Reviews for Southwestern University Performances
Review: The Norwegians by Southwestern University
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 10, 2014
Swanson's one-act script is a cleverly ironic thought experiment: Given that Norwegians are some of the nicest people in the world, with their phlegmatic courtesy and lilting accent in English, what would Norwegian contract killers be like?
Southwestern University's resident playwright and part-time assistant prof C. Denby Swanson was graced over this past couple of weeks with a university production of her mischievous little comedy The Norwegians, a piece that recently ran at the Drilling Company on E. 78th Street in New York for a year and garnered a favorable NY Times review. I wish I could have accepted SWU's invitation to the opening weekend. I was in Sweden at the time, so …
Review: Cloud 9 by Southwestern University
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 04, 2011
Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine is a gender bender and a time twister, a sly comic look at sex and sexual roles in the Victorian British Empire and in the contemporary United Kingdom.
Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine is a gender bender and a time twister, a sly comic look at sex and sexual roles in the Victorian British Empire and in the contemporary United Kingdom. One of the many clever twists of the piece, the fruit of some intensive workshopping with actors, is that seventy-five years pass between the two acts but the characters age only thirty years. Churchill explained that that arose from the fact that her 1970's contemporaries …
Review: Urinetown by Southwestern University
by Michael Meigs
Published on March 09, 2010
This was a polished, well-designed, well-lit and exciting production. Every member of that big cast was on top of it, in synch, in character and visibly enjoying the show.
Southwestern University students had a joyful frolic with Rick Roemer's vigorous production of the smart-alecky musical Urinetown last week. This show won the 2002 Tony awards for best original score for a musical and for best book of a musical.The show gives us a cheeky, animated cartoon story of a bleak, bleak future world when water has run out. The common folk are obliged to cross their legs and hold their own water until they can scrimp …
Review: Good Night Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet by Southwestern University
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 01, 2009
I'd much prefer to be like Connie with her wild but almost plausible notions of the theatre or like this dedicated, lively and attractive cast working under the guidance of a director who's a '98 honors alum of the same program.
Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet is a lighthearted little romp that sends up both Shakespeare and the academic ivory tower with a mischievous feminist sense of humor.Our heroine Constance Ledbelly is an undistinguished worker bee in the literature department of an unidentified university, where she has worked ably without recognition for her pompous supervisor Professor Claude Night. Her devotion to him is absolute but irrational, for he's a caricature of self-centered male vanity, interested principally …
Review: Buried Child by Southwestern University
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 25, 2009
While creating these grotesques this cast and director show acute awareness of pacing, visible thought and reaction.They create whole characters and visible emotion, maintaining audience engagement in what otherwise might seem so incredible and farcical as to provoke laughter.
Sam Shephard's Buried Child gives such a strange, phantasmagoric world that one's first impulse might be to play it for laughs. In Shephard's introduction to the printed edition he speaks of revising the text for the 1995 Steppenwolf theatre company in Chicago and of director Gary Sinese's "instinct to push the characters and situation in an almost burlesque territory, which suddenly seemed right." At Southwestern University, director Jared J. Stein and his exemplary young ensemble of players create Shephard's …
Review: Lysistrata by Aristophanes, Southwestern University
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 02, 2008
I’m happy to see this powerful satire adapted so as to reach a modern, largely university-age audience. The shortcoming that did consistently surface through the play was shrill, rushed vocalizing.
Preparing for Southwestern University’s staging of this 2003 version of Aristophanes’ comedy, I dug out my worn copy of The Complete Greek Drama, edited by Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O’Neill, Jr. in 1938. That’s right – the editor of the comedies was a Yale classicist and son of the famous American playwright. In his introduction to the collection and to this play O’Neill stressed that very little remains of the ancient Greek comedies. Thousands were …