Reviews for Last Act Theater Company Performances
Review: Doctor Faustus by Last Act Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 24, 2012
This is a morality play in which the protagonist stands between the stark absolutes of God and the Devil, heaven and hell, the throne of God and the fiery pit. McLemore's Faustus does not appear to pause to reflect seriously on any of this and comes across as a young man throughout.
Faustus, why do you torment me so? This production of the work of the mercurial Christopher Marlowe, an exact contemporary of Shakespeare, stabbed to death in a tavern at the age of 29, held me at an uneasy distance despite its robust verse and stark dilemma. Austin's Last Act Theatre Company, just over a year old, demonstrates its art and vaunting ambition in daring to take on this text. Their productions for love of …
Review: Love in Pine by Last Act Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 24, 2012
The central obsessive incident is on the poster: on their way to their high school prom, with arrangements in place for post-dance coitus, the couple crashes against a huge pine tree -- the same one where they carved their joined initials when they were thirteen years old.
Gary Jaffe's Love in Pine is a coming-of-age story, a coming-out story and a fable with a tree spirit and ghosts, all this with multiple realities and time periods anchored in the fictitious town of Pine, Texas at a time of conflagrations. This is unmistakably Bastrop, at about the time that Jaffe left Yale Drama School to return to his hometown of Austin. One wonders uneasily how much of this is auto-therapy, considering that a central character …
Review: Titus Andronicus by Last Act Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 26, 2011
The sparse opening night audience for this production was rapt, almost stunned by what they heard and saw. Amidst the intensity of action and image in that intimate outdoor space the cast's conviction, diction and projection were superb.
Austin likes its hellish Halloweens and on that score Titus Andronicus deserves standing-room-only audiences and ticket queues around the block, down there on César Chávez Avenue just a few blocks east of Interstate 35. Forget all that stuff about Shakespeare they taught you in high school and college. This one he wrote really early in his career, in 1591 or so when he had only a couple of comedies and the three-part history Henry VI under his belt. …
Review: Upon A Midnight Dreary by Last Act Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 11, 2011
In contrast to those somewhat overstaged pieces, The Tell Tale Heart was direct, convincing and suspenseful. Greg Klein's adaptation takes the principal concept -- the alarming and disorienting effect of heightened aural and visual sensitivity -- and develops it in a completely different context.
Edgar Allan Poe is a deceptively attractive figure for theatre makers. We've all read with a delicious shiver his best-known short stories. His themes of death, madness and mystery are so very elemental that they have never gone out of style. The elaborate early 19th-century style of his poetry may be a challenge, but the simple sardonics of his short stories, often in first person, appeal to our desire for intensity. As long as …