Laurie Anderson really doesn’t like to make broad statements. But her semi-musical, quasi-theatrical, demi-technological performance art not only involves so many grand forms, it also deals with issues so big–technology, communication, politics, human frailty–that you frequently forget that these are the broad issues in your life as well. Onstage, the…
Among the films screening at this year’s USA Film Festival: Animal House, Xanadu, Can’t Stop the Music, Cruising, Bonnie and Clyde, Little Big Man, A Hard Day’s Night, The Shining, Night Moves, and the direct-to-video Savior, centerpiece of the Dennis Quaid, ah, tribute. Sounds like TNT’s Saturday-night schedule to us–unless…
Digital editing techniques in the recording studio have resulted in songs being not so much captured as assembled nowadays; choruses and verses are often pieced together, line by line, from many different sessions. What’s lost in the process is any sense of urgency and momentum and suspense, everything that a…
David Cronenberg has a thing for body openings. His movies are, literally, full of holes. There’s the botched surgery wound on Marilyn Chambers that bites and infects unsuspecting sexual partners in Rabid; the vaginal VCR in James Woods’ chest where he plugs into tapes to experience ever more exotic porn…
To oversimplify matters, you could say that the pair of one-acts that make up Our Endeavors’ latest evening, Loved It/Hated It: Two Distinct Plays, are separated as sharply as the mind-heart dichotomy: The first act makes you think, the second act makes you feel. But we know from real life–and…
Really, we don’t want to give Cameron Cobb a big head–being 23 and talented can be a recipe for obnoxiousness–but the recent world premiere of his Christ resurrection redux Didymus packs a quiet, even occasionally comedic wallop. Director Kimberlyn Crowe launched her theater company, Ground Zero, out of sheer passion…
Now that I’ve enjoyed a sad, funny, subtle evening of family memories and unseen fates in WaterTower Theatre’s sterling production of Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain, I must express my gratitude by harassing producing director Gayle D. Pearson with the following plea. (Right about now, the sounds of collective…
Internationally feted actor-writer Fred Curchack loves talking about the gap between the “groundlings” and the “sophisticates” when discussing one of his favorite writers, William Shakespeare. Specifically, he loves how hyper-learned critics like Harold Bloom get all red-faced wading into the mosh pit to snatch back Willie’s language from indecent interpretations…
Perhaps the biggest deficiency of Dallas theater is the tendency to cast performers against type. The pool of committed actors in this town is small, and chances are if you think so-and-so would be just perfect for this role, he or she is already working in someone else’s production. Sometimes…
After nearly two decades of explicit and sometimes buck-naked solo appearances at theater spaces around the world, gay performance artist Tim Miller still harbors a shocking revelation. This one should really unnerve the fundamentalist Christian demagogues who had declared him armed and dangerous in the litigious standoff over NEA-funded “indecent”…
More than a couple of times in David Mamet’s rage-and remorse-filled trilogy of scenes, The Old Neighborhood, staged by New Theatre Company, one character is stuck trying to express himself and finally just says: “Do ya know?” The other character replies: “Yeah, I know.” It’s vintage Mamet–a concession that more…
“Free My Pee-wee!” That clarion call from outraged fans rose up in the form of buttons, T-shirts, and bumper stickers just a few days after July 26, 1991, when Paul Reubens, a.k.a. Pee-wee Herman, was arrested for masturbating in a Florida adult theater while watching the film Nancy Nurse. It…
Bart Weiss, artistic director of the Dallas Video Festival, loves every single entry in his international video showcase’s 12th year, again hosted by the Dallas Theater Center in its Kalita Humphreys Theater. He has watched each of them from beginning to end, and a helluva lot more that didn’t make…
What follows are brief reviews of some highlights from the Dallas Video Festival, arranged chronologically. The festival runs from Thursday, March 25, through Sunday, March 28, in four different areas–the Electronic Theater, Video Cabaret, Video Lounge, and Video Box–at the Kalita Humphreys Theater, 3636 Turtle Creek Boulevard. Installations of video…
Opening night, with its mix of season subscribers, journalists, theater folk, and assorted other naysayers and wellwishers who were able to scam comp seats, always hums with energy. And the opening-night audience of Dallas Theater Center’s Alice: Tales of a Curious Girl that watched as the lights dawned on Riccardo…
Maybe it’s because the show is set in the ultra-glamorous, intrigue-ridden world of journalism. Or maybe because there’s a glaringly unnecessary subplot about clairvoyance and ghost sightings. Or perhaps my cold critical heart has begun to thaw and leak watery pink juice. For whatever reason, the latest Pegasus Theatre comedy…
Samuel Beckett has become more useful as an allusion, an adjective to qualify the heirs and pretenders of his perverse comic legacy. Rarely is the novelist-playwright spoken of as a living voice. Perhaps being widely regarded as one of the most influential theatrical sensibilities of the 20th century comes with…
Anyone who caught Mexican director Eduardo Ruiz Savinon’s previous collaborations with Teatro Dallas knows that this man loves to walk on the dark side, stopping here and there to frolic in the downright macabre: Profane Games and The Tree were marvelously atmospheric Teatro successes that dealt, respectively, with children who…
There’s one moment in Global Village, the Actors’ Stock Company world premiere by playwright-collaborator Tom Grady, that arrives just before intermission and knocks the breath right out of you. I won’t be so thoughtless as to reveal it here. Suffice to say it’s the culmination of a slow tragicomic buildup…
In a tiny recording studio on the eastern edge of Deep Ellum, a pair of young Texas filmmakers are combining the movie resources of two very different cities, Austin and Dallas. Gathered in the control room of The Listening Chair, Austin filmmakers Lance Larsen and Jas Shelton are screening their…
There is one standard I hold for so-called “experimental” forms, be it in the novel or the poem or the play: Does it ripple? A delightful, now-deceased college English professor lectured at length on the phenomenon of “rippling,” and it has become an ideal bullshit detector for works whose creators…
“Racism is a device that, of itself, means nothing,” says a character from Lorraine Hansberry’s unfinished African liberation drama Les Blancs. “It is simply a means, an invention to justify the rule of some men over others.” The character, however, goes on to confuse his listener by declaring that racism…
