting the world, a collaborative effort to explore what's important to us now, at this moment in history and at this time in our lives. The power of mimesis lends itself to large scale commercial presentation, including on screen and in extravagant live entertainments ("Razzle-dazzle 'em," as Billy Flynn advises Roxy in Kander and Ebb's Chicago). …
Review: Deus Ex Machina by Liz Fisher
by David Glen Robinson
Published on January 20, 2015
The oracle dance conveyed the outer excitement of the setting and the inner turmoil of the diverse characters tossed willingly within its circle of clairvoyant fire. This was brilliant choreography, flawlessly danced.
Whirligig Productions and playwright Liz Fisher seem to have turned a corner in theatre with their production of Deus ex Machina, now enjoying its spectacular premiere run at the Rollins Studio Theatre at the Long Center. The production is a new play by Fisher, her compound of the three plays in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, about the House of Atreus after the Trojan War. Her work also incorporates some of Sophocles’ and Euripides’ follow-on works (fan fiction?) …