Recent Reviews
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 …
Review: Gallathea by Poor Shadows of Elysium
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 10, 2014
Kevin Gates is intensely dedicated to the text of early modern English drama. In the same secret space where he was transformed into Shakespeare's Coriolanus just over a year ago, he has conjured up a graceful and whimsical staging of a work from the London of 1588 that you've not seen and probably have never heard of: John Lyly's Gallathea. It's a pastorale that provides definitive evidence that Shakespeare wasn't the only dramatist whose plots sent …
Review: Venus in Fur by Austin Playhouse
by David Glen Robinson
Published on January 06, 2014
The humor in the play is sharp contemporary adult dialogue. Someday this topical humor may date Venus in Fur to the early ought-teens of the twenty-first century, but so be it.
Venus in Fur by David Ives is a new, highly regarded American play making the rounds of theatres in Texas and across the nation. It's currently playing at Austin Playhouse, Austin’s singular shopping mall theatre through January 25th. Austin Playhouse is calling it an off-season play and discounting its ticket price for its initial run. Theatre-goers won’t want to miss this one. The setting is a rented rehearsal studio in Manhattan, where a young playwright named …