The essays and book-length ruminations of Susan Sontag, the American zeitgeist’s preeminent fag hag, are accessible, friendly, almost conversational in their explorations of camp aesthetic and AIDS mythology. But her mammoth first novel, The Volcano Lover, from which I had the fortitude only to snatch scattered sections, felt like–horrors!–a veteran…
Hers is a transformation as amazing as the shape-shifting you’ll find in the pulpiest of science fiction. To witness it is to be astonished at the writer emerging from the cocoon; it’s like a creature springing fully formed out of a pod until it walks, talks, and looks like the…
There have been numerous American plays that have grappled with what might be called “the morning after” dilemma–as in, “OK, what do I do the morning after I’ve spent the night with someone I just met?” Think David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago or Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny at…
Comic actor Coy Covington trowels on the base and mascara far too infrequently for Dallas audiences; underneath all that getup and goo, he has a bloodhound’s sense for the moment to play comedy up or down. While he stalks the daytime in man drag, he ought to consider teaching lessons…
Watching Kitchen Dog Theater’s ballsy new interpretation of Tennessee Williams’ dramatic warhorse The Glass Menagerie makes you feel as though you’re doing a high-wire act right alongside the actors. Director Tina Parker has taken Williams’ kitchen-sink staple from its claustrophobic apartment in St. Louis into the Big Top. At first,…
The 11th Street Theatre Project’s revival of Arthur Miller’s The Creation of the World and Other Business is timed well, as another of our premier stage moralist’s little-produced efforts, A View From the Bridge, has been generating a firestorm of critical and audience praise for its current New York production…
Longtime patrons already know that the Undermain Theatre can mix a mean theatrical drink–comedy and drama shaken together into one potent cocktail, served up on some treacherous rocks. Rarely has the house recipe been more potent when you gulp it–and rarely have the effects felt more disappointing, when the buzz…
Discussing gang presence in Deep Ellum with Dallas police or a merchant from that area is a dance of verbal negotiation and qualification. They will use the “g” word only if pushed. They will only reluctantly admit that the Deep Ellum Association has paid to redirect traffic on Friday and…
Josh Alan Nominated for: Blues, Folk/Acoustic Who knew what to make of Alan’s 1997 Blacks ‘n’ Jews? The title track was a work of absolute genius and chutzpah, the history of black-Jewish relations rolled up into one glib, sharp statement: “Marchin’ two-by-two down in Mississippi/One was a Panther when the…
Playwright, essayist, and screenwriter Wendy Wasserstein recently admitted in an Advocate interview that she’s fallen in love with more than one gay man during her lifetime. Of course, this was to promote her deliriously witty screenplay for The Object of My Affection, the story of a straight woman who falls…
Two weeks ago in this space, while reviewing Our Endeavors’ disappointing production of Albert Camus’ Caligula, or The Meaning of Death, I suggested that a rape that happens offstage in that show should be brought onstage to balance some of the windy philosophical stretches with a little raw emotion. Well,…
I learned an important lesson while watching Having Our Say, Emily Mann’s theatrical adaptation of the best-selling memoir from a pair of hundred-year-old black sisters in New York: African-Americans have indeed arrived in the mainstream. This huge Broadway hit celebrates the fact that they can be just as shortsighted and…
The caprice of totalitarianism burdened the thoughts of a 32-year-old Albert Camus when, in 1945, he staged a theatrical meditation called Caligula, or The Meaning of Death. He hid out while the Nazis plundered France, writing inflammatory articles for the Resistance and nurturing his philosophy of the absurd that would…
What follows are brief reviews of some highlights from the USA Film Festival, arranged chronologically. The festival runs Thursday, April 16, through Thursday, April 23. All events take place at the AMC Glen Lakes, 9450 N. Central Expressway, except for the Master Screen Artist Tribute to Christopher Walken, which will…
Playwright and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley loves words. Anyone with a similar depth of feeling for the currency of human communication cannot blame him; it’s easy to become enthralled with the sounds, even the look on the printed page, of words, and forget that they are symbols of meaning, not…
Since January, someone with inside knowledge of the USA Film Festival has regularly trickled anonymous letters, legal correspondence, and inter-office memos to both the Dallas Observer and The Dallas Morning News that suggest some pretty nasty conflicts tearing at the soul of the organization. But nobody in Dallas arts journalism…
The explosion of gay visibility in contemporary cinema might make some believe that you can’t get a script produced in America unless it has at least one world-weary, big-hearted gay neighbor or a wisecracking lesbian best friend/daughter/sister, both of whom put the central heterosexual romance into perspective by the exotic…
Thursday April 2 If you just know Ship of Fools and “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” from college classes, you don’t know the late Texas writer Katherine Anne Porter. Her one novel, Ship of Fools, felt, to some critics, like Peyton Place in a life jacket (plus one dwarf). Even…
Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus thought life was absurd, but all the more meaningful for it. His contemporaries Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir thought him a cut-rate intellectual because he had a sentimental side. As early as 25, Camus was aware of the conflict between his brain and his…
When you think about how some of the smartest, most surprising films about women have been made by men–and how, when a woman filmmaker manages to score a decent budget for her project, she does the same for stories about men–you start to realize: Directors should dare to speak for…
Barney the Dinosaur’s broad purple hide has sustained quite a few scars since Barney and Friends debuted on PBS in spring 1992. Bob Dole denounced him on the floor of the Senate as part of a public television scam. Rogue computer programmers made him the target of automatic weapons fire…
Driving to Mesquite to see a provocative, world-premiere play by a talented Texas playwright? Jeez, what’s next–performance art by a radical African-American collective in Garland? Actually, you shouldn’t be surprised that a stately construction like the Mesquite Arts Center, which sticks out like a good tooth among the day-care centers…
