International film critics who have raved about veteran French farceur Francis Veber’s The Dinner Game (Le Diner De Cons), only to qualify the goings-on in this serviceable but meringuey little chuckler as “cruel” and “punishing,” clearly haven’t taken in a comedy by American filmmaker Neil LaBute. In much the same…
This week, “Stage” is running a section up the flagpole titled “You’re a Fool if You Missed…” to discover whether readers will salute insults, coercion, and contempt from the theater critic. Rather than exhorting folks to see a great play during the run, we decided to try it backward: browbeating…
And now on to a quieter, sturdier, more focused, if a bit overlong account of one woman’s grappling with the forces of church, literary reputation, professional sexism, and a love for someone not her husband. And it was written by a man, no less. I can’t claim that as any…
Playwright Maria Irene Fornes said in an interview that during a post-production talkback she attended at the American Place Theatre for her in-and-out-of-the-chamber-room drama Fefu and Her Friends, she discovered that the men didn’t “get” the play. She wondered whether it had to do with the fact that women are…
Although it’s not talked about much, one of the reasons that WaterTower Theatre has been using a pricey, multi-functional space essentially to stage community-theater fare (albeit starring professional, often Equity actors) is in reaction to the days when it was Addison Centre Theatre and the ambitious Kelly Cotten poured his…
It’s been little remarked-upon in the big national magazines that regularly profile him as a movie star, but as Steve Martin’s movie presence has turned limper and limper, his screenplays (especially L.A. Story) and essays for The New Yorker have grown positively tumescent. These works are not quite like the…
A recent piece in The New York Times profiled a bit of missionary work by an American playwright: Wendy Wasserstein took a half-dozen kids from the Bronx to different plays in the city, then went for pizza afterward and asked them what they thought. The piece ostensibly had to do…
The list of tyrants and geniuses, critics and playwrights, politicians and serial killers who receive praise and condemnation in Jonathan Reynolds’ scorching comedy about the scrambled cultural circuits connecting American blacks and whites is too long to mention in this column. Suffice to say Stonewall Jackson’s House, given its second…
Here’s a hint to every artistic director in town on how to get me off your back about creating entertaining and challenging theater: Just do what I say. Pick the plays I want and cast the Dallas actors I like. There’s no need to get ugly about it…but if I…
I don’t know about you, but if I hear either of the phrases “politically correct” or “politically incorrect” one more time, I’m gonna commit a hate crime. It’s now quite fashionable to be rude to any and every minority group in America, save one — African-Americans. This is the void…
In the Undermain Theatre’s world premiere of Shiner, one character asks auto-mechanic and serial killer Agate (Dalton James) why he smiles so much. It’s not really a smile, replies the sly, reptilian Agate: “It’s just bad teeth.” That icy little moment perfectly encapsulates the duality in almost every scene of…
Walk into the Cathedral of Hope during Sunday services, and the first thing you will likely notice is the number of couples holding hands as they worship together — women locking fingers with women, men with other men. They do so rising and sitting, singing, and approaching the altar to…
OK, here’s a sample of the Dallas cast list for Undermain Theatre’s world premiere (have I written that phrase often enough recently?) of Erik Ehn and Octavio Solis’ stormy Texas tragicomedy Shiner. Let’s see, there’s Jeremy Schwartz, Dalton James, Rhonda Boutte, Christina Vela, and Max Hartman, who also has written…
If you have spent any time at all in rural Mississippi, you’ll know that what the uninitiated may roll their eyes at as exaggeration in plays and films is often simply a wild truth trapped out of context. And if you’ve ever been in certain small-town Mississippi churches on a…
Over the last few months, it seems as though every major small theater company in Dallas–and a couple of debuting ones–has offered us a world-premiere show. The results have been mixed, but the ambitions behind them have been unassailable. It’s an exciting time to be a theater critic in this…
You couldn’t help but giggle, sitting behind wizened little Stanley Marcus at the world premiere of Blind Lemon: Prince of Country Blues as actors sang or spoke lines like “I can’t even make enough money to buy me a loaf of bread.” You had to wonder whether Marcus, who was…
I don’t know about you, but if any Old Testament story is primed to make me an atheist, it’s the saga of Abraham, the man who’s happy to stab and incinerate his son because God asked him to as a test of faith. You can talk about historical context and…
Whether it’s Tennessee Williams’ characters clinging to booze-soaked illusions or Flannery O’Connor’s thousand clowns spinning their wheels under God’s pitiless eye, American literature is rife with romanticized depictions of Southern eccentricity that spirals in and out of pathology. Yet native Southerners have always tended to roll their eyes at stories…
A USA Film Festival member wrote a letter accusing us of acting like spurned lovers because we took offense at the USAFF’s recent snub of this very newspaper. Well, we’d like to clarify: We’re really more like spurned, masochistic lovers. Slap us, and we’ll give you more publicity–providing you put…
The other night at Pegasus Theatre, I waited for a kiss that I hoped would move the earth beneath my feet, even though I knew I wasn’t going to be the recipient. When that kiss finally did come, it was, as expected, a curious sight–many gay men would never admit…
What is it about gay men and straight women? Or, to phrase it more explicitly: Why are so many gay men drawn to powerful, emotional women? In theory, we shouldn’t give a damn about the female personality: most men (hetero and homo) are hounds, eager to bury our bones in…
OK, So We’ll Never do this again. It seemed like a swell idea at first: Do away with the so-called “local music-industry insiders” (i.e., guys who work for Sam Paulos) who have traditionally selected the Dallas Observer Music Awards nominees, and simply let the voters fill in the blanks. That’s…
