Recent Reviews
Review: Mocha
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 25, 2014
In her earnest drama about international adoption Eleanor Burgess tries to do too much. Adoption is a topic that offers all sorts of dramatic possibilities. Suspecting and then confirming infertility, efforts to conceive; reluctant and then increasingly determined efforts to discover ways to create or come into possession of a life that will irrevocably change one's own; and dealing with all those involved in the process, revealing one's psyche and circumstances in order to qualify …
Review: Hazards
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 24, 2014
The dusty stage at the Salvage Vanguard is dressed in black and so is Mina Samuels. The rear backdrop quivers, and Samuels emerges from beneath it, crawling -- squirming forward, really, because she's on her belly, embracing the grimy floor and working her way forward as if she were on a live fire range at army boot camp. Keep your head down is the implied message. She works her way around a couple of wooden …
Review: People Will Talk About You Sometimes by Poison Apple Initiative
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 23, 2014
"And then they'll be sorry. . . ." That's a typical mind game of adolescents hurting from bruised egos and sunk in self pity. It's a no-win game in which they're always victorious. No boundaries; no opposition; and the only players are imaginary others who regret every slight or offense they've ever caused you. Sarah Matusek's script takes the concept seriously. She removes the protagonist entirely and explores the consternation of four persons who knew …
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 Diana Small, the author, but which? 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 …
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. …