Photo: Christopher Taylor, Stage Directions Blog
COYOTE wraps up its run at Nouveau 47 this weekend to some great reviews in Dallas. Here are three of the more favorable reviews, with some enticing pull quotes:
Kautzman… hurls metaphor, alliteration and theatrical convention into a universe inhabited by the likes of Sam Shepard, John Milton and James Joyce with defiant abandon… My vote for the best written play currently on stage in this region, bar none.
– Alexandra Bonifield, CriticalRant.com
…a danderoo of a play, with the dark comedy of a Coen brothers film and just enough unexpected violence to make you flinch and giggle… a terrific evening of theater, full of big laughs (both at and with the characters) and deliciously tense turnarounds.
– Elaine Liner, Dallas Observer
Though this is the first full production of Kautzman’s play, it won’t be the last. There’s a compelling combination of the sort of male soul-searching found in Sam Shepard’s works and the gritty noir tension of early Coen Brother’s films like Blood Simple.
– David Novinski, Theatre Jones
This play has been touched my numerous hands through the process of development and production, so it’s especially rewarding to see it come together so satisfyingly, as it really brings back the course of its development from when I first drafted it in 2010 back in Minneapolis. Director Donny Covington and his team stuck a goddamned truck in the Magnolia Lounge, and if you know that space, then you know it wasn’t easy. There are no bay doors. They literally drove the thing through the lobby, and it looks fantastic. The actors are amazing and the design, by my colleagues at UT Bill Anderson and Stephanie Busing, is inspired. But don’t take my word for it. The reviews linked to above do a pretty good job laying it out.
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I am writing this from Des Moines, Iowa, where I’m being hosted by the good people at Repertory Theatre of Iowa as they stage two readings of COYOTE this weekend: one tonight and another tomorrow. I’m leading a playwriting workshop tomorrow, where we will discuss such topics as urgency in dramatic writing and what makes a good monologue. If I can figure out the absolute and indisputable key to one or both of these in the next twelve hours, I’ll write another post and explain it all. More likely I won’t be posting here for another week or so…