Erma Bombeck: at wit’s end
How a Suburban Mom Transformed Boredom and Dread Written by Allison Engel and Margaret Engel, featuring Sarah Fleming Walker, the Austin Playhouse Associate Artistic Director, and central character who performed…
Flirt, fuck, is there so vast a difference?
That existential question, posed by John Updike in a letter to a woman who would become his wife, was written in 1974. It is, to put it bluntly, the animating…
Best Play of the Season in Austin:
A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder Roy Horniman could scarcely imagine that one of his books would be turned into a film and then a theatrical production. His novel,…
Take Care of My Friend
Director Elizabeth Newman of the Filigree Theatre strayed a bit from her previous repertoire with the world premiere of Take Care of My Friend. Starring Kathleen Fletcher, who wrote the…
Dear Evan Hansen Waves Pain Through a Window
Most theatregoers know the story of Dear Evan Hansen, as it was a tremendous success on Broadway for six years in a row and was also a film and a…
Others Were Here Beforehand: City Theatre Austin’s Men on Boats
There is a single line in Jaclyn Backhaus’s Men on Boats, now running at City Theatre Austin through April 12, that cuts through everything: the rapids, rhetoric, gender politics, and…
Witch — Bewitchingly Witty
I was fortunate to grab one of the remaining tickets for the closing night performance of Witch, at Hyde Park Theatre, a bewitchingly witty play directed superbly by Ken Webster…
One Woman, Many Lives: Penfold Theatre’s “Wild Horses” Kicks Up the Dust of a Violent Coming-of-Age
Jennifer Coy Jennings carries an entire world on her shoulders — and makes it look effortless. There’s a moment in “Wild Horses,” when playwright Allison Gregory’s language hits “freedom takers…
Yellow Face: The Mirror America Refuses to Hold Up
There’s a particular courage required to write a play in which you are the fool. David Henry Hwang possesses that courage in abundance, and Yellow Face — now receiving a…
When Stillness Becomes Stagnation: The Trip to Bountiful
There is a difference between quiet and stagnation. Horton Foote wrote his 1953 play The Trip to Bountiful during an era that tolerated stillness, repetition, and domestic realism as dramatic…