Reviews for Austin Playhouse Performances
Review: Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar, Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 20, 2016
Powerful but subtle J. Ben Wolfe as Amir Is almost a tragic hero, but playwright Akhtar implies that Amir's an ugly template for Muslims.
J. Ben Wolfe is a powerful but subtle actor, and that's just what's required in Ayad Akhtar's brooding drama Disgraced. This ninety-minute one-act in four scenes delves deep into the psyche of Amir, the protagonist, who's a tense, talented and aspiring attorney in a New York law firm specializing in big-money litigation. Amir is handling big issues, both at work and in his personal life. His family immigrated from Pakistan when he was eight years …
The Devil and the Details: A Review of Austin Playhouse’s The Philadelphia Story
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on December 11, 2015
The spell has been cast. It would be folly to single out any individual performer in this review, since the cast as a whole is so delightful.
The atmosphere is tense but not too tense: family members mill about the living room preparing for the second wedding of the eldest daughter. The nervousness is almost rote, stakes not being quite as high as, say, those for a first wedding. The mother titters about with last minute details.The bride to be makes declarative but none-too bold statements, and the butler is prompt and complacent. Nearly all of them take a moment to bark at the …
Review: The Real Thing by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 27, 2015
Wit is not obliged to be funny. THE REAL THING isn't a comedy, but it flashes with insights of a grown-up exploration of the contracts of human hearts.
Wit is not obliged to be funny. The Real Thing isn't a comedy, but it flashes with insights and features exchanges as swift, surprising and unexpected as those of a fencing match. Austin Playhouse provides an assured and impressive production of this grown-up exploration of the hearts' contract that is the essence of any lengthy intimate relationship. And most particularly, its exploration of the issues of emotional fidelity and toleration of sentimental and sexual …
Review: I'm Not Rappaport by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 16, 2015
It's a heart-warming tale, no matter how much you may be aware that your sympathies are being manipulated. As in the Quijote, the man's great disasters have an endearing nobility.
Lifetime New Yorker Herb Gardner hit the theatrical jackpot twice, with A Thousand Clowns in 1962 and I'm Not Rappaport in 1984. I didn't see the first of those on any stage, but my kids wondered why I would periodically proclaim, "All right, everybody out for volleyball!" That's Jason Robards summoning the neighborhood at 6 a.m. in the film version. In both plays Gardner portrays an oddball New Yorker down on his luck but …
Review: She Stoops to Conquer, Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 05, 2015
Babs George is Mrs. Hardcastle, a Londoner's nightmare vision of the self-deluded and vain country matriarch. Give the lady credit for pluck, initiative and thespianism
Things do go a little crazy out in the countryside at Hardcastle manor. Hardcastle's oafish stepson Toby Lumpkin (the happily leering Stephen Mercantel) instigates the confusion when he solemnly assures a couple of visiting London dandies that the place is really a country inn run by an eccentric host. But that's only the beginning of the comic deceptions. Oliver Goldsmith's 1773 theatre piece is still going strong, unlike so many of the Covent Garden comedies …
Review: Time Stands Still by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 15, 2014
I don't watch television. I don't have cable TV service in the house, and I especially avoid television news. Even when the editors strive for balance in face of controversy, TV reporting makes you stupid. Most of it is essentially entertainment, so the programmers can't resist lurid exploitation of violence and catastrophe. That's what the public wants and has wanted since the days of Aristotle: stories that arouse pity and fear. So you'll understand my …