Recent Reviews
Review: Burn This by 7 Towers Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 08, 2011
Aaron Black's frighteningly convincing portrayal of Pale is monumentally good -- the fierce solarization of the neutral males he embodied in Susie Gidseg's play di[verge] this past summer.
For this intimate, powerful urban drama the setting is superb: a balcony-level studio downtown with a kitchen, a vantage point from which one could study passing vehicles, lines of close-parked cars, and pedestrians hurrying to music venues nearby. It's a "studio" in every sense of the word: with the addition of a minimum of furniture it represents a New York loft. Situated in the Ballet Austin building at 501 West Third Street, it's an appropriate …
Review: Men of Tortuga by Street Corner Arts
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 07, 2011
After the furious build, playwright Wells' dénouement is less satisfying than everything that went before. But the ride is such an entertaining one that we can forgive him that.
Where is Tortuga and whom are these conspirators targeting? Tortuga is Spanish for "turtle" and there are Tortugas all over the place. Lots of islands, for example -- a former pirates' haven off the northern coast of Haiti, an island off Venezuela, others off Costa Rica, in the Gallapagos and down in the Florida Keys. There's an unincorporated community in California close to the border with Mexico. My brother, in town for a visit, misremembered …
Review: Natividad - A Homemade Pastorela Play by ALTA Teatro
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 06, 2011
Director Alejandro Pedemonte and playwright Miguel Angel Santana have put together a thoroughly contemporary Christmas story.
Every year since 1997 Austin's Spanish-speaking community has crafted a Christmas play, taking the model of the traditional Pastorela pageant of long date, in which the birth of Jesus is witnessed by a simple shepherd girl. As in virtually all folk theatre, the story can be told many different ways and styles. The sponsoring coalition ALTA (the Austin Latino Theatre Alliance) recruits a different director every year for the Spanish-language enactment, so that each Austin …
Review: Look Back in Anger by Out of Context Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 04, 2011
All of the young members of the cast deliver the dialogue in something close to standard U.S. speech, a fact made all the more evident by Donald Bayne's convincing accent as the stiff-upper-lip retired Colonel Redfern, Alison's father, who's come back from doing his duty for the Empire.
Encouraged by applause at last year's FronteraFest, recent graduates of Southwestern and St. Ed's are taking a great big leap right now at the Off Center. Look Back in Anger was a landmark, a watershed, a paradigm shifter (take your pick) for twentieth-century theatre in England. With his 1956 three-act play John Osborne took clubs and cudgels to the genteel British stage, presenting his protagonist Jimmy Porter as a fiercely intelligent university graduate of lower …
Review: Housebreaking by Poison Apple Initiative
by Hannah Bisewski
Published on December 03, 2011
Though the script never moralizes, the meditative tone of the first half fails to meet the promise of the explosive inertia of the first half. Housebreaking sputters to an end with a few quiet revelations.
What does a theatre space feel like? How is it supposed to make us feel? Those of us in the small crowd gathered for the opening of the premiere run of Jakob Holder’s Housebreaking were asking ourselves those questions in some form or other. People from the Poison Apple Initiative funneled us into a cramped living room nook in a discreet East Austin housing venue. We found ourselves in the kitchen of a fairly average …
Review: The Lion in Winter by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 01, 2011
You could just rent the DVD or dig it out of your collection, but Austin Playhouse is offering you a fine cast, an unusual venue, and action that should strike enough spark and fire to keep you fascinated.
Our medieval experience for Austin Playhouse's The Lion in Winter was unexpectedly complete, for last week in that almost unheated temporary tent structure on the windy plains of the Mueller Development we were wishing we had castle-appropriate fur and wool like those of the period costumes put together for the actors by Diana Huckaby. I suspect that they might have been wearing high tech underwear for the long evening during which we sat motionless watching …