Recent Reviews
Review: Marriage Play by Edward Albee, Classic Theatre of San Antonio
by Kurt Gardner
Published on October 10, 2016
Catherine Babbitt and Andrew Thornton are marvelous as the troubled couple. Director Tim Hedgepeth wisely strips the staging down to the essentials. Tony Ciaravino’s fight choreography, so startling, is terrific.
The late, great playwright Edward Albee certainly loved his games. In his most famous work, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the characters spent an entire night (and early morning) playing them. In his seldom-seen two-character piece from 1987, Marriage Play, the protagonists also seem to be playing at something. Jack (Andrew Thornton) comes home to Gillian (Catherine Babbitt), his wife of 30 years, and calmly announces that he’s leaving her. She greets the news with …
Review: Dust by Nicole Oglesby, Heartland Theatre Collective
by Catherine Dribb
Published on October 09, 2016
Don't brush It off. . . catch DUST while you can. This new company provides a forehead-wiping, dirty evening of stellar performances and a poetic script.
Ashes to ashes and dust to dust is the underlying metaphor in this touching play about the toughness of life during the Dust Bowl that plagued midwest America in the 1930s. In retrospect, it was perfect that we watched Dust by Nicole Oglesby in an un-air conditioned 'pony shed' in the backyard of the booming Vortex complex (a venue featuring live theatre, food, wine, and so much more). The shack, resembling some sort of converted …
Review: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 05, 2016
Deprived of Brecht's framework of satirical references to the rise of Adolf Hitler, the plot of this production sways awkwardly with no real point of attachment to our current political drama.
David Long's annual choices for directing at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre usually show a clever quirkiness and the ability to make surprising juxtapositions. He has a string of successes. He takes a classic and gives it modern comic spin (Molière's The Imaginary Invalid and Tartuffe) or he chooses a modern text that tips into absurdist fantasy (Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9 and Love & Information, Overmeyer's On The Verge or The Geography of Longing, Chuck …
Review: The Drowning Girls by Theatre en Bloc
by David Glen Robinson
Published on October 04, 2016
The flood of images was created to soggy perfection by the three incomparable actresses. I never again want to hear the sentence: “He took my breath away.”
The Drowning Girls is a murder mystery told in nonlinear fashion by the murder victims. The three brides, each drowned in the bath, rise from the water postmortem and sopping wet to tell their tale.The play is definitely a strong textual dialogue play, but not one with parlor scenes in a spacious set with numerous characters, as one would expect from an Agatha Christie mystery. No, here we have a bathroom set, looking perhaps like …
Review: Incorruptible by Gaslight Baker Theatre
by Kara Bliss McGregor
Published on October 04, 2016
Equal parts satire and soul, INCORRUPTIBLE at the Gaslight Baker Theatre in Lockhart will renew your faith in the transformative power of theater. And belly laughs.
Billed as “a dark comedy about the dark ages,” Incorruptible seemed sure to be some amalgam of Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part I and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. But the latest production at the Gaslight-Baker Theater in Lockhart is neither nonsensical nor ominous. This nimble prodution is delightful. And improbable, set far from our modern reality yet landing right where we live. Incorruptible by Michael Hollinger is a bawdy satire …
Review: THE PRICE by Arthur Miller, Jarrott Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 01, 2016
To whom do these things belong? That question is literal but rapidly becomes metaphorical. Each is condemned to his discontents, Miller tells us; the price is simply what you're willing to pay.
The setting for The Price is heavily symbolic, an attic living space abandoned for sixteen years since the death of its occupant. The half-covered pieces of heavy furniture, the wardrobe with its mirror reflecting emptiness, empty frames, bric-a-brac, a sagging armchair, a piano bench at stage center without a piano, a passageway to an unseen bedroom -- designer Desiderio Roybal avoids clutter but embraces the miscellany of memory. There's a price for all of this, …