Recent Reviews
Review: Three, or the Sound of the Great Existential Nothingness by Breaking String Theater
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on August 05, 2013
“People don’t want what you want,” Andre comments to Olga in a half-dismissive and half pleading tone, This ironically sums up the positions of all the characters in the play: ironically, because none of them can admit or even be sure of what they really want.
What Philosophers Call It A pause button. Many wish for it and none achieve it. Many of life’s moments skyrocket past us with meteor-like frenzy. Some we miss altogether, because we were simply too wrapped up in, well, what we consider to be life. Vonnegut fantasizes about something similar in Slaughterhouse Five: the ability to stretch time out like taffy, look at each and every important moment from our past, and understand how they brought …
Review: Three, or the Sound of the Great Existential Nothingness by Breaking String Theater
by David Glen Robinson
Published on August 02, 2013
By the end, it is clear that the characters will continue to stumble through their personal wreckage, but from that point on without the grinding misery of worrying that things could be better or could have turned out differently.
Brother Andre’s cell ringtone is Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire, and that’s everything, right up front, for Three, or, The Sound of the Great Existential Nothingness by Timothy Braun. Each and every character on stage goes down, down, down in a burning ring of fire, seemingly without redemption. Breaking String Theater produces the play at the Off Center, possibly the east side’s most prestigious venue. In marketing material, the play is described as a modern reworking of …
Review: The Pillowman by 7 Towers Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 23, 2013
Director Christina Gutierrez chose some of Austin's most muscularly intellectual actors to create the piece. Travis Bedard's Katurian is earnest, eloquent and sly; Aaron Black endows brother Michael with vulnerability, effusive reactions and innocence.
The Pillowman takes place in a dark, eerie world that Martin McDonagh created back in 2003 when he moved away from his dark Irish ethnic plays The Beauty Queen of Leenan and The Lieutenant of Inishmore. The Hyde Park Theatre staged this piece in 2007, winning Ken Webster a B. Iden Payne for direction and critics' table awards for actors Jude Hickey and Kenneth Wayne Bradley. Both Southwestern University and the UT University Theatre Guild staged The Pillowman in 2011, and the …
Review: One Night with Janis Joplin by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 20, 2013
One Night with Janis is fun, even if it takes you to a mythic 1970 that couldn't have existed. That backup band has got the hair, for example, but none of the hungry look; they're chunky Texas beer-drinking buddies.
The Zach Theatre has franchised Randy Johnson's concert show, dosing it with lively Joplin imitator Kacee Clanton from LA, top-quality local talent, and a high wall projected full of Colin Lowry's CGI. Clanton and the back-up band deliver some spot-on covers of Pearl's most famous numbers. It's a thumping, thrumming night of thrills, not so cheap, a mostly mindless celebration of the highs delivered to us by that gifted misfit from Port Arthur. The …
Review: Make Believe by Chris Fontanes, Bottle Alley Theatre Company
by Jessica Helmke
Published on July 15, 2013
Experiencing Make-Believe was like watching a painter fresco a wall in lime plaster. Tension mounted as the plot was slowly revealed.
A Commentative Search for Truths I ended up parking two blocks away by accident and only once had to stop and ask for directions to the Grayduck Gallery [click for map]. I was really excited to watch the premiere of Make-Believe, a new work by Chris Fontanes of Bottle Alley Theatre Company. I'd received an early version of the full length play from Chris a couple of months earlier, so I'd gotten an actresses's inside view …
Review: Brides of the Moon by Weird Sisters Women's Theater Collective
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on June 22, 2013
Then there was the moment when the astronauts' SDIS (sex drive implants) went awry and they all had sex under, next to and on top of the spaceship's dashboard: legs and cleavage were everywhere.
Farce in Space Describing the new work by Austin’s all-female theatre group the Weird Sisters Collective is like recounting a good Saturday night party at work on Monday morning. While at the party the most inane things take on catastrophic significance, in a dull office space they come off as decidedly dotty. Your cell mates behind their respective desks might smile, nod and chuckle, but try as you might, the terms hamburgoo, sergonic drift and consensual monkey sex will be pretty …