“All women who’ve wanted to break out of the prison of consciousness…are strange monsters,” declared travel writer and poet May Sarton, “who’ve renounced the treasure of their silence for a curious, devouring pleasure.” She goes on to name Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, and Sappho as examples, so we know she’s…
It has often been written that while film is a director’s medium, theater is the province of the actor. Except for that phenomenon known as “director’s theater”–on the plus side, the current New York productions of Cabaret and Swan Lake and, on the minus side, Franco Zefferilli’s recent animal-costumed, boo-inspiring…
For critics (and for audience members who enjoy thinking too much), there are movie devices and there are movie effects. Movie devices–happy endings, sad endings, emotion-wracked confessions, harrowing confrontations–are those stock contraptions that filmmakers employ with varying degrees of subtlety to induce movie effects–making you laugh, making you cry, creating…
Viewers who find Hurlyburly one of the most weirdly annoying movies they’ve seen–which is likely–will probably locate different “last straws” in the self-indulgent bundle of hay that has been made from David Rabe’s grueling 1984 play. For me, it was watching Eddie (Sean Penn) stretched out beneath a glass coffee…
History has always been among my weaker subjects: I carry around gaps in my knowledge that you could drop a war or a social movement through. But it was nonetheless startling to learn that Article III of the original Constitution was a clause forbidding theater critics. Frank Rich of The…
The biggest disappointment in Dallas theater in 1998 was the conspicuous omission of the 1997 Jimmys by the winners in their artist bios on play programs. Granted, last year was the first year they were presented, so the adjective “august” doesn’t come to mind when describing their status, and granted…
My early college years found me jumping back and forth between attraction and repulsion on the question of white people co-opting black culture-or, at least, black music. On the one hand, reading liver-spotted libidinist Norman Mailer’s inadvertently hilarious early essay “The White Negro” led me to adopt this ode to…
Dallas is Larry O’Dwyer’s stomping ground, and I am the Lilliputian who scurries amid the underbrush, firing projectile adjectives at his all-terrain-vehicle feet. Well, the dream I had after seeing Theatre Three’s manically funny production of The Miser went something like that. Mr. O’Dwyer is a founding company member of…
Virtually every Dallas theater company that’s managed to hang in there more than five years has a holiday show that will, hopefully, finance the less commercial excursions of the rest of the season. December is the month when people are willing to drop cash in symbolic recognition of all the…
It’s an unusually warm afternoon for a Texas Saturday in December, but inside the AMS Studios in Addison, the air feels cold enough to hang beef carcasses in. Nobody feels this more than Rusty the TNT Mailgirl, a strawberry-blond waitress at Humperdink’s in Arlington, who remains here all day and…
Many of us fancy that we could earn a handsome living simply by sitting on a stage and talking about our lives in a clever way. After all, we spellbind friends, lovers, and co-workers for free every day, right? But truly, who among us is qualified for such a deceptively…
Beginning in the mid-’80s, the devastation of AIDS opened the floodgates of theatrical imagination, engulfing audiences across the country. The Neptune King of the genre is, of course, Tony Kushner’s two-part epic Angels in America, and although the old boy still has some fire left in him, he is doddering…
The character Simon Geist (Dan Zukovic) is a black-haired, dead-eyed intellectual who never smiles and never condescends when he talks: He’d never even think of kneeling to address you on your level. The actor Dan Zukovic is a playwright whose screenplay for his debut feature The Last Big Thing doesn’t…
The strained relationship between theater and the Christian church didn’t begin when Terrence McNally held a press conference to announce he was painting a lavender Jesus in Corpus Christi. Way back in seventh-century Europe, church elders declared a culture war against the cross-dressing, bawdy humor, and symbolic wine-pouring that honored…
When The Dallas Morning News printed the Dallas Theater Critics Forum results on November 1, it was frisky foreplay working up to the climax of November 2, when the Dallas Theatre League distributed the 1998 Leon Rabin Awards at the Irving Arts Center. They are, of course, separate but related…
Playwright Paul Rudnick captured the contemporary public’s disdain for William Shakespeare with one utterly accurate declaration from a character in his aptly named comedy I Hate Hamlet: “It’s like algebra on stage!” Just as millions of us sat through that high school mathematical torture learning just enough to pass (or…
The prodigiously talented and now corrosively bitter Woody Allen was once quoted as saying, “I’ve always tried to dissuade people and tell them my films are not all autobiographical.” Allen’s adoring cult has never been convinced of this, of course, because many have never wanted to be. Part of the…
Italian commie provocateur Dario Fo got kicked around but good in a recent New Yorker article concerning the sometimes nasty political entanglements of the Nobel Prize’s Swiss nominating committee for literature. The 72-year-old Fo nabbed the literature award last year, but nobody seems to know why–or at least, nobody in…
Who’da thunk Dallas was ready for a revival of the revue, the late-19th-century live entertainment that might best be called “short attention span theater”? Hell, in a city where stealth police cars are employed to curtail tailgating, speeding, and other restless by-products of road rage, the question should be more…
On a gray Sunday morning at the Eldorado Country Club in McKinney, Rabbi Michael Rovinsky stands in a high-ceilinged back room that’s nearly empty except for a few chairs. He’s a mohel (the Yiddicized pronunciation is “moil”), a rabbi authorized by Judaic certification to perform the bris milah, the Jewish…
Sitting in the recently opened Deep Ellum Center for the Arts with producer-director-writer Scott Osborne while builders and light engineers help him transform the space’s interior is eye-opening for a theater critic. Wow, sets and props and furniture really aren’t created by stage elves who wander into the space at…
If some actors, directors, and designers from Dallas Theater Center and the Dallas theater scene didn’t already want to restrain me atop a stone temple and yank my beating heart out like one of those S.R.O. Aztec sacrifice rituals, they will now: I’m writing a review of a preview performance…
