Recent Reviews
Review: God of Carnage by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 10, 2011
There's plenty of clash in God of Carnage and there are unexpected turns, including destruction of precious items, self-control and self-esteem. Sometimes it's quite comic and other times it's closer to appalling.
Zach Theatre's God of Carnage is a beautiful mess. That's intentional. The set by Michael Raiford is sleekly contemporary with a bold abstract mural inspired by Cy Twombly spread across the back wall. This living room has a stark leather sofa, a Barcelona chair and large pillows in African-style fabrics, all positioned over a striking red floor so highly polished that the characters can probably see themselves in it. Somebody in this family has got money …
Review: Burn This by 7 Towers Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 08, 2011
Aaron Black's frighteningly convincing portrayal of Pale is monumentally good -- the fierce solarization of the neutral males he embodied in Susie Gidseg's play di[verge] this past summer.
For this intimate, powerful urban drama the setting is superb: a balcony-level studio downtown with a kitchen, a vantage point from which one could study passing vehicles, lines of close-parked cars, and pedestrians hurrying to music venues nearby. It's a "studio" in every sense of the word: with the addition of a minimum of furniture it represents a New York loft. Situated in the Ballet Austin building at 501 West Third Street, it's an appropriate …
Review: Men of Tortuga by Street Corner Arts
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 07, 2011
After the furious build, playwright Wells' dénouement is less satisfying than everything that went before. But the ride is such an entertaining one that we can forgive him that.
Where is Tortuga and whom are these conspirators targeting? Tortuga is Spanish for "turtle" and there are Tortugas all over the place. Lots of islands, for example -- a former pirates' haven off the northern coast of Haiti, an island off Venezuela, others off Costa Rica, in the Gallapagos and down in the Florida Keys. There's an unincorporated community in California close to the border with Mexico. My brother, in town for a visit, …
Review: Natividad - A Homemade Pastorela Play by ALTA Teatro
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 06, 2011
Director Alejandro Pedemonte and playwright Miguel Angel Santana have put together a thoroughly contemporary Christmas story.
Every year since 1997 Austin's Spanish-speaking community has crafted a Christmas play, taking the model of the traditional Pastorela pageant of long date, in which the birth of Jesus is witnessed by a simple shepherd girl. As in virtually all folk theatre, the story can be told many different ways and styles. The sponsoring coalition ALTA (the Austin Latino Theatre Alliance) recruits a different director every year for the Spanish-language enactment, so that each Austin Pastorela is unlike …
Review: Look Back in Anger by Out of Context Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 04, 2011
All of the young members of the cast deliver the dialogue in something close to standard U.S. speech, a fact made all the more evident by Donald Bayne's convincing accent as the stiff-upper-lip retired Colonel Redfern, Alison's father, who's come back from doing his duty for the Empire.
Encouraged by applause at last year's FronteraFest, recent graduates of Southwestern and St. Ed's are taking a great big leap right now at the Off Center. Look Back in Anger was a landmark, a watershed, a paradigm shifter (take your pick) for twentieth-century theatre in England. With his 1956 three-act play John Osborne took clubs and cudgels to the genteel British stage, presenting his protagonist Jimmy Porter as a fiercely intelligent university graduate of lower class …
Review: Housebreaking by Poison Apple Initiative
by Hannah Bisewski
Published on December 03, 2011
Though the script never moralizes, the meditative tone of the first half fails to meet the promise of the explosive inertia of the first half. Housebreaking sputters to an end with a few quiet revelations.
What does a theatre space feel like? How is it supposed to make us feel? Those of us in the small crowd gathered for the opening of the premiere run of Jakob Holder’s Housebreaking were asking ourselves those questions in some form or other. People from the Poison Apple Initiative funneled us into a cramped living room nook in a discreet East Austin housing venue. We found ourselves in the kitchen of a fairly average but rundown home. …