Reviews for Capital T Theatre Performances
Review: The Year of the Rooster by Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 29, 2015
Playwright Eric Dufault sinks down into the wild dim mind of a bantam rooster bred for combat and hopped up on steroids, enraged and obsessed with the glare of the sun; Jason Liebrecht incarnates the bird with ferocious sinewy movement and stacatto speech.
You generally have a pretty good idea of what you're going to see at a Capital T production at the Hyde Park Theatre. Strong emotion, blighted lives, poverty or else poverty of spirit amidst mindless materialism, misfits in an America-through-the-looking-glass. The Year of the Rooster fits that template and gives you ample reason to shiver and hug yourself and be thankful for what you've got. But -- as so often with Mark Pickell's band of mischief …
Review: The Strangerer by Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on June 14, 2015
Now, six years further down the road and here in the heart of Texas, Robert Pierson and Capital T turn this piece into an exploration of man's incapacity to understand. The focus is far less on the missteps of an administration than on our plight when faced with random catastrophe and evil.
Mickle Maher's The Strangerer is profoundly witty. But it's not comical. You may go into the agreeably conspiratorial Hyde Park Theatre with the expectation of laughing it up on the dark side, making fun of politicians in general and Bushes in particular, but you're going to get a short sharp shock. Capital T Theatre, Mark Pickell's comfortable co-conspirator with Ken Webster's Hyde Park Theatre, is going to get up your nose with some serious …
DNA, Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 26, 2015
Big Phil tells them what to do so as to escape detection. Things get out of hand. When Phil's first plan runs aground, he's unperturbed; he provides a new set of instructions. And then another. No one questions him. No one tells the police or any of the grownups the truth.
The Off Center's a pretty dark place, as is any black box theatre, so it's an appropriate setting for Capital T's production of Dennis Kelly's sardonic little play DNA. Mark Pickell's simple set makes the most of that void. You spend just over an hour in a stretch of nondescript forest, defined only by a line of young trees and a random rock and lump of ground. This is a long way from anywhere, …
Review: Gidion's Knot by Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 01, 2014
The setting at the Salvage Vanguard's black box is that of a fifth-grade classroom. In contrast to those of many other FronteraFest presentations in this space, the room seems spacious. A long greenboard runs across the rear. Those two rows of school desks have lots of room between them. Bright images and posters carry optimistic slogans. The kids are gone -- the kids are gone at every moment in this piece, both physically and in …
Review: There is a Happiness that Morning is by Capital T Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on November 19, 2013
This production of Mickle Maher’s There is a Happiness That Morning Is generated considerable marketing material on its fictional premise: two teachers of William Blake’s poetry at a crumbling east coast liberal arts college became so overwhelmed by it all that they had throwdown carnal knowledge of each other on the leafy day-lit campus. Their students witnessed their intimacy, as did the president of the college, and everyone else. The president and trustees want them to apologize …
Review: There is a Happiness that Morning is by Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 08, 2013
Maher's 80-minute one act piece is exciting, dramatic, funny and deep -- an impressive script, and it's performed with élan, aplomb, assurance and feeling by the two leads, Catmull and Jason Phelps, who also has a long history with this venue.
There is a space that theatre is, Unknown except to the hip and cognoscenti -- where verse and blood, ironic plenty, dearth, death, desire and wit conjured forth from air, direct our eyes to great and lesser things unseen, unknown, unspoken in our media. Hyde Park, Cap T, Mick' Maher, Blake, knife-sharp, wit-full, astounding, take our souls in dance and squeeze our hearts, unglaze our eyes. Innocence? Experience? Groves of academe, Pierian springs, our …