Recent Reviews
Review: 893/Ya-Ku-Za by Vortex Repertory Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 31, 2018
There's a great deal of watchful waiting in the dialogue between these two characters, so much so that I found myself imagining this piece as a Japanese film in black-and-white, framed principally in closeups
The Generic Ensemble Company (GenEnCo) has mounted a starkly simple set on the Vortex Rep's inside stage, representing a private room in a Japanese restaurant or teahouse: sliding bamboo-and-paper partitions, mats, a low table and two cushions. By containing the hour-long performance of 893 YA-KU-ZA in this plain space, they're playing an evocative, reductionist game. Mia King and kt shorb meet here in an atmosphere of tense threat. King is Aya, female martial arts …
Review: The Giver by TILT Performance Group
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 27, 2018
Levels of gentle irony were at work in TILT's staging of THE GIVER, both in the story and in the use of actors, some of them differently abled, to present the complexity of difference.
Adam Roberts' staging of The Giver, a 2006 adaptation by Eric Coble of Lowis Lowry's famous YA novel, is a gentle, extended exercise in complicit irony. It's a clever pivot for the four-year-old TILT Performance Group, founded by Roberts and others to open the world of theatrical performance to actors, principally young, afflicted by physical disadvantages. TILT showed their families and the rest of us that those participants are just as capable as any of …
Review: Strip by FronteraFest
by David Glen Robinson
Published on January 26, 2018
An impressive multimedia blitz of live music expertly performed, dance and video, STRIP succeeds in its triple focus on tumultuous, tragic lives of often overlooked, almost closeted twentieth-century performers Candy Barr, Lenny Bruce and Josephine Baker.
Strip, the Musical is a showcase of the old Austin performance community, revolving around the central figure of Amparo Garcia-Crow, who's the producer, director, and writer of this huge independent show. As one of a talented group of UT-Austin drama students in the 1980s, Garcia-Crow launched a lifelong national performance career of multimedia, multimodal performances that defied characterization as only music, only theatre, or only dance.Her motto seemed to be “all of this, and more.” An …
Review: If I Forget by Southwest Theatre Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 22, 2018
Confessions and quandries, the testing of ties that bind: siblilngs who curse one another four times over and then lapse into shared memories of better times. Every second of IF I FORGET is gripping.
For the second time in just a few months an Austin theatre company has scooped a powerful drama out of the big city theatre biosphere and mounted an accomplished staging that proves the script universal instead of big-city provincial. In September Hyde Park Theatre did it with Sarah DeLappe's The Wolves, and now Southwest Theatre Productions delivers Steven Levenson's powerful and closely plotted If I Forget as its seventh production since it was founded in Austin …
Review #2 of 2: Uncle Vanya by City Theatre Company
by Brian Paul Scipione
Published on January 18, 2018
The brilliance of director Rod Mechem's production is that even when the characters believe they have nothing to live for, the actors' performances show us they're lying to themselves.
There are many things you can say about Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya that would be an understatement. For example: It is about characters going through their own and very different mid-life crises. It is an existential commentary on social classes in mid-19th century Russia. It explores the exploitive relationship between people and the environment. It illustrates the dangerous self-delusions created variously by academia, alcohol abuse and religion. The timelessness of this work is …
Review: Uncle Vanya by City Theatre Company
by David Glen Robinson
Published on January 15, 2018
UNCLE VANYA plays out in drinking, multidirectional lust, and Vanya’s unending suffering. Vanya, with his considerable but totally unacknowledged talents, is faithfully conveyed by Beau Paul .
Anton Chekhov’s great play Uncle Vanya has just opened at City Theatre on the east side. City has made a worthy production of it, without frills, updatings, or Russian accents. The production is a straight, dialogue-heavy play that emphasizes the hopes, fears, and joys of its characters. The four-act play dwells on Russian landed gentry and lower classes living on a family hereditary estate in agricultural southern Russia. As vast as the skies over the …