Reviews for Bottle Alley Theatre Company Performances
Review: Apocalypse by Bottle Alley Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 03, 2017
Apocalypse succeeds as an evocation not of the classic notion of apocalypse, the world ending in fire or in ice, but in intimate finales of accumulating inertia and unknowing.
You need ingenuity if you're a small theatre company facing Austin's squeeze of performing space. Equipped spaces are recording reservations well out into 2019. On the other hand, if you're a determined ad hoc band of performers not worried about the inquisition forces of the City of Austin, you can put up your tents virtually anywhere. The world is wide. And if you have no tents either, the woods are lovely, dark and deep. …
Review: Hate Yourself by Bottle Alley Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 29, 2017
Perhaps playwright Chris Fontanes is just teasing, daring us to read more into the inert but eloquent protagonist than actually was intended. The persistent theme here is that same uncertainty, writ large: Why care? Why speak? And, implicit: Why make art?
If Austin has a 'beat generation' Chris Fontanes is part of it. He's straight out of the jagged earnest non-conformist tradition of those who believe that words make a difference. Even if -- and especially if -- they describe the quietly desperate and downtrodden. The man's been making theatre in Austin holes and haunts since 2012 in the single-minded belief that saying it, writing it, and calling attention to it makes it so. The …
Review: The Curious by Bottle Alley Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 02, 2017
The pauses in Bottle Alley's THE CURIOUS speak unbounded stories. Writer-director Chris Fontanes has again bound a group of explorers in a mystery and invited the witnesses along. The case remains both solved and unresolved. As in life, we'll have to be satisfied with that.
Writer-director Chris Fontanes prefers the shadow worlds of mystery, enigma and the threatening unseen. Forced to turn to 'found' spaces, his essentially penniless and well named Bottle Alley Theatre Company makes a virtue of that necessity by incorporating the environment fully into the action. Their cryptic parables don't hang like abstract art from the surfaces of scenery flats on a stage. The Curious is set in a modest but comfortable bungalow in Austin's south-of-the-lake …
Review: Wraith Radio by Bottle Alley Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 18, 2016
Like Wraith and Star, in our lives we may find ourselves in rooms without safe exits and without clearly defined missions. Our messages become our missions.
Chris Fontanes' original works for Bottle Alley Theatre Company tend to take place in the dark. There are good reasons for that. He and his collaborators have been making seat-of-the-pants theatre in Austin since September, 2012. I reviewed his work Stage back then, and when I checked the date on that review just now I discovered to my embarrassment that in 2012 I used exactly the same term: "seat-of-the-pants theatre." So let's be more …
Review: Cloud Formations by Bottle Alley Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 21, 2015
Playwright Fontanes has a thing for strong women protagonists, and Samantha Ireland as Marlow is the forceful and articulate but existentially confused center of this piece.
Chris Fontanes' Cloud Formations sets a Zen-like entry to the world of shadows it depicts. Part of that is the venue, Sessions on Mary, a 78704 bungalow with a scrap of yard out front, and part may be unintentional, an oversight in the publicity. Cloud Formations is announced for 7:30 p.m. Fridays - Sundays. In fact, the house opens at 7:30, but the action of the play begins sometime closer to 8 p.m. As happened with …
Review: The Insomniacs' Ball by Chris Fontanes
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 22, 2015
The insomniacs' late sleepless night breathed not of angst but of ennui. . . . In his millenial neo-Romantic script Fontanes moves his characters toward communion, if not toward hope or optimism.
Theatre, in the concept of this website, isn't an industry or an institution. It's a way of experiencing and reporting the world, a collaborative effort to explore what's important to us now, at this moment in history and at this time in our lives. The power of mimesis lends itself to large scale commercial presentation, including on screen and in extravagant live entertainments ("Razzle-dazzle 'em," as Billy Flynn advises Roxy in Kander and Ebb's …