Reviews for Street Corner Arts Performances
Review: The Gulf by Street Corner Arts
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 10, 2022
These extraordinary women actors explore tensions and attractions with a script at times wildly comic, at times charged with emotion. Highly recommended.
Two women. Together in a boat on a shallow bay in the Gulf of Mexico. Nobody else around. Another boat passes at high speed, and the women shout mocking defiance, yell bad advice, give them the finger. No, this isn't a story of victimization. This seventy-five minutes delivers turbulence and a torment, but those are interior emotions. Playwright Audry Cefaly places her characters in the watery expanse of Mobile Bay or Florida's Redneck …
Review: Strange but Perfect by Street Corner Arts
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 09, 2021
In this vivid, small-scale human comedy Carlo Lorenzo and Natalie Garcia acknowledge our pandemic times and take us away from them. May they continue to exercise that gift of magic.
A message to Garcías: thanks for relocating from Chicago to Austin. Back in 2017, wasn't it? Carlo Lorenzo appeared in Street Corner Arts' Pocatello in December of that year, and Austin's B. Iden Payne (BiP) committee put him on the list of nominees for best lead actor (walking out of the Hyde Park Theatre that evening, I was convinced that they would). And two years later when he directed The Butcher of Baraboo for …
Review: The Butcher of Baraboo by Street Corner Arts
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 16, 2019
THE BUTCHER OF BARABOO is one of the most gripping and entertaining pieces I've seen in Austin. Director Carlo Lorenzo Garcia and a breathtaking cast deliver insightful, imaginative, thought-provoking gothic comedy.
No theatre performance is the same from night to night. The combined talents of the company create the front part of the magic, delivering the text richly incorporating the visuals, the rhythm, and subtleties of gesture and tone, but just as important is the ardent, usually silent participation of those who attend, witness, and vicariously participate. Attending The Butcher of Baraboo on "industry night," the Monday evening after opening weekend, was a rare high. Anticipation …
Review: We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia. . . by Street Corner Arts
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 06, 2018
WE ARE PROUD TO PRESENT is initially so entertaining and then such a conflagration of our unconscious assumptions that it is vital, necessary and ultimately inescapable theatre.
To what extent may good and decent people like ourselves be held responsible today for the vast evils of racism and genocide committed in modern history against the innocent and defenseless? Put this way, it's an abstract and chilling theme statement. We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, from the German SudwestAfrika, between the Years 1884-1915 -- the title's more than a mouthful and …
Review: Pocatello by Street Corner Arts
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 14, 2017
Carlo Lorenzo Garcia's performance as Eddie is nuanced and riveting, an ache of tightly controlled emotion. It belongs on any of the "best of" lists drawn up for 2017-2018.
From Street Corner Arts' publicity photos for Pocatello you might think that this was going to be a story of a big Italilan family dinner. Lots of discussion, acrimony, anger, maybe even flying plates -- a nightmare over turkey and dressing. A sort of modern-day Sopranos translated to the barren plains of Idaho. You'd be wrong. Way wrong. Samuel D. Hunter's work concerns not a single quarreling family but three. Yes, the stories overlap and …
Review: Perfect Mendacity by Street Corner Arts
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 19, 2017
PERFECT MENDACITY's two acts fly by. The knowledgeable audience appreciated a clever well executed script and familiar faces giving strong performances. The evening had just the right mixture of suspense, contradiction and comedy.
Playwright Jason Wells has contributed a lot to the brand Street Corner Arts has established since their 2011 debut. Perfect Mendacity is the third of his oeuvre they've put on stage at the Hyde Park Theatre, which gives them a clean sweep of this Steppenwolf playwright's 2008 - 2016 work. Men of Tortuga and The North Plan share the same sardonic cynicism about U.S. businesses and government. It's no surprise to learn that his latest work The …