Recent Reviews
Review: Morning's at Seven by Different Stages
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 26, 2010
Five strong, distinctive women actors play against four equally vivid men, and not a one of them is in years of the ardent twenty-somethings so familiar in this town.
Different Stages lives up to its name with this affectionate recreation of a vanished America. Paul Osborn created for his 1930's audiences a comforting family portrait, set in a small town. All three acts of Morning's at Seven take place in a back yard shared by two wooden frame houses. All except one of the nine characters are related. This gentle comedy was a quirky oldies play. All four of the Boulton sisters are in their …
Review: Wait Until Dark by Way Off Broadway Community Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 17, 2010
I did have a woman seated somewhere behind me who probably had the habit of talking to her television at home, but others were kind enough to shush her into mostly silent attention to the action on stage.
Community theatre folks are glad that you came, and they make no pretense about that. They've worked for weeks, mostly after hours and on weekends, in an undertaking that doesn't pay the grocery bills or even the transportation expenses. I'm always touched and honored when players and staff position themselves to greet audience members as they come out of the theatre. Over decades of diplomatic assignments I regularly shook hands of officials receiving guests …
Review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 16, 2010
Christi Moore and her cast have created three hard drinkers condemned to retain fluency of invective and imagination without losing visions of disaster.
I knew that this was going to be intense. I had invited friends to see it with me, and we had seats in the middle of the front row, south side of the "theatre in the square" at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre. After Michelle Polgar had dedicated the opening night's performance to the memory of Oscar Brockett, that grand old man of Austin theatre, the lights began to fade and I had a feeling …
Review: Baal by Paper Chairs
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 15, 2010
Brecht gives characters elevated language that at times passes for verse -- Baal is always yammering on about the sky -- but that's not enough in itself to retain our attention.
Baal was Brecht's first play, written in 1918 at the age of twenty. He had avoided the draft by taking a medical course and he was called up to staff a venereal disease clinic only a month before the war ended, and much of that time he was studying theatre. Brecht did not articulate his doctrine of theatrical alienation until 1935, but this text and the production of it by Dustin Wills and the Paper …
Review: At Home at the Zoo by Palindrome Theatre (2010-2013)
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 12, 2010
Jude Hickey is the editor and Nigel O'Hearn is the intruder. You couldn't cast this piece any better, at least, not here in Austin.
Edward Albee once commented, "If you can sum a play in one sentence, that's how long the play should be." That's a fine bon mot and a cutting challenge to all who try to work in the odd art form of the theatre review. Albee has challenged and puzzled the public, the theatre community and academics since The Zoo Story, the second half of this theatre evening, first took the stage in Berlin 51 years ago. I have …
Review: Shadowlands by Trinity Street Players
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 10, 2010
José Shenkner is a wonder in this role, particularly for his physical control of the character while delivering a complex, layered emotional portrayal. Linda Miller Rath creates Gresham with sharp tongue and acute sensibilities. The two play superbly against and with one another.
I am a bookish sort of person -- not fiercely literary, but more inclined to take my reference points from a printed page than from a screen. I was aware of C.S. Lewis because my daughter and son had absorbed the Narnia books and because back in my own school days I had wrestled a bit with The Screwtape Letters, but I had not much more knowledge of him than that. When this piece came …