Recent Reviews
Review: Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 04, 2015
Washburn's work is a think piece with worthy aims, but it fails to connect with the audience precisely because of its thesis.
American popular imaginings of recent years have been enamoured of dystopian tales of post-industrial collapse. It's not a new trope: Orson Welles' 1939 War of the Worlds hinted at it and Neville Shute's 1959 On the Beach haunted a Western world newly conscious of the H-Bomb. Hollywood has been tearing civilization apart with CGI-FX glee for decades; the first Mad Max movie was in 1979. Cormac McCarthy's 2006 The Road is a stark father-and-son survival epic. My favorite …
Review: The Real Thing by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 27, 2015
Wit is not obliged to be funny. THE REAL THING isn't a comedy, but it flashes with insights of a grown-up exploration of the contracts of human hearts.
Wit is not obliged to be funny. The Real Thing isn't a comedy, but it flashes with insights and features exchanges as swift, surprising and unexpected as those of a fencing match. Austin Playhouse provides an assured and impressive production of this grown-up exploration of the hearts' contract that is the essence of any lengthy intimate relationship. And most particularly, its exploration of the issues of emotional fidelity and toleration of sentimental and sexual …
Review: Freud's Last Session by Jarrott Productions
by David Glen Robinson
Published on September 26, 2015
The play collects grand thoughts from people in an important time and place and fossilizes them beautifully in the amber of this Jarrott Productions show.
Freud’s Last Session, a one-act play by Mark St. Germain, has opened at Trinity Street Theatre in downtown Austin. This production of Jarrott Productions stars producer David Jarrott as psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and Tyler Jones as writer-philosopher C.S. Lewis.They enact a fictional meeting between the two intellectuals at Freud’s office in London on September 3, 1939, the day Britain and its allies declared war on Germany following Hitler’s invasion of Poland.Freud had relocated to London earlier …
Review: Never Such Rain by Tegan McLeod
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 18, 2015
The moves of the final moments, when Jesse twists sinuously around Brandon and the clasp of their pistol, are deft, neat choreography summing up these two damned souls' relationship to the pitiless outer world.
Lily Wolff places Tegan McLeod's Never Such Rain on the stage of UT's Lab Theatre with the audience sitting on the twenty folding chairs along three sides of that space. This is theatre up close and in your face, the way I like it most. I was lucky to snag a chair at the Wednesday opening of this short run, for most had names of IndieGoGo supporters taped on them. I'd thought I could buy a …
Review: Godspell by Emily Ann Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 12, 2015
As in most high-energy small-cast musicals, if you don't know individual cast members at the start, you'll feel that you do by the finale.
Medieval guilds and church clergy organized the mystery plays performed before cathedrals or in town pageants. The aim was devotional and pedagogical. Church services were conducted in impenetrable Latin, but festive costumes and drama of Bible stories vividly conveyed stories of the Old and New Testaments to populations that were devout but illiterate. Of the three 'tribal' musicals of late mid-twentieth-century American theatre, the 1970 Godspell by John-Michael Tebelak and Stephen Schwartz is closest to …
Review: Veronica's Room by Oh Dragon Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on September 07, 2015
At first you share the young woman's incredulity, but as the action proceeds and the stakes mount, you begin to ask yourself whether the playwright has cheated his willing audience.
Have you ever been 'gaslighted'? I didn't know that psychological term before attending Oh Dragon's production of Veronica's Room, but I'm not sure it would have protected me from the confusion and discomfit produced by Ira Levin's 1973 play. Not only were the characters malevolently manipulating one another's perceptions; Lewin the playwright was doing the same to those of us who naïvely agreed to play along with the usual conventions of suspension of disbelief. …