Reviews for Paladin Theatre Company Performances
Review: Chesapeake by Paladin Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 30, 2011
Stites' delivery of Lee Blessing's Chesapeake was the most gripping act of theatre imagination I've ever seen in Austin. Take that with as many grains of salt as you like.
Sometimes the miracle happens. Theatre is a collusion between actors and the audiences: You pretend to be somebody and I'll pretend to believe you. In the subtitle to his 2010 book-length essay The Necessity of Theatre, UT philosophy professor Paul Woodroof calls it "the art of watching and being watching." Writing for a rationalist public in 1817 Coleridge defended the use of the fantastical in poetry by invoking "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, …
Review: Early Girl by Paladin Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 26, 2010
'Early Girl' takes place in an eternal now. Kava has written a "chick play" in which the outside world is unexplained and largely unheeded.
Charlie Stites is a big guy with a big heart whose most recent stage outings have been as braggarts and sexual boasters. He counters that image somewhat with his intent to right the acting balance between the sexes by staging this drama by actress Carolyn Kava, done to respectful New York reviews in the mid-1980s. Stites writes in the program that he was struck "by the dearth of interesting parts available for [women]," making …
Review: Sexual Perversity in Chicago by Paladin Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 20, 2010
Oh, God, it's as if they are arrested forever in the hell of a fourteen-year-old's hormones. Perhaps it explains the survival of the species, but it says damn little for the culture or the civilization.
Charles Stites fits so entirely and comfortably into the horrible male characters of David Mamet that one has to wonder if the man is, in fact, acting. Mind you, he is a performer of great presence and élan vital, as anyone could see when he was onstage in City Theatre's Glengarry, Glen Ross by Mamet and in the title role of its Tartuffe by Molière. It's just that for this new theatre grouping Stites chose Mamet's 1974 one-act, he directed …