Directly from the San Antonio Current
Best Theater Event
AtticRep
OK, it’s no secret that the Current has a big hard-on for AtticRep, Trinity University’s resident theater company reborn last spring under the leadership of Producing Artistic Director Roberto Prestigiacomo and Executive Director Timothy Hedgepeth.
San Antonio’s theater community is bedeviled by its audience’s apparently boundless appetite for feel-good endings and catchy tunes. Companies with electrical bills and aging buildings to maintain either do their best to pimp responsibly or become codependent enablers indulging a personal weakness for quasi-historical jukebox musicals.
Our local colleges and universities fill some of the void, dabbling in experimental stage design and controversial playwrights, but AtticRep is unique in that it marries some of academia’s best assets (institutional support for overhead, facilities) with a proactive mission to engage professional actors and audiences in the pursuit of theater that matters. It’s been an intense ride so far, beginning with Harold Pinter’s searing critique of state-sponsored terrorism, One for the Road, followed by Adly Guirgis’s encyclopedically ambitious dark comedy The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, and now, equal-opportunity sadist Neil Labute’s Fat Pig. In case viewers were unwilling or unable to ferret out Pinter’s analogies, each One for the Road performance was followed by a presentation and discussion of curent human-rights horrors such as Abu Ghraib.
OK, there was a little musical tribute to Irving Berlin last fall, written by Hedgepeth and performed at the McNay. But in the context of AtticRep’s inaugural season, it looks like a well-placed reminder that not all human beings are sociopaths.
— Elaine Wolff