Recent Reviews
Review: Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding) by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 21, 2013
Federico García Lorca's Bodas de Sangre takes places in the stark and arid landscape of the mind. The setting is rural Spain, somewhere far out in the countryside, and the characters are peasant families. They have no names, with the single exception of Leonardo, the angry and frustrated young farmer who precipitates the tragedy. García Lorca identifies the others by role: the intended groom (novio), the bride (novia), the mother, the neighbor, the father of the bride. …
Review: There is a Happiness that Morning is by Capital T Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on November 19, 2013
This production of Mickle Maher’s There is a Happiness That Morning Is generated considerable marketing material on its fictional premise: two teachers of William Blake’s poetry at a crumbling east coast liberal arts college became so overwhelmed by it all that they had throwdown carnal knowledge of each other on the leafy day-lit campus. Their students witnessed their intimacy, as did the president of the college, and everyone else. The president and trustees want them to apologize …
Review: The Belle of Amherst by Austin Shakespeare
by Jessica Helmke
Published on November 17, 2013
At Home with Emily Dickinson
I told myself, "I should have brought my favorite pen. Or maybe my secret stash of amateur poems? Some decorated stationary perhaps? Then again, freshly baked sugar cookies are sure to do the trick. . . ." I was finally going to meet her. The dark, secluded and intriguing poetic genius herself, Ms. Emily Dickinson. I waited patiently and quietly in my chair for over an hour, but she never showed. Instead, a woman dressed …
Review: Fixing King John by Rude Mechs
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 13, 2013
A wild ride, two hours or so including the intermission, Fixing King John doesn't so much fix/repair an inferior script as fix/set in our imaginations a portrait and a fable relevant to our own day, struggling mightily in contemporary American speech for meaning.
Kirk Lynn's script isn't Shakespeare. Fixing King John is a tight, fast story with dialogue full of fucking obscenities, one suited not for PBS but maybe to HBO. E. Jason Liebrecht creates King John as an edgy, angry, powerful capo with the force of Jimmy Cagney and the morals of Tony Soprano. Director Madge Darlington puts the Rude Mechs' staging into the confined space of their Off-Shoot rehearsal studio behind the Off-Center in east Austin. Audience members -- no, …
Review: Flu Season by Oh Dragon Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 11, 2013
Oh Dragon Theatre Company's choice of the Grayduck Gallery just off south First Street as the venue to stage Will Eno's The Flu Season is appropriate. The white walls, open space, and angled positioning of the seats for the audience create a stark setting for a stark play. In his odd little fable of anomie, set in a mental clinic, Will Eno tells a story that could squeeze our hearts if only he didn't keep relentlessly undercutting …
Review: There is a Happiness that Morning is by Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 08, 2013
Maher's 80-minute one act piece is exciting, dramatic, funny and deep -- an impressive script, and it's performed with élan, aplomb, assurance and feeling by the two leads, Catmull and Jason Phelps, who also has a long history with this venue.
There is a space that theatre is, Unknown except to the hip and cognoscenti -- where verse and blood, ironic plenty, dearth, death, desire and wit conjured forth from air, direct our eyes to great and lesser things unseen, unknown, unspoken in our media. Hyde Park, Cap T, Mick' Maher, Blake, knife-sharp, wit-full, astounding, take our souls in dance and squeeze our hearts, unglaze our eyes. Innocence? Experience? Groves of academe, Pierian springs, our …