Reviews for Southwest Theatre Productions Performances
Review: The Poetry Shift by Southwest Theatre Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 05, 2023
THE POETRY SHIFT is just the sort of theatre for which I glean the theatre fields of Austin -- an new, intimate, small-cast drama people with distinctive characters and new faces.
The Southwest Theatre Productions staging of Daniel Born's The Poetry Shift is just the sort of theatre for which I glean the theatre fields of Austin -- an new, intimate, small-cast drama peopled with distinctive characters and new faces. Kat Sparks did us all a service by setting up this showcase. I immediately regretted that I hadn't been to see it early in its four-week run at the Trinity Players black box on the fourth …
Review: Sweat by Southwest Theatre Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 30, 2019
Americans, even blue-collar workers have always been relatively more mobile than citizens of many other nations, but when the factory closes, your life has been laid down in a deep groove, and your people are around you, what are you going to do?
Southwest Theatre Productions in Austin has staged a dozen contemporary American dramas since its inception in 2015. Maybe you hadn't noticed? The company is itinerant though not homeless, for they're inhabiting a very specific field of the art. SWTP looks for scripts, preferably recent ones, that use realistic styling to examine closely the flaws and frustrations of contemporary society. The company has shown a special sensibility for outsiders, the disadvantaged, people of color, …
Review: Alabama Story by Southwest Theatre Productions
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on July 23, 2018
The story is simple, the staging is top notch. ALABAMA STORY, eerily timeless, challenges the audience to ask themselves: has anything other than the period clothing changed?
Montgomery, Alabama in 1959, our enchanted southern kingdom, where the lemonade tastes sweeter because it was made by both our mamas together. Montgomery, Alabama where people say things like piffle and you are in high cotton. Montgomery where it is natural and normal to be married. The capital of mighty Alabama where people fight for their rights to protect things: their lifestyle, their church, their children and their books. Alabama Story …
Review: If I Forget by Southwest Theatre Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 22, 2018
Confessions and quandries, the testing of ties that bind: siblilngs who curse one another four times over and then lapse into shared memories of better times. Every second of IF I FORGET is gripping.
For the second time in just a few months an Austin theatre company has scooped a powerful drama out of the big city theatre biosphere and mounted an accomplished staging that proves the script universal instead of big-city provincial. In September Hyde Park Theatre did it with Sarah DeLappe's The Wolves, and now Southwest Theatre Productions delivers Steven Levenson's powerful and closely plotted If I Forget as its seventh production since it was founded in Austin …
Review: The Understudy by Southwest Theatre Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 30, 2017
Playwright Theresa Rebeck has great fun with this cartoonishly cynical look at the business of theatre. She implies that in big league art the megastars and the money men rule, while those very many hopeful and talented artistis looking for a break are willfully deluding themselves.
Playwright Theresa Rebeck has great fun with this cartoonishly cynical look at the business of theatre. Not theatre as we like it and practice it here in Austin, or even as the three vivid and vigorous cast members practice it in this piece. Her theme is that in big league art the megastars and the money men rule, while those very many hopeful and talented artistis looking for a break are willfully deluding themselves. …
Review #2 of 2: CAGES by Southwest Theatre Productions
by Justin M. West
Published on February 02, 2017
The show stuck with me for days after I left the theatre -- the light, the sound, the immersive and clever use of space to its fullest potential, but most of all the generally stellar cast and their varied, nuanced and memorable performances.
Outstanding Performances in CAGES Overcome Flawed Script Huntsville, Texas, where I was born and spent the first nine years of my life, is a horrible, godforsaken little shitsplat town, just this side of Bumfuck, Egypt and dangerously close to being a suburb of Houston. It’s also a prison town. There are seven (seven!) fucking prisons in Huntsville, a few in which my father worked as a guard while pursuing a PhD in criminology. …