Recent Reviews
Review: The Mikado Reclaimed by Generic Ensemble Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 23, 2016
They're not going to ask you if you liked the show. Anyone who likes what they see portrayed here is a dark and twisted soul.
At the talk-back following the performance they're not going to ask you if you liked the show. Anyone who likes what they see portrayed here is a dark and twisted soul. The co-director of the Vortex Repertory asks you to volunteer a word or phrase expressing your reaction to the relentlessly grim world of captivity and exploitation of Asian women, a Muslim woman and an Asian man who may be gay. That dark crude …
Review: The Government Inspector by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 18, 2016
All the town's characters are stereotypes of self-importance, ripe for deflating. In the busy and buoyant action Gogol, Hatcher and director Polgar puncture them deftly and often.
Nikolai Gogol was only 25 when The Government Inspector was presented and published, and he'd already made a reputation for himself as a writer of short stories and the historical romance Taras Bulba, set in the Cossack region of his origins. Gogol had also proved an ignorant disaster when appointed professor of medieval history at the University of St. Petersburg. A romantic fleeing from his modest origins among the petty nobility of the Ukraine, he'd made …
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 …