Recent Reviews
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: Cock by Theatre en Bloc
by David Glen Robinson
Published on October 06, 2014
Theatre en Bloc presents Cock by Mike Bartlett at the Off Center in east Austin, October 3 through 26, 2014. As advertised, the award-winning play is about a young man who leaves his boyfriend, meets a woman, and then returns to question his sexual identity. Forget actually changing it. Merely questioning it is enough to pitch one into the abyss of unknowing, as this brilliant play informs us in roaring, penetrating detail. Its refreshing humor keeps the …
Review: Cock by Theatre en Bloc
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 06, 2014
Director Derek Kolluri and the four equally gifted members of this cast prove to us how perilously close are the arcs between sentimental comedy and tragedy. Cock is a powerful piece, one that will wring you out over the hundred minutes of fierce emotional fighting that takes place inside the chalk circle at the Off Center. Playwright Mike Bartlett's provocative title Cock is a cheap come-on, not worthy of the depth of feeling and the intensity of the acting. …
Review: Love and Information by St. Edward's University
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 04, 2014
Information is not knowledge. Even less is it wisdom. And in our popular consciousness, increasingly fragmented by the synapse-candy of sound bites, blurbs, ads, Tweets and Facebook postings, random information thrown at us typically constitutes an accumulation of meaningless trivia. I went looking for an author's statement or a thoughtful analysis of Caryl Churchill's 2012 play Love and Information, staged in the United States for the first time in February of this year, but I found …
Review: The King and I by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 24, 2014
The first and probably unnecessary point to make is that this opulent evening is not the place to go for authenticity. The Zach Theatre has of course gone to great lengths to provide us with an Asian experience, and it's an enchanting one. It's not a historic document, however, and The King and I on the stage at the Topfer Theatre is really a fantasy about the guardedly cordial meeting of East and West. Freely adapted from …
Review: Now Then Again by Penfold Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 23, 2014
We all like ‘What if?’ That’s really the essence of theatrical art, isn’t it? In simplest terms, we gather to witness the presentation of a story. No, it’s not real. . . but what if it were? A romantic comedy, say — where the protagonist is a brilliant theoretical physicist who’s incredibly shy and socially inept, and he meets this incredibly gifted woman, an undergraduate intern who somehow has gotten a summer assignment to this cutting-edge lab, recognizes …