Recent Reviews
Review: Mad & A Goat by Diana Lynn Small, FronteraFest 2014
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 23, 2014
Once they begin to speak and move, mirroring one another, complementing one another, delivering the lengthy shaggy goat story written by Small (whichever one she is), it doesn't matter. They are the same woman.
Two women appear, standing side by side, each dressed in a frumpy oversized T-shirt and holding a portable tape recorder. Expressionless -- or is that ironic? -- they take turns jabbing buttons so that the machines blurt forth, a phrase at a time, the intro. (Oh, gosh, is this going to be an endless evening of pseudosmart absurdity?) (The answer is triumphantly 'no.') One of those women is …
Review: W.K. by Gale Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 22, 2014
Gale Theatre Company has hit the ground running -- and jumping and performing gymnastics -- since founders Katherine Wilkinson and Celina Chapin arrived in Austin last year. They advocate and organize 'devised theatre,' performances of collective authorship that coalesce through exercises and improvisation. They explained the process in a six-minute video via Indiegogo last October that brought viewers into the studio with a group of intent and very fit participants. That group did Florence, a piece centered on Florence …
Der Bestrafte Brudermord, or Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
by David Glen Robinson
Published on January 21, 2014
This is the puppet show version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Never heard of it? That’s quite understandable, because its very existence was pieced together by rarefied world-class literary research by Oxford professor Tiffany Stern. The initial clue to its existence was a sketchy scenario found in a German monastery in 1710 and published in 1780 as Der Bestrafte Brudermord, translated as The Punished Fratricide. The characters and plot are almost all from Hamlet. Stern’s research sought to …
Review: Der Bestrafte Brudermord by Hidden Room Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 20, 2014
William Shakespeare is a time machine. We attend performances of his work and it transports us four centuries or more back in time, to an imagined realm of rich language, amazing characters and astounding intrigue. Even in stagings done in modern dress, like that Beach Boy Love's Labor's Lost staged by Robert Faires for Austin Shakespeare in 2011, or in altered context such as artistic director Ann Ciccolella's Latino-flavored Romeo and Juliet for the same company two years before …
Review: True West by Weird Rodeo
by David Glen Robinson
Published on January 18, 2014
The question one could ask is why a brand-new theatre company would challenge a play as complex and difficult as Sam Shepard’s True West for its premier production. And the question contains the answer—because it is a challenge, and all who see it can measure the company’s skill in their upward progress climbing the monument. That's the first reason to shout “Bravo!” at this show, one of the few. Weird Rodeo wisely short-circuits some of the difficulties by assembling …
Review: The Language Archive by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 16, 2014
Julia Cho's The Language Archive is a gently sentimental tale built inside a concept, similar to the way nesting birds inhabit a hedge. The theme is the failure of communication, and the metaphor is a collection of recordings and documents describing extinct languages curated by George, a fussy, white-coated linguist who's tongue-tied when it comes to expressing any sentiment. Cho writes her characters as variations on that theme. The gulf between George and his wife Mary is …