Reviews for Trinity Street Players Performances
Review: Proof by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 27, 2012
'Proof' only hints at mathematical proofs. More importantly, it offers us the search for proof in a more judicial sense -- the messy accumulation of facts, testimony and human interactions to establish, beyond a reasonable doubt, a version of reality.
David Auburn's Proof plays with the audience, cannily withholding elements essential to the story taking place before our eyes in a back garden, adjacent to the University of Chicago. The first of those elements arrives after a lengthy gentle conversation between a relaxed, reassuring professor of mathematics and his earnest, worried daughter. Similar to an instruction to divide by the square root of -1, it obliges new rules upon us, sending us off into the world of …
Review: Three Viewings by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 27, 2011
These stories start in the dark of tenuously mastered emotion and they grow toward the light. Bob Beare and his cast make us care about every second of that progress.
Those who attend Trinity Street Players' Three Viewings by Jeffrey Hatcher will be spending some time in the dark with these faces. Each will feature in a solo act, navigating the fragile thread of human emotion like a tightrope walker. Or, to use the German expression for it, like a 'rope dancer,' because these narratives are not as predicable as a taut line. These characters inhabit the same world and speak to us from the same space …
Review: Incident at Vichy by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 10, 2011
The reluctant accessory to the murder machine, the fully human and aware victim, the despairing exponent of German-speaking decency and moral feeling. . . Miller's accomplishment is to make them characters of dimension and prototypes of millions involved in the still incomprehensible atrocities.
The black box on the fourth floor has a claustrophobic feel. The central space is stark and looks more like a basement than an attic -- a couple of benches, neutral gray walls, a narrow high window, a couple of empty beer bottles left on the sill. As you gather and settle into the ranks of seats around that central space, the theatre serenades you with recordings of French music -- Jacques Brel, an anachronism, …
Review: Shadowlands by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 10, 2010
José Shenkner is a wonder in this role, particularly for his physical control of the character while delivering a complex, layered emotional portrayal. Linda Miller Rath creates Gresham with sharp tongue and acute sensibilities. The two play superbly against and with one another.
I am a bookish sort of person -- not fiercely literary, but more inclined to take my reference points from a printed page than from a screen. I was aware of C.S. Lewis because my daughter and son had absorbed the Narnia books and because back in my own school days I had wrestled a bit with The Screwtape Letters, but I had not much more knowledge of him than that. When this piece came …
Review: The Fantasticks by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 25, 2010
This attractive little show, minimal in props and effects but lively in music and clowning, played wonderfully well in the intimate, close-up space of the Trinity Street black box.
The Trinity Street Players call the third-floor theatre space at the First Baptist Church "the black box theatre." Now that I've attended three performances in that space, it seems to me that the appellation is a bit too generic. "Black box" suggests a void, perhaps one that's wrapped in mystery. A better reference for this long-running Theatre Ministry might be "jewel box." When we were living in Geneva, Switzerland, in the opening years …
Review: You Can't Take it with You by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 22, 2010
Roland Johnson, at center as the patriarch Martin Vanderhof, surely must be playing himself. If not, his deadpan comic performance is an off-the-charts triumph.
Director Rev. Ann Pittman and the Trinity Street Players have put together an accomplished, warm and funny production of Kaufman & Hart's You Can't Take It With You at the 4th floor black box theatre of Austin's First Baptist Church, 901 Trinity Street, downtown.This affectionate study of a family of distracted amateur would-be artists and entrepreneurs bears the title You Can't . . . but the message is clearly You Can. You can be an artist, a writer, a dancer, a fireworks …