Recent Reviews
Review: Fixing Timon of Athens by Rude Mechs
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 16, 2016
Kirk Lynn takes this sow's ear and turns it into a silk purse, well constructed, hand sewn, brightly spangled and furnished with language of 21st-century pungency.
In casting about for Shakespeare plays to mend with his own distinctive language and imagining, Kirk Lynn did well to choose Timon of Athens. It was published in the First Folio of 1623 and not much seems to be known about its history. Timon has the full five acts characteristic of Shakespearian and Elizabethan drama, but they're an awkward and uneasy assembly. It's easy to suppose that this piece, appearing seven years after Shakespeare's death, is the …
Review: The Seagull by Classic Theatre of San Antonio
by Kurt Gardner
Published on February 15, 2016
Director Allan S. Ross works with a fine ensemble cast to bring Chekhov’s prose to life, and the results are superb.
The characters in Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull should be familiar to theatergoers, even those who haven’t seen the actual play itself. Among other works, Christopher Durang’s 2012 comedy, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (presented by the Classic Theatre last year) incorporates themes from Chekhov’s play, and Donald Margulies’s 2014 comedy The Country House also riffs on the piece. So how does a straight-on presentation of this century-old play hold up for contemporary audiences? In the Classic …
Review: The Amish Project by AtticRep
by Kurt Gardner
Published on February 14, 2016
Jessica Dickey's shattering solo piece comes to San Antonio's AtticRep in a superlative production starring the marvelous Sarah Gise.
Originally presented to great acclaim at New York’s Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Jessica Dickey’s 2009 solo work The Amish Project comes to AtticRep in a superlative production starring a marvelous Sarah Gise. In a role — well, actually roles — originated by Dickey, Gise masterfully portrays seven characters in a piece inspired by the real-life 2006 killing of five Amish girls in their schoolhouse in Lancaster County, PA. The characters here are creations …
Review: Tribes by Zach Theatre, January 27 - February 28, 2016
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 06, 2016
Dave Steakley picked a winner with this script, successfully courted a fine ensemble and placed them in a soaring circular Palace of Ozymandias.
Nina Raine's Tribes deals with language. Make that plural: languages. First and predominant at the opening is the sharp back-and-forth of a comfortably middle-class English family, a couple with three grown children, all living at home. Christopher the father is particularly abrasive and foul-mouthed. Wife Beth puts up with it, and two of the children are uncowed by their dad's bantering sneers. The other, Billy, is quiet most of the time, and the prominent hearing devices …
Review: Exit 27 by Southwest Theatre Productions
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 01, 2016
Message: Those worshipped FLSD elders imprisoned their women and, like cannibals, consumed their own many children, both female and male.
Exit 27 starts dark and gets darker. Much darker. Like just about everyone else I'd heard of the abuses of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLSD) church headed by Warren Jeffs -- traditionally polygamous and in some cases abusive of underage girls. That's why the man is serving a much deserved twenty-year prison sentence. Alex Merilo's 2013 play, which premiered in Houston, looks at the other horrific aspect of systematic abuse: the 'lost …
Review: Top Dog/Underdog by Viceroys
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 31, 2016
Playwright Parks' talent is such that she makes a grotesque concept largely irrelevant n an extended, harsh and convincing portrayal of the serial defeats of the bottom one percent.
Matthew Frazier and Jarrett King, the self-styled Viceroys, delivered to initiates and fans a four-performance in camara production of Suzan-Lori Parks' fascinatingly grim drama Topdog/Underdog during the final days of January. The studio theatre at the Salvage Vanguard, a close and dark little space with perhaps fifty seats, lent itself to the creation of the barren and junk-furnished squat shared by two brothers. Lincoln and Booth, so named by sardonic father and overwhelmed mother who abandoned …