Tongue And Groove Theater proved itself, with The Red Balloon, to be one of Austin's more interesting theatrical stylists. Omnivorous in its approach, the company seemed determined to just create a brilliant, beautiful live experience, unconcerned with being Theater-with-capital-letters and instead mostly interested in giving audiences what they want, not what they expect. more ›

Political drama is a minefield. The compulsion to discuss hot-button issues seems, more often than not, to beget messy and overwrought or overtly agenda-laden work and halt open conversation, rather than inspire it. Not that it can't and hasn't been done really well; it's just that the bar is high. more ›

The premise here is simple: Edgar Cardigan is a frustrated writer turned creative writing teacher, and possibly a compulsive liar. Of course, some might argue that fiction writing is all artfully-rendered lies anyway. Either way, Cardigan is enjoyable, though the script needed some clarifications. more ›

Frontera Fest’s Long Fringe festival is over, but the wildly popular short fringe powers on! Every Tuesday through Friday there are shows of 5 short plays, then every Saturday the best of the week is selected for an encore performance. This is the last week of debuting new short fringe shows. Next week, the Best of the Festival will have its victory lap. If last night’s shows were any indication, there are still plenty of great performances yet to see. more ›

Theresa Harrison promised that her 60-minute adaptation of HOWL appearing in Frontera Fest’s Long Fringe festival was not an homage, but a portal. The performance was supposed to transport the audience somewhere and be as free as beat poetry, as dangerous as insanity and as unstable as time. The source material is as powerful today as ever (been a while? treat yourself!), which is why the poem’s flat staging was particularly disappointing. more ›

John Boulanger knows American absurdism. His precedent-setting House of Several Stories, which garnered the ACTF National Student Playwrighting Award in 2008, presented a refreshing reminder of the genre's ability to stun and strike a deep, resonating cord. Viewers expecting something like a repeat of this stylistic acrobatics show be forewarned: despite typical elements like negligent mothers, incompetent therapists, and general confusion about reality, this show is only absurdist-ish. It's straight-up zany. This show simply won't allow you to take it seriously. Don't bother trying. more ›

A dozen superheroes sit at a bank of telephones in their submarine headquarters. Sounds like the beginning of a really strange joke, right? That's the premise of Mickle Maher's Spirits to Enforce, Capital T Theatre's New Directions production for this year's installment of FronteraFest. It gets weirder, though: the heroes (in street casual dress) are dialing for dollars for their upcoming production of The Tempest. Yeah, that Tempest. more ›

Five strangers have come to town, each with his or her own purpose, each removing belongings from a backpack, a suitcase. They explore, interact, form alliances, become rivals. Their behavior, their manner of speaking, even their very words may seem familiar to the audience. This is Portmanteau, created by Applied Mechanics, at the Vortex Cafe for FronteraFest 2011. The ensemble hails from Philadelphia, and frankly, the 1,600 mile trip was worth it. This “invasion play” strikes a rare balance in unconventional, interactive-ish theater: by using a relatively small space, and sticking to a pretty straightforward narrative built on familiar found texts, this hour-ish piece allows the audience member to get into the action without being forced to get too close (hear that, Ben Brantley?) more ›

There's a question everyone who attends any sort of entertainment event has to determine their own answer to at some point: "When, if ever, do I walk out of a play/movie/band/recital/whatever that I'm not enjoying?" more ›

Callie and Jonas are two fairly typical teenagers (maybe they’re older than that, but they looked very very young in their underpants). They seem unmotivated by much except one-upping each other, they are fairly cruel, and they are capable of dying for short periods of time, then coming back to life. The two main characters in the new Frontera Fest production of Sometimes Callie and Jonas Die present an impressively surreal comment on actual adolescence’s bent to get any kind of attention, even negative attention. more ›

Hyde Park Theater's prestigious Frontera Fest got kicked off last week! That means this past Saturday was the first Best of Week showcase for the festival’s Short Fringe where every night is a grab bag of monologues, poetry, standup and improv comics and a healthy dose of miscellaneous. more ›

Seen a lot of theater, seen a lot of solo performance. Seen a few shows about sex or that deal primarily with sex. Suddenly it’s surprising that there hasn’t been a show that opened with the following line before last night: “We don’t have to have a play right now. We could have an orgy.” more ›

The FronteraFest Long Fringe finally kicks off tonight, and we couldn't be more excited. This looks to be one of the festival's strongest lineups in years, with ascending Austin companies like City On A Hill, Capital T Theater, and Tongue and Groove all participating, as well as a number of newcomers, out-of-towners, and theatermakers just one great show away from finding themselves one of 2011's most talked-about companies. With all of that happening over the next two weeks, Austinist polled our theater writers to see what they were most excited about. Keep reading to see what everyone's most psyched for. more ›

As 2010 begins its second half (already! Can you believe it?), there've been a number of spectacular performances, productions, and scripts to grace the Austin stage this year. And, as we start to look ahead to what the next six months have in store, we first want to take one last look back. Austinist polled its theater and comedy writers and asked each of them to offer two moments that stood out in the first half of 2010. more ›

There's a running joke among some members of the Austin theater community that Austinist hates fun, given reviews that haven't always shined favorably on shows that aim for the lowbrow audience. We've dismissed these criticisms with a dreary no one understands us, and gone on to busy ourselves with collecting driftwood and pondering the inherent futility of existence. more ›

After a month of nearly nightly performances, the audiences and judges have whittled down the list of short fringe entrants from the original pool of 80+ to bring you the cream: The fifteen 25-minute-or-less shows that make up this week's Best Of Fest schedule, which opens tonight and runs through Saturday. more ›

In Johnny Meyer’s timely new play about a squad of Army Rangers patrolling Afghanistan’s unstable border regions, nothing and no one seems to stay in place: Not the officers who constantly question their commanders’ (and their own) wisdom and good will; not the invisible enemy snipers who may or may not be striking from across the porous Pakistani border; and certainly not the soldiers’ distant lives on the home-front, which crash into the combat zone in dangerously unpredictable ways. Instead, these anti-hero “American Volunteers” flounder in a sprawling, violent grey area, without clear roles, purpose, or progress. The meticulously engineered play, on the other hand, unfolds with military precision. more ›

At the FronteraFest Short Fringe Best of Week 3, the Ken Webster-and-Christi Moore show saved the best of the week's best till last—luscious, mad Keira McDonald from Seattle took us on a wild, wild trip in Astronaughty, her satirical/comical/tragical/musical/burlesque take-off (in more ways than one) "about a female astronaut who drives 900 miles wearing diapers to mace her love rival in the face with pepper spray. She gets arrested." more ›

Ellen Bartel founded Spank Dance Company ten years ago and for the past seven, she and her dancers have presented Dance Carousel as part of FronteraFest. Billed as a “dance sampler,” this year’s show features forty one-minute dances, created by ten choreographers, and performed by soloists, duets, and groups accompanied by everything from commercial pop recordings to original scores. In short—and we mean that literally—Dance Carousel is spectacular. more ›

Reworkings of classic text from an avenging feminist playwright's view have become a popular sub-genre and, as with any socio-political artform, must be continuously guarded against gallivanting headlong into the snaggled, flapping maw of Becoming Cliche and Disenfranchising. Add to that the apex stakes for anyone attempting to make a sympathetic character of one of drama's most notorious viragoes, and you've got a task on your hands. The "cruel victim of a cruel world" angle can still work in a feminist structure, but when handled with such fumbling hands it alienates rather than endorses empathy. more ›

Raymond King Shurtz steps out onto a simple set, enveloped in darkness at the start of Bohemian Cowboy, his tribute to his missing-and-presumed-dead father, Raymond Dean Shurtz. When the elder (and elderly) Shurtz wandered into a Nevada desert in late 2005, it was not, as the younger Shurtz reveals, the first time he ever disappeared. Hardly. In fake, the playwright/performer’s father made a habit of vanishing, particularly at life’s most important moments. His mother, on the other hand, was always there, always striving to rescue anyone she deemed worthy of saving. In his words, Shurtz’s father was a “nostalgist,” his mother a “salvationist.” She was a poet but he—that vanishing father—he was poetic. more ›

Dying City, with its focus on treating its characters as an outlet for the playwright's views about both the war and pop-culture minutiae, doesn't come anywhere close to telling a satisfying story. But actor Liz Fischer is outstanding, and director Derek Kolluri shows encouraging signs that he's going to be a director to watch. more ›

Phillip Kreyche’s Love Me tackles some big questions: Is artistic creation an inspired act or a masturbatory self-indulgence? Are artists visionaries or control freaks? For that matter, do people fall in love with other (real) people or with their own psychological projections? more ›

Week four of FronteraFest's Short Fringe at Hyde Park Theatre continues this week, showcasing more of Austin's best performance. Read on for show descriptions or click for tix! more ›

It's been a great week to take in some fringe at Hyde Park Theatre. We've always enjoyed Maggie Gallant's work, and her latest piece, Our Angle In Heaven, is outstanding. We plan to check out the full version of the show in the Long Fringe: this Sunday at 4pm at the Salvage Vanguard Theater. We'll also catch the final Long Fringe performance of Daniel Huntley Solon's Sex, With Benefits on Saturday at noon, at the Blue Theater, because the portion we saw last night was so compelling, we have to see the whole story. more ›

Tonight kicks off the first night of the Short Fringe at Hyde Park Theatre during FronteraFest 2009, a performance festival celebrating the spectrum of performing arts, from dance to music to theatre. You name it, it's probably been done in the 16 year history of FronteraFest. This year, FronteraFest also features Long Fringe performances showcasing longer works at the Blue Theater and Salvage Vanguard Theatre as well as a day of performance in unexpected locations, aptly named Mi Casa Es Su Teatro. more ›

Frontera Fest is such a playing-field-leveled egalitarian opportunity for creative types from all walks and skill levels to have a night in the spotlight. Totally worth the $12 -14 price of admission but don’t wait to figure this out later. The wait for unclaimed tickets on sold out nights starts an hour before showtime and baby it’s cold outside. more ›

Gay people and good theatre go hand-in-hand, see: ancient Greece and Tennessee Williams. Conversely, good gay-themed theatre can be hard to come by. How many tired ensemble pieces populated with predictable muscle marys, self-important disco queens, wilting PLWA s, stoic bears and bubbly twink ingenues (each grappling with their place in the world) can one art form support? more ›

ArtSpark 2008 applications are available through 3/31, and this year HBMG is awarding $15,000 in prizes to two winning creative teams. For the uninitiated, ArtSpark throws a "spark"—a piece of visual art or music—to a group of creative teams and tasks them with creating a new play or video game. If you're active in almost any creative field, check it out. more ›

Zach Scott is getting national attention for its run of Porgy and Bess at the newly remodeled Austin Music Hall. The show runs two weekends only, and wraps up this Sunday. // Jaston Williams had great success with his autobiographical, one-man show, I'm Not Lying—and now he's back with more. This weekend only, Cowboy Noises further explores Williams' fascinating life with humor and, we expect, unflinching honesty. // We're mighty fond of local playwright Max Langert, and his current play, You're Happier Than You Think: Recalibrating Your Emotional Scale, at Frontera Short Fringe sounds like a charmer. Saturday @6:15pm, and Sunday @noon. more ›