Reviews for Austin Playhouse Performances
Review: The Norwegians by C. Denby Swanson at Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 04, 2023
The greatest pleasures in this staging of THE NORWEGIANS are the Sarahs: Zeringue and Fleming Walker, acting out in the crossed cultures of Texas and Minnesota.
What better way to escape Austin's endless summer than to go to Minnesota? Austin Playhouse's The Norwegians by C. Denby Swanson has got just the antidote for you, a funny, quirky, cross-cultural, character-based comedy. This odd little piece ran off-off-Broadway for more than a year. I first saw it in 2014 at Southwestern University, where the playwright was on staff. Austin Playhouse presented it in 2015. According to Michael Barnes's profile in the Austin Statesman, Swanson …
Review: Indecent by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 09, 2023
Austin Playhouse's astonishingly accomplished production of INDECENT is a fully mermerizing experience that one wants never to end.
Director Lara Toner and the many artists of Austin Playhouse bring their audience into a fully mermerizing experience with their astonishingly accomplished production of Paula Vogel's Indecent - the True Story of a Little Jewish Play. In their hands and hearts, the work transcends theatrical experience; they create a multilayered emotional, intellectual, and historical experience peopled with vividly convincing characters and set within a world that no longer exists. The world of Yiddish-language theatre is …
Review: The Catastrophist by Austin Playhouse
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on April 06, 2022
Timely but not directly about COVID, Ben Wolfe's fitfully meta solo as the virologist known as THE CATASTOPHIST is both about saving the world and about dealing with insoluble personal issues
The Catastrophist is the story of virologist Nathan Wolfe, who tracks viral pandemics. It's based on the real-life work of Dr. Nathan Daniel Wolfe and was written by his wife, playwright Lauren Gunderson (The Book of Will, Silent Sky, and Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley). Gunderson contrasts the wide world of science with the more personal story of confronting one’s own mortality. Commissioned by Marin Theatre Company in 2020, the play premiered as a digital …
Review: The 12 Dates of Christmas AND Stealing Baby Jesus by Austin Playhouse
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on December 29, 2021
These stories performed by Lara Toner Haddock and Bernadette Nason are about a personal relationship with Christmas, both elusive and ineluctable, something that cannot be yet MUST be explained.
Austin Playhouse found a new venue at Trinity Street Playhouse in time to put on two holiday offerings, and more are planned for early spring. They chose to do two one-act, one-actor plays that explore the impact of Christmas on the lives of two very different women. Or put another way, how the experiences of their lives impact their views on Christmas. The 12 Dates of Christmas by Ginna Hoben stars Lara Toner Haddock and …
Review: Tiny Beautiful Things by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 16, 2020
TINY BEAUTIFUL THINGS is an accomplishment of grace and bravura on both sides of the non-existent footlights at the Austin Playhouse.
The premise is simple, almost anodyne, and celebrated in the publicity and the program: what if we put together a play based on real letters from real people to an anonymous advice columnist? Counsel dispensed by newspaper column is an entertaiment that dates back centuries but really proliferated in the early twentieth century. Back then it was "Dear Abby" or "Hints from Heloise" or similar lesser lights; now, ageing millenials can get an occasional tittle from …
Review: The Book of Will by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 21, 2019
Stephen Mercantel as shy, neurotic copyist Ralph Crane performs with aroused intensity, while other cool kids onstage played so broadly one half expected conspiratorial winks to the audience.
Lauren Gunderson's The Book of Will at the Austin Playhouse is a lot of fun, and it doesn't intend to be anything else. It's a players' play, patterned on history, not particularly deep, but with the predictable happy ending -- the printing and sale of the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, seven years after his death. The great Will is mostly absent from the narrative and dialogue, except when pirated poor editions are quoted. …