Reviews for Paper Chairs Performances
Review: The Audience/El Público by Paper Chairs
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 31, 2018
Elizabeth Doss's staging of her adaptation is a sensitive but vigorous and often absurdist work, portraying both Spain's greatest twentieth-century poet and the brutal intolerance of Franco's Falange that murdered him.
It's not possible to descry how much of paperchairs' The Audience/El Público is Elizabeth Doss and how much of it is Federico García Lorca, twentieth-century Spain's greatest poet. One can guess, of course, that the succession of poetic similes describing homoerotic love probably came from the gifted, tormented poet who was arrested and arbitrarily executed by Franco's Falange in 1936 when he was only 38 years old. Playwright Doss's savage depiction of the captors and torturers of …
Review: The Repentance of St. Joan by Paper Chairs
by David Glen Robinson
Published on March 26, 2018
The freshness of THE REPENTANCE OF SAINT JOAN is its freedom to change space, time, character, and tone from one phrase of dialogue to the next, thanks in large part to a gifted and flexible cast.
Judd Farris’ visage is a landscape. He opens the play in monologue, speaking of what he did after the war—what war?—building villages, building churches, and working in granaries. He describes walking in snowy woodlands, and ascending a hill and its consequent aerobic effects on him. By the time he reaches the crest he has become the landscape he describes, and we trust his genuineness and authenticity. It is time itself we cannot trust. …
Review: Catalina de Erauso by Paper Chairs
by David Glen Robinson
Published on September 20, 2017
A marvelous work of postmodernist theatre, frame-bending and highly metatheatrical, Elizabeth Doss's CATALINA DE ERAUSO bursts with the topsy-turvy irony of postmodern plays.
Catalina de Erauso produced by Paper Chairs is a marvelous work of postmodernist theatre, frame-bending and highly metatheatrical. Playwright Elizabeth Doss takes on a historical theme as she has before (Mast, Poor Herman). But in our time in which history is poorly regarded and even more poorly studied, Doss avoids a conventional treatment of her historical theme. Rather than taking on history as a monolithic truth for source material, Doss sees history as something …
Two Reviews: HOT BELLY by Diana Lynn Small, paper chairs at Austin Public, February 3 - 19, 2017
by David Glen Robinson
Published on February 09, 2017
HOT BELLY is a slice of two lives that come together for a while and go their own ways much later. The insight is that coming apart is never really distinct and never final. Even final isn't final.
Two lesbians fall in love. What’s new? The premise no longer has any shock value, not even any surprise value. The point that love is love regardless of sexuality has been made amply in our generation.Playwright and director Diana Lynn Small recognizes this and gets on with telling life stories in her new play Hot Belly. Chili, shoes, facial hair, and ghosts: these are the stuff of this play, the thematic bits around which Small’s characters …
Review: Poor Herman by Paper Chairs
by David Glen Robinson
Published on May 14, 2016
A beautiful, fresh theatrical experience, POOR HERMAN is bold, transgressive, and the best single choice among several good shows in Austin in May.
Poor Herman is a beautiful, fresh theatrical experience from paper chairs theatre company. This group is more than a little committed to experiment, and its artists are surefooted in giving us new thoughts, new stagings, new feelings and, perhaps, some originality. Last year’s Mast and this year’s Art/Model Show: Subject are evidence for this bold statement. In Austin only a few can claim the turf of the new. Among them are paper chairs, the Rude Mechanicals, Physical …
Review: Art/Model Show: Subject by Paper Chairs
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 04, 2016
This session was anything but static. I slipped away into the cool Austin evening with the strong feeling that I had been somehow embraced.
I slipped away into the cool Austin evening after Art Model Show: Subject with the strong feeling that I had been somehow embraced. The performance wasn't lengthy. For just over an hour the spectators -- no, call us paying guests -- had sat quietly in the studio, clutching sketchbooks and pencils while taking in the huddle of six artists working at their easels and the five undraped figure models positioned variously on platforms before them. …