Recent Reviews
Review: Antigone (David Rush) by Filigree Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 26, 2023
In Filigree Theatre's accomplished staging, the adversity and mutual destruction of Antigone and dictator Creon are entirely human. The gods are silent. As they are in our own day.
The choices are stark and the interests are opposed. As they were then, are now, and ever will be. Playwright/adapter David Rush thoroughly scrubs Sophocles's Antigone, like a museum curator carefully restoring a find from an archeological dig, rendering it from an odd antiquity into a darkly glowing relevant contemporary challenge. Director Elizabeth V. Newman, her cast, and the design team embraced the ritual nature of Greek drama with an almost liturgical staging. Eloquent and …
Review: Twelfth Night, or What You Will by The Baron's Men
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 20, 2023
Austin's Baron's Men is a Big Deal, and so is this TWELFTH NIGHT of comedy and courting we won't soon forget.
For those of you who weren't aware of it, the Baron's Men (BM) is a Big Deal and their Twelfth Night, winding up a three-week run at the Elizabeth-style outdoor stage The Curtain Theatre, is an equally big deal. Twenty-four years ago, enthusiasts associated with the video gaming industry grabbed the opportunity to occupy Richard Garriott's folly, a quarter-size replica of a sixteenth-century London theatre on the north bank of the Colorado just west of …
Review: Frankenstein (adapted by Nick Dear) by Gaslight Baker Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 18, 2023
Nick Dear tells the creature's story and the Gaslight Baker Theatre presents it with astonishing physicality and amazingly vivid projected detail.
The towering wall and platforms beyond the Gaslight Baker stage are swathed in white. When you settle into the already chilled audience space, you have the impression that you've been transported to the Arctic. That red, red sun in the distance is the only dim hint of possible warmth. A muted, percussive soundtrack seems to emanate from it as if from a celestial speaker. CTXLT reviews live narrative theatre -- stories told in words. There …
Review: The Norwegians by C. Denby Swanson at Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 04, 2023
The greatest pleasures in this staging of THE NORWEGIANS are the Sarahs: Zeringue and Fleming Walker, acting out in the crossed cultures of Texas and Minnesota.
What better way to escape Austin's endless summer than to go to Minnesota? Austin Playhouse's The Norwegians by C. Denby Swanson has got just the antidote for you, a funny, quirky, cross-cultural, character-based comedy. This odd little piece ran off-off-Broadway for more than a year. I first saw it in 2014 at Southwestern University, where the playwright was on staff. Austin Playhouse presented it in 2015. According to Michael Barnes's profile in the Austin Statesman, …
Review: Jack and Aiden by Lane Michael Stanley -- Workshop Reading at Austin's Ground Floor Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on October 02, 2023
Playwright Stanley portrays the closed society of the gay urban village in language that's authentic and often course. GFT stages a full production in December, 2023.
Jack and Aiden has a cast of two attractive actors giving a positive, almost ethnographic depiction of twenty-first century urban gay life. They quickly drill down past the gay ghetto to the sub-sub-culture of hook-up practitioners who practically exist in their cyber technology and the on-line world. Please forgive the brief sociology essay: the place is the urban gay village--post-Stonewall, post-AIDS, post-Covid19—where people meet anonymously through texts, transmitting emojis and avatars instead of photographs, seeking …
Review: The Girl who Became Legend by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 30, 2023
Leaving dusty Dustbin in search of rainclouds, "Raina" (get it?) meets legends on her quest. This colorful, imaginative staging of Sarah Saltwick's play charms, surprises, and educates.
The form is familiar—this is a "quest" story in which the protagonist leaves home to wander through the unknown "beyond" to experience a series of encounters and adventures but eventually returns home wiser and accepted by former adversaries and critics. Sarah Saltwick's first modification is evident in the title, for the questor is female, an earnest, sweet, booted young teen. "Raina" -- that's a tell! -- lives with her mother in Dustbin, a huddle of …