Reviews for Beyond August Productions Performances
Review: EXIT STRATEGY by Beyond August Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 23, 2024
EXIT STRATEGY is a sensitive, impressive portrait of hopes raised and hopes menaced. Vivid characters clash; the mute witness of a Black student embodies playwright Holter's message.
No, this small, impressive play is not a comedy. That tag line was probably a marketing decision, for laughter attracts more viewers than drama, just as honey lures more bees than vinegar. The ambitious and alert Beyond August Productions brings us Exit Strategy by Chicago playwright Ike Holter. It's set firmly in Chicago's divisions of class, race, and ethnicity. Austin is but a faint echo of all that, but even so, the gentrification that …
Review #2 of 2: The Outsider by Beyond August Productions
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on October 14, 2022
With THE OUTSIDER, Beyond August Productions delivers the goods. The laughter begins as soon as action begins and continues through the final curtain call.
The program states: “Time: The Present. Place: The Governor’s Office in a Small State.” And so begins the new play by Paul Slade Smith, an actor and writer from Brooklyn. His play Unnecessary Farce was a runaway international hit with productions in eight different countries. His 2015 work The Outsider has racked up thirty-four productions in 2022 alone. This play has been described as “razor-sharp satire” and a “madcap political farce.” The elevator pitch …
Review #1 of 2: The Outsider by Beyond August Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 13, 2022
Smith's comedy on the politics of image was fun in 2015. It's still full of zing, especially with Michael Stuart, but in today's troubles the message is bittersweet.
A double irony attends Beyond August Productions' staging of The Outsider. The titular character, Ned Newley, is not an outsider at all. He's the lieutenant governor of a small, unidentified, perhaps New England state. Ned is far and away the smartest man in the room, but he didn't get that position through the exertions of politics. He was drafted as a presumptive non-entity, the state treasurer, strangled with shyness and practically invisible to the public eye. …