Recent Reviews
Review: The Grapes of Wrath by City Theatre Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on August 19, 2018
Steinbeck's semi-articulate characters gain insight through loss after loss. Their lives seem as enormous as Ansel Adams’ mountains and forests, yet quaking beneath an overpowering and impersonal universe. City's production remains dreadfully true to Steinbeck's vision and sorrow.
Onstage now at City Theatre on the east side is a play about the struggle to be human. Yes, City Theatre has undertaken an adapted stage presentation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The well-known tragedy continues to offer generations of Americans sometimes-harsh lessons on the human condition. Steinbeck’s canonized 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath places uneducated regional migrants at the epicenter of the rending social upheaval of the Great …
Review: Real Women Have Curves by Teatro Vivo
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 17, 2018
The appealing humanity of this small band of sisters is an implicit appeal to audiences and to faceless society to recognize the value of their work and their very existence in U.S. society. The playwright gives Estela and her comrades a triumph in which we can all share.
The script of Josefina López’s Real Women Have Curves is swift moving and atmospheric, and it blasts along like a roller coaster doing the curves. The women aboard the ride are sharply differentiated, talky and engaged with one another. It’s not surprising that this 1990 play produced in Los Angeles was eventually turned into a successful film back in 2002. Austin’s Teatro Vivo does a good job of it, too, for director Claudia M. …
Review: Clinically Undepressed by Bastrop Opera House
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 16, 2018
Will Holcomb's CLINICALLY UNDEPRESSED is a gentle parable in which a young man's Christ-like temperament inevitably leads to desired miracles. Deklan Finley's performance is clear as water, with concealed depth.
Serenity. In our busy and often afflicted lives, perhaps that’s what we yearn for, even more than happiness. While attending Will Holcomb’s third staging of his play Clinically Undepressed I heard in my mind Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” Holcomb’s premise in writing the piece was simple: imagine a …
Review #2 of 2: There and Back by Raul Garza, Ground Floor Theatre
by David Glen Robinson
Published on August 12, 2018
Raul Garza's THERE AND BACK is a universal tale presented within the specific culture of Latin migrants. Performances by the three-person cast, with Karina Dominguez as the protagonist, draw in the audience firmly yet subtly. The design fields make for a brilliant play.
Have you ever felt your home was not really your home, even when it is merely a converted chicken coop? And have you been told by all around you that the land you work with your hands is not your country? This deep-striking sense of dislocation is one of the first conveyances of There and Back, assisted mightily by Ia Ensterä’s exploded set, centered on the aforementioned avian shelter. Raul Garza’s cry from the heart is presented in …
Review #1 of 2: There and Back by Ground Floor Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on August 11, 2018
Karina's Dominguez's stamina and subtly modulated performance endow the protagonist with the transcendence required to represent decades and generations of Mexican women whose pure endurance leaves us all in awe.
Raul Garza's new work is a tribute to the courage and resiliency of Mexican women. His story of Gloria, arrived in the United States without papers in the mid-50's, extends to the present day, and it touches upon some of the principal developments in U.S. migration policy. Scenes of prejudice, discrimination and violence are inevitable in those six deades and more, but they're handled deftly and briefly. The story is unexceptional, even ordinary, and …
Review: The Audience/El Público by Paper Chairs
by Michael Meigs
Published on July 31, 2018
Elizabeth Doss's staging of her adaptation is a sensitive but vigorous and often absurdist work, portraying both Spain's greatest twentieth-century poet and the brutal intolerance of Franco's Falange that murdered him.
It's not possible to descry how much of paperchairs' The Audience/El Público is Elizabeth Doss and how much of it is Federico García Lorca, twentieth-century Spain's greatest poet. One can guess, of course, that the succession of poetic similes describing homoerotic love probably came from the gifted, tormented poet who was arrested and arbitrarily executed by Franco's Falange in 1936 when he was only 38 years old. Playwright Doss's savage depiction of the captors and torturers of …