Hillcountry Underbelly: A Pilgrimage on the Outskirts, a new musical by Elizabeth Doss, presented by Paper Chairs, might be initially perceived as your classic, charming and whimsical country bumpkin tale. Complete with references to Ma and Pa and beautiful ballads (composed by Mark Stewart) about big old red dogs and scorpions. However, as the title implies, the Underbelly is anything but light-hearted. After scratching the surface, there lies a dark comedy of desperation, death, illness, and a struggle between allegiance to a patriarch and individual desire that eventually rip the family apart. more ›

Here is the magic of Salvage Vanguard Theater's Heddatron: After over an hour in which the vast majority of the characters -- eleven, counting the robots -- display nothing that resembles a real human emotion, the play's resolution sneaks around for an unexpectedly deep and affecting conclusion that validates all of the silliness (and there certainly is silliness) that came before. It's the theatrical equivalent of Ali's rope-a-dope, wearing audiences out by bobbing and weaving, laying back, and then delivering the emotional knock-out punch that no one saw coming. In short, it's a unique experience made all the more powerful by the fact that everything that happens for the majority of the play is robots and precocious pre-adolescent narrators and karaoke and Strawberry Shortcake costumes and crazy shit like that. more ›

The title character, portrayed with a soft-toned nastiness by Paper Chairs regular Gabriel Luna, is vicious, insatiable, anti-social, and selfish. He steals women from his compatriots, including Jacob Trussell's trusting Johannes, who at first seems as charmed by Baal as every woman seems to be. Baal's allure seems to be in the boldness and beauty of his words - for though this play is full of ugly imagery, of human waste, murder, and decay, the nature of Brecht's writing is also imbued with an elegance and lyricism that is hard to ignore. more ›

The clack of keyboards, sputter and stench of traffic, the press of the madding crowd, the burdens of societal expectation: Modern urban life can seem hellish. In Paper Chairs' production of the late 1920s expressionist tragedy Machinal, the rote mechanisms and sensory overload that oppress playwright Sophie Treadwell's protagonist are embodied in sight, sound, and cog-like motion on stage. The larger of two performance spaces at Salvage Vanguard is set in the round for this production, allowing director Dustin Willis to foreground the mechanized feeling of the play's world. A Young Woman (portrayed by Chase Crossno with a high-strung loveliness reminiscent of Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski's Repulsion) is out of step - late for the office job where her coworkers file, type, and even gossip in lockstep; pursued by her boss, whose very touch causes her to recoil - but an obligation to care for her widowed mother leads her to accept a life that repels and numbs her. An encounter with an alluring stranger from south of the border seems to shake her awake, and her struggle to break free from her one-sided marriage ends in violence. more ›

In This House (Everything Is You) is collaborative creation, not a ghost story, but in fact a memory story ranging across the years, a touching narrative in non-linear time. Mind you, there is a ghost - Jamie Rhodes as that silent young woman in black who follows the action around. But except for the wild stories of the young brother and sister, we never really get around to her story. more ›

Remember that part in Jurassic Park when Ian What's-His-Fuck says something along the lines of, "They were so busy thinking about whether they could. No one stopped to think whether or not they should"? Murder Ballad Murder Mystery is like Jurassic Park sans dinosaurs and coherent narrative (right down to the theme of dead things being resurrected). Oh, it's visually stunning, resourceful, raucous, and joyous theatre-making, but there are clearly ill-conceived aspects to the whole affair. While fresh, the piece is unripe and therefore minimally nutritious. more ›

Mikhail Bulgakov, whose Black Snow is currently in the midst of a run by Tutto Theatre Company at the Salvage Vanguard Theater, is one of those figures it's hard to criticize on his work's merits, which is unfortunate. It's much safer to insist that the work's author is fully deserving of his exalted status, and that the flaws in the production belong to Tutto and director Dustin Wills. But the fact is that it's hard to imagine a better interpretation of Bulgakov's cranky, cartoony piece about what a bummer working in the theater was for him. more ›