Recent Reviews
Picasso at the Lapin Agile, by Present Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 04, 2015
Stephanie Carll's direction crafts clever interplay between the characters, the accompaniment and the audience. The tempo is brisk, and surprises pop forth like nimble bunnies out of a derby hat.
Usually during performance the theatre artists of Present Company have breeze ruffling their hair, as they stand out on their epic set constructions at Rain Lily Farm in east Austin or scamper around the roof terrace at Whole Foods Market. Not so in Picasso at the Lapin Agile. Their charming production of Steve Martin's clever, goofy play set in 1904 Paris offers a different experience. Director Stephanie Carll and Production Coordinator Samuel Grimes bring you …
Review: Changelings, by Vortex Repertory
by David Glen Robinson
Published on January 31, 2015
Reina Hardy establishes a secret land one can enter with the correct magic keys and incantations. Once there, characters fight fairies’ nasty habit of stealing mortal babies and raising them as their own, the changelings.
Reina Hardy’s Changelings, A Dark Fairytale Adventure, playing weekends until February 7 is the very paragon of the dark fairytale subgenre. I expect it will have success and long runs nationally after its performances at the Vortex Repertory on Manor Road in Austin. Hardy, a young playwright and Michener Fellow from UT Austin, has already enjoyed recognition on the national level. She has typically pursued magical realism in her playwriting, notably in her Stars …
Review: The Walls of Jericho, at Ground Floor Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on January 30, 2015
The father is an Air Force Chief Master Sergeant, and his family lives on a base. The mother has nothing to do except take instructions on how to help bury the dead after a nuclear attack, assuming she survives.
Frontera Fest Long Fringe is still steaming along, filling the new Ground Floor Theater with performance after performance at an exhausting pace. The festival never fails to put new talent through its pressure cooker, to the enjoyment of theatre goers. The Walls of Jericho by Sandra Metcalf is an autobiographical play, true, but it is more of a biography of a family of which Metcalf was the youngest member. The background of the play …
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. …
Review: Thr3E Zisters, at Salvage Vanguard Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 27, 2015
The bloodless female bodies move and speak. One delivers an eerie wailing monologue insisting that the smell of cut flowers is really the flowers screaming in pain. It's an exquisitely scary moment.
Robert Matney's solo appearance for the first eight minutes or so of Three Zisters is a pure delight. Attentively silent and diffident in his vaguely Russian garb, he greets the audience with his eyes, nibbles a pickle, checks the samovar, works through an exquisite sequence of business and gestures that leaves the audience rapt, fascinated by his subtle pantomime, reminiscent of Chaplin in the silents. Once he finds his voice we learn that he's …
DNA, Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 26, 2015
Big Phil tells them what to do so as to escape detection. Things get out of hand. When Phil's first plan runs aground, he's unperturbed; he provides a new set of instructions. And then another. No one questions him. No one tells the police or any of the grownups the truth.
The Off Center's a pretty dark place, as is any black box theatre, so it's an appropriate setting for Capital T's production of Dennis Kelly's sardonic little play DNA. Mark Pickell's simple set makes the most of that void. You spend just over an hour in a stretch of nondescript forest, defined only by a line of young trees and a random rock and lump of ground. This is a long way from anywhere, …