Reviews for Jarrott Productions Performances

Two CTXLT Reviews: DEATHTRAP by Ira Levine, Jarrott Productions

Two CTXLT Reviews: DEATHTRAP by Ira Levine, Jarrott Productions

by David Glen Robinson
Published on November 08, 2023

Playwright Ira Levin displays his hubris by mocking his own cliché-loaded genre in approved Ivy League haute-snobbery while still entertaining and frightening audiences.

 Death Trap is well-regarded as a model murder/thriller potboiler with plot twists and reversals presented to the audience at every peak of its impressive dramatic action. Of great enjoyment is the fact that in all the excitement, the play takes its time. Contrast that pacing to stand-up comedy's effort to deliver a punchline every six seconds. Still, the stage is strewn with many bodies after just two and a half hours playing time. What’s less …

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Review: Mother of the Maid by Jarrott Productions

Review: Mother of the Maid by Jarrott Productions

by David Glen Robinson
Published on April 29, 2023

Jeanne d'Arc's mother Isabelle faces the extreme test of faith of losing her child due to events she cannot understand. Isabelle's is a tale of strength, survival, perseverance, and searching for the transcendent.

You already know how it ends. Here it is, no spoiler: Joan of Arc, teenager, war leader, visionary, sheep herder, innocent, über feminist, and pivot of history, suffered execution by burning at the stake by the French and the English, May 30, 1431. The high drama of her story in Mother of the Maid by Jane Anderson is foregrounded by the story of Joan’s mother Isabelle d’Arc. Anderson’s play focuses upon Isabelle in the extreme …

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Review: The Sound Inside by Jarrott Productions

Review: The Sound Inside by Jarrott Productions

by David Glen Robinson
Published on January 15, 2023

A rule-breaking student asks his creative writing professor to read a dark novella, a twisted take on Catcher in the Rye. Intimacy and intimations of suicide color this vividly produced story.

The Sound Inside by Adam Rapp shakes the earth without arrogance or condescension. With this and recent productions Jarrott Productions has found its stride on a high plateau of excellence in production and theatrical art. Much is due to the dramaturgy of Producing Artistic Director David R. Jarrott. In The Sound Inside, much of the excellence is brought to the audience by actor Rebecca Robinson, who plays fictional Yale faculty member Bella Baird. All of …

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Review #2 of 2: The Pact by Jarrott Productions

Review #2 of 2: The Pact by Jarrott Productions

by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on October 14, 2022

It's easy to imagine a continuation of THE PACT in which these characters go on forever jabbing, sneering, and sniping at each other, all the while with love in their hearts.

Jarrott Productions describes The Pact by Austin playwright Max Langert, as “a play about family, pizza, climate change, dating apps, and fringe religious sects...in that order!” Put this way, it sure sounds like a zany farce, and in truth, it is that. However, it manages to be so much more, due to the fact that all of the characters are delightfully three-dimensional.   This evening of theatre feels like the pilot of runaway hit television …

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Review#1 of 2: The Pact by Jarrott Productions

Review#1 of 2: The Pact by Jarrott Productions

by David Glen Robinson
Published on October 05, 2022

Austin playwright Max Langert creates a somewhat wacky middle-class family as a vehicle to impart wisdom through their dysfunctional behavior. The cast is the very conjunction of excellent contemporary theatre in Austin.

  Review by Courtney Thomas, Sightlines magazine, October 3, 2022 The Pact by Austin playwright Max Langert is a comedy exploring contemporary relations, with a heavy emphasis on action involving cell phones. Cell phone acting and storytelling are yet another trope marking a new horizon in the theatrical world. Look for more of same in the future.        Langert’s sophisticated writing creates a somewhat wacky middle-class family. Their dysfunctional behavior and failed, destructive …

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Review 1 of 2: The Lifespan of a Fact by Jarrott Productions

Review 1 of 2: The Lifespan of a Fact by Jarrott Productions

by David Glen Robinson
Published on March 12, 2022

The focus of the story is the distinction between facts and truth. THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT stuns the audience with a very precise but unvoiced answer to the question inherent in the title. Perfect.

This Austin premiere of The Lifespan of a Fact marks Jarrott Productions' welcome return to live onstage performance after the debilitation of the Covid pandemic. The company has built a reputation for urban contemporary theatre and explores that esthetic further by moving for this show to the mixed industrial, suburbanized east side at Ground Floor Theatre on Springfield Road in Austin.   The work was originally produced on Broadway in 2018, written jointly by Jeremy Kareken, …

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