Reviews for Jarrott Productions Performances
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
Review: A Portrait of My Mother by Carlo Lorenzo Garcia, presented by Jarrott Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 12, 2021
We're lucky Carlo Lorenzo Garcia was willing to share this story without a scrap of sentimentality, and that his gift as an actor is the rare ability tell it so well.
I remember very clearly when I first saw Carlo Lorenzo Garcia. Curiously enough it was in another—very different—drama about family. That was in December, 2017 when Street Corner Arts presented Pocatello, directed by Benjamin Summers. Garcia was surrounded by a dozen Austin actors, including some of the very best and most vivid. I wrote, "Carlos Lorenzo Garcia, newly arrived in Austin from Chicago, is Eddie. [ . . .] [and his] performance"[ . . …