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Production history:
Circle X Theater Company, Los Angeles, CA, October, 1998 (Waiver)
Photographs,
Erin Fiedler
Empty Space Theatre Company, Seattle, WA, February, 2000 (Equity)
Blue Light Theater Company, New York, NY, December, 2000 (Reading)
Baic Grammar Productions, Mandy Greenfield, Producer, in association with Rachel
Neuburger, 2002 (Off Off Broadway) Kirk Theatre, 42nd Street
Reviews:
LA Weekly--Tom
Provenzano
Louis Broome's exhilarating script meets its match in
directory Allison Narver's highly imaginative yet starkly efficient staging… A
uniformly superb ensemble makes Broome's quick turns between arid life and
surreal flight look easy.
Seattle Weekly--John
Longenbaugh
Broome's deft writing walks a careful line between cowboy
camp and real-world tragedy…this is a script and a production that draws
considerable power from an unlikely source and, like the waltz which gives the
show its title, is a lyrical dance that celebrates life and love with a sad,
nostalgic air.
The Stranger
(Seattle)--Steve Wiecking
"Who would believe so wild a yarn as mine is spun from
truth?" says a grieving, vengeful Houston (Paul Morgan Stetler) in Louis
Broome's Texarkana Waltz. It's a tribute to both the playwright and the fine
production…that you not only believe Broome's tall tale, you respond to its
zingy, vital, plaintive truths. Everything has worked to turn Broome's broad,
wistful saga into something warm and rewarding. With high comic and tragic
style, the show croons a whiskey-soaked tale of the stories that both conceal us
from and reveal us to each other and ourselves.
The Daily
(Seattle)--Louis Porter
The amazing thing about the Empty Space's new production,
Texarkana Waltz, is that the play…introduces us to characters we care about in
spite of their cynicism, mental breakdowns and murderous impulses.
That the source of the play's material was so close to Broome's life is a reason
it would be more difficult for him to write well about it, not less, and makes
his achievement even more impressive.
Eastside Journal
(Seattle)--Mary Martin
Louis Broome's play, "Texarkana Waltz," belongs on
a best list. But the best what? It is both new and traditional, holy and
irreverent, slick and funky, kindergarten basic and Shakespeare complex. Its
soliloquies with rhyming couplets echo Elizabethan revenge tragedies. Its
characters come out of old Western movies and modern TV soaps.
Frontiers Magazine
(Los Angeles)
In its premiere production, Louis Broome's "Texarkana
Waltz," the latest offering from the critically lauded Circle X Theatre
Company, is--much to it's credit--impossible to categorize. At times you will
not be sure whether to laugh or cry, wallow in despair or howl in hilarity. But
what you won't be is bored. The cumulative result is an invigorating and highly
inventive piece of mind-stretching theatre…
Park La Brea News
(Los Angeles)--Madeleine Shaner
Tragic, doomed, intermittently gloomy, Broome's play is
nevertheless irresistibly funny, irrepressibly loony in several of its
manifestations, brilliantly conceived, and simply but daringly staged by Allison
Narver.
Jet City Maven
(Seattle)
One day 23 years ago, Eddie Wickett killed his pretty young
wife, Emma, while their two children looked on. Today, the son lies speechless
in an Oklahoma mental hospital, deep in dreams of the imaginary Wild West. The
daughter lives in a distant city, hiding her past from the woman she loves. The
story of a family torn apart could be material for a psychological drama, an
Elizabethan revenge tragedy, or even a Country-Western song - which are just a
few of the forms Louis Broome weaves together effortlessly in his exuberant,
lyrical, touching, astonishingly original script for "Texarkana Waltz."
Red Meat Substitutes Productions
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Texarkana Waltz
