Reviews for Paper Chairs Performances
Review: MAST by Paper Chairs
by David Glen Robinson
Published on July 27, 2015
Avoiding the overused theme of the scattering of lives in global war, Elizabeth Doss uses the ocean as her overarching metaphor. Lives drift, drown, sail or find new lands.
The Paper Chairs theatre collective has a reputation for innovative and experimental productions. In almost six years of existence the company has gained skill and recognition in the Austin theatre scene, and MAST by Artistic Director Elizabeth Doss may prove to be its strongest edge-dancing production yet, and artfully produced. The play has at its core incidents and relationships in Doss’s family tree in World War II and the generation that followed, but one …
Review: The Suicide by Paper Chairs
by Michael Meigs
Published on May 20, 2014
The paperchairs crew is smart, savvy, musical and literate, a combination that has consistently produced challenging and exciting theatre. With Erdman's The Suicide they reach 85 years back in theatre history to a Russian farce of breath-taking arrogance that earned its author a prison term in Siberia and wasn't staged again in his homeland until after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Directors Elizabeth Doss and Lisa Laratta cast this piece with a Loony Tunes satiric sensibility …
Review: The Suicide by Paper Chairs
by David Glen Robinson
Published on May 17, 2014
Paper Chairs is an innovative company known for its boldness and vision. The company is opening the little-known but important play The Suicide by Russian playwright Nicolai Erdman, at the Off Center in east Austin. In so doing, they are solidifying their reputation for making brilliant choices. Their production comes at a time of vastly heightened interest and concern for Russian theatre of all periods, in part from the world-changing events in Ukraine and Russia. Paper Chairs …
Review: Art Show/Model Show by Paper Chairs
by David Glen Robinson
Published on September 03, 2013
The models who created this show classify it as documentary theatre. They have a video record of their topic much more extensive than the images shown in the performance. They have identified and developed a powerful topic and a bold presentation.
A Participating Artist's Impressions The artists stood at easels or sat at drawing tables in the well of the theatre, downstage center, or more aptly, house center. The stage was multilevel, rising before us and offering sightlines better than in most figurative art workshops. The lighting on the models was also much better than in any workshop. My choice of oil on canvas as the medium ensured no relaxation on my part. I sweated and …
Review: Boom for Real by Paper Chairs
by David Glen Robinson
Published on November 03, 2012
Let it be said now: the cast is the singular strength of this production, and Noel Gaulin is the primus inter pares.
It was Halloween night and I went to the theatre in costume as I always do. The show was Boom for Real by Jason Tremblay, produced by Paper Chairs. This company has a gift for finding truly unusual but serviceable performance spaces, albeit sometimes hard to find. I tramped through the crushed limestone parking lot of an industrial east Austin construction zone in my wobbly fireman’s boots, uncertain of my balance and vision behind my long-nosed mask …
Review: Baal by Paper Chairs
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 15, 2010
Brecht gives characters elevated language that at times passes for verse -- Baal is always yammering on about the sky -- but that's not enough in itself to retain our attention.
Baal was Brecht's first play, written in 1918 at the age of twenty. He had avoided the draft by taking a medical course and he was called up to staff a venereal disease clinic only a month before the war ended, and much of that time he was studying theatre. Brecht did not articulate his doctrine of theatrical alienation until 1935, but this text and the production of it by Dustin Wills and the Paper …