Reviews for Southwest Theatre Productions Performances
Review #1 of 2: Cages by Southwest Theatre Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 25, 2017
CAGES is didactic, the application of the power of imagination and acting to teach and admonish. It's not a comfortable evening, and that's to the credit of all at Southwest Theatre Productions.
The overwhelming impressions are dark and stark. 'Stark' both in the sense of sharply contrasted in color and outcome, and 'stark' in the etymological sense of 'strong' and 'powerful.' Leonard Manzella's Cages is not entertainment; it is an orientation to a hell that few of us know but all too many of us suffer. Playwright Manzella will step out on stage after the performance. He wants you to understand what he has done and seen as a …
Review: Exit 27 by Southwest Theatre Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 01, 2016
Message: Those worshipped FLSD elders imprisoned their women and, like cannibals, consumed their own many children, both female and male.
Exit 27 starts dark and gets darker. Much darker. Like just about everyone else I'd heard of the abuses of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLSD) church headed by Warren Jeffs -- traditionally polygamous and in some cases abusive of underage girls. That's why the man is serving a much deserved twenty-year prison sentence. Alex Merilo's 2013 play, which premiered in Houston, looks at the other horrific aspect of systematic abuse: the 'lost …
Review: Rapture, Blister Burn, by Southwest Theatre Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 30, 2015
It's 15 years further down the road. You'd hardly think it a good idea for him to invite his former flame to teach a summer seminar on feminism at the college.
New on the scene, Southwest Theatre Productions provides an intimate experience with Gina Gionfriddo's 2012 play Rapture Blister Burn due both to the staging in the Salvage Vanguard's tiny studio theatre and to the subject matter: a middle-aged triangle of marital regrets served with lectures on the awakening of feminism in the twentieth century. Gionfriddo sets out to demonstrate that theories of sociology fall short of providing a philosophical basis for living one's life. …