Recent Reviews
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …