Reviews for Jarrott Productions Performances

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 …

Read more »

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 …

Read more »

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, …

Read more »

Review: A Portrait of My Mother by Carlo Lorenzo Garcia, presented by Jarrott Productions

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"[ . . …

Read more »

Review: The Niceties by Jarrott Productions

Review: The Niceties by Jarrott Productions

by David Glen Robinson
Published on January 18, 2020

Director Jeremy Rashad Brown tries to tease apart the issues writhing in this spaghetti bowl of despair, but he can’t. The script won’t let him. And that’s the point of the play.

  The Niceties is about intersectionality, the intersections of every issue you can name: race, gender, age, sexuality, class, power, revolution, economics, freedom, history, semiotics, equity in all modes, communication theory, pronoun etiquette, and morality over all. The intersections of these issues, each to all, are touched lightly or embraced passionately in this play by Eleanor Burgess. Jeremy Rashad Brown directs.    The play is set in the office of a history professor of a small, …

Read more »

Review: Admissions by Jarrott Productions

Review: Admissions by Jarrott Productions

by Michael Meigs
Published on September 26, 2019

The real revelation — and it is one — is Tucker Shepherd as the focus and subsequently the fuse for the explosion within the family, including an astonishing, long, beautifully modulated rant that makes him a hero and a schmuck at the same time.

  Joshua Harmon’s Admissions is billed as a comedy, but the only comic scenes are short and steered by the ever intriguing Jennifer Underwood in the role of Roberta, a superannuated staffer directly related to the founder of a prestigious New England prep school. Underwood stands knee-deep in tradition and loyalty to the school's meritocratic mission to affluent and keenly honed offspring of alumni and potential donors. She sees no need to be apologize for …

Read more »