Recent Reviews
Review: The Lion in Winter by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 01, 2011
You could just rent the DVD or dig it out of your collection, but Austin Playhouse is offering you a fine cast, an unusual venue, and action that should strike enough spark and fire to keep you fascinated.
Our medieval experience for Austin Playhouse's The Lion in Winter was unexpectedly complete, for last week in that almost unheated temporary tent structure on the windy plains of the Mueller Development we were wishing we had castle-appropriate fur and wool like those of the period costumes put together for the actors by Diana Huckaby. I suspect that they might have been wearing high tech underwear for the long evening during which we sat motionless watching them. …
Review: American Bear, a play about home by Theatre en Bloc
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 30, 2011
Part of the fascination and, frankly, the deeply unsettling feeling prompted by this play is the experience of seeing highly intelligent actors submerge themselves into characters who are uncomprehending. Jenny Lavery and Derek Kolluri are whip smart, I know, from seeing their work.
Larry Mitchell's American Bear has an undeclared kinship with the 'kitchen sink' school of drama of 1950s Britain, grim depictions of working class life pioneered by John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (curiously enough, also playing in Austin this week and next). Sam Shepard has explored similar terrain and Tracy Letts followed him there with sardonic tales you might call the Grand Guignols of Trailer Park Trash. American Bear offers a world that is more credible than those. Mitchell's characters are from …
Review: She Loves Me by Wimberley Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 27, 2011
Just as in the classic screwball comedies of the 1930's and 1940's, the background to the comic courtship is decorated with stock characters.
The Wimberley Players' production of She Loves Me directed by Dawn Youngs delivers a serene and intricately musical vision of a 1930s fairy tale. Preserved as if in one of those snow globes awaiting a gentle shake to send the flakes whirling, a perfume shop in Budapest is a holiday setting where affairs of the heart predominate. The elegant ladies of the city come seeking their creams, perfumes and philtres; the clerks of the shop, good earnest …
Review: Stranger by Jump-Start Performance Company
by Hannah Bisewski
Published on November 21, 2011
not only did half the actors travel from Slovakia to collaborate with performers who didn’t speak a word of Slovakian, but all of the performers from Europe had some degree of mental handicap. the understanding of our need to embrace the “strangers” of our societies and ourselves became urgent.
The Salvage Vanguard Theatre played host this past weekend to a single performance in Austin by two acting troupes from very different corners of the world. San Antonio’s Jump-Start Performance Company spent the last five weeks in intensive collaboration with a troupe known as Divadlo z Pasáže, or “Theatre from the Passage” from, of all places, the Slovak Republic. The product of this challenging and exceptional cooperation was Stranger, a heavily allegorical and visually stunning telling of …
Review: Well by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 18, 2011
Jennifer Underwood is that rare bird, the experienced actress who radiates such wisdom and warmth that she makes you long for a big hug, a cup of herbal tea and a long afternoon chat in the homey mess that's her living room.
This mischievous comedy deserves a better title. By calling it Well, Lisa Kron implies that it's about exactly the opposite: about illness. That subliminal message is reinforced in Different Stages' press releases. Even an impish twist of punctuation would have done it. Call it Well? so as to capture the mother-daughter dialogue at the heart of the play, in which monologist Lisa Kron pushes beyond the strictures of stand-up comedy and tale-telling, confiding to the audience that …
Review: A Lie of the Mind by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 15, 2011
A Lie of the Mind is a hard evening with a bunch of no-hopers who might just be hybrids of The Stupids and The Nastys -- 'Deliverance'-style degenerates, except that they're out somewhere in the great American West.
Sam Shepard wrote and directed A Lie of The Mind off Broadway in 1985. It won awards as best play then and the 2010 New York production won the Lucille Lortel award as best revival. Musing over the claustrophobic evening with these characters, I recalled Harry Allard's picture book collaboration with James Marshall in the 1970's featuring a charmingly inept cartoon family named The Stupids. A Lie of the Mind is a hard evening with a bunch of …