Recent Reviews
Review: The Heidi Chronicles by The City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 29, 2009
Wasserstein recalls shared moments and attitudes of the baby boom generation, making merciless fun of them; at the same time she presents us with characters wrapped in loneliness as they achieve career success.
Wendy Wasserstein, playwright of The Heidi Chronicles, died in 2005, cut down in full artistic activity by lymphoma. Her play Third, which premiered that year, was performed in Austin last September by the Paradox Players. The City Theatre has just opened The Heidi Chronicles for a four-week run, featuring a talented young cast, clever staging and some still unanswered big questions. One of five children of a wealthy Jewish family in Brooklyn, Wasserstein graduated from …
Review: Bombs in Your Mouth by Hyde Park Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 28, 2009
They fill in the six-year void, unemployed Danny with stories of their father's decline and Lily with horror stories of work in a New York ad agency. She is smarter than Danny -- but in fact no more successful.
Losers are just more interesting than winners.There are just so many ways that they can go wrong. And it's so satisfying to watch as that happens. That's part of comedy -- that's why we laugh when the clown slips on the banana peel or when Moe gives the other stooges a savage poke. We chortle because we know that they're not really hurting.And in Bombs in Your Mouth by Corey Patrick, now playing at the …
Review: Human Sketches by Sam Bass Community Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 24, 2009
Author Trey Deason's two-act piece is well crafted, peopled with sharply drawn central characters and examines serious, interesting issues -- although perhaps not those you might expect from the M.C. Escher sketch used on the poster.
This is a "world premiere," in public-relations-speak, and the folks at the Sam Bass Community Theatre once again show their inventiveness and their determination to be more than a simple source of weekend amusement for the suburbs of Austin.SBCT isn't a large group and they don't have the ample venues or resources of some other out-of-Austin theatres. But they make up for that in pluckiness. Following close on their accomplished production of funnyman Steve Martin's …
Review: The Grapes of Wrath by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 16, 2009
The story is gripping. In the theatre it is unburdened by the grim omniscience of Steinbeck's overlay and so allows us to identify with the Joad family and to hope for them even as they pass under the millstone of history.
A brooding orange light dominates the empty central space at the Zach Theatre's Kleberg Stage. A haze roils fitfully against a panorama of emptiness. A man in overalls, wearing a slouch cap and heavy work boots, holds a saw between his knees. He gently applies a bow to it, bends the saw, and an eerie, keening melody begins The Grapes of Wrath. John Steinbeck's story follows the Joad family from the 1930s Oklahoma Dustbowl, driven …
Review: Flu Season by Austin Community College
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 12, 2009
It took a while, but I finally found the word that describes Will Eno's Flu Season, produced February 27- March 8 by Austin Community College. That word is "aggravating."
It took a while, but I finally found the word that describes Will Eno's Flu Season, produced February 27- March 8 by Austin Community College.That word is "aggravating."Maybe y'all don't use it here in Texas, but I heard it regularly from my mother, who came from a small town in Georgia. "Aggravating" describes behavior that is egotistical, rudely mischievous and intentionally provocative. Since she raised six sons, my Mom had occasion to use that word …
Review: Cuentos y Risas, one-acts by Rupert Reyes
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 10, 2009
Teatro Vivo is always fun, and this evening of two one-act plays is no exception. Both were written by the group's artistic director Rupert Reyes.
Teatro Vivo is always fun, and this evening of two one-act plays is no exception. Both were written by the group's artistic director Rupert Reyes. The opening piece, Two Souls and A Promise, was presented for the first time last August as one of several short pieces. At that time I commented, in part, "With 2 Souls and A Promise, veteran Rupert Reyes offers us a meditation that starts in whimsy and finishes with reflections …