friday november 28 Phillip Walker: This weekend, Teatro Dallas was all prepared to present you a theatrical troupe from Venezuela performing a political satire in which the two lead characters were prostitutes. We’d be lying if we said we weren’t a little disappointed to hear that the theatrical company never…
When people refer to playwright Alan Ayckbourn as “the British Neil Simon,” the comparison is usually intended to be a compliment. Both men are god-awful rich (with Simon probably in the lead, but only because of the countless American movie versions of his plays); both, at their best, have stitched…
thursday november 20 20th Annual Chi Omega Christmas Market: You say your blood isn’t quite blue enough to click champagne glasses with the wealthy and powerful of Dallas, but your idea of self-employment doesn’t extend to holding a sign at the corner of a Stemmons exit ramp? The 20th Annual…
There are two plays that alternate in New Theatre Company’s crisp, occasionally volatile production of Donald Margulies’ Sight Unseen. One is the portrait of an aborted relationship, the other a savage, expressionistic landscape of the terrain between art and identity, commercial success and exploitation. You have to wonder if Margulies…
thursday november 13 The Love Clinic: Is satisfying long-term monogamy possible between a man and a woman? Is it even desirable? The Love Clinic, a monthly African-American forum hosted by Jubilee United Methodist Church, cries “Yes!” to both. They temporarily move their clinic to Stephanie’s Collection of African-American Art, but…
“How they gonna keep him down on the farm once he’s seen Paree?” was roughly the question in some friend’s minds when I told them I was going to cram as much theatergoing as I could afford into my eight-day Manhattan vacation. After I arrived–during various conversations in which I…
“That’s not how you do it!” insists Chris Ware, who at a lanky, falsetto-voiced 16 could pass for 11. He’s criticizing friend and classmate Robert Headrick’s impersonation of an effeminate gay man. Sixteen-year-old Headrick is heterosexual, after all, so some important details are lost in translation. We’re waiting for world…
Watching Dallas Theater Center’s gutsy (and I mean that literally, but more later) production of Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, I couldn’t help but wonder why American playwrights haven’t plundered the 19th-century American frontier for the kind of blood-red gems Ondaatje has uncovered. As directed with…
thursday october 30 Maafa: The Assault on African Civilization and the African Response to Slavery: It’s hard not to get emotional about history, but too much emotion, whether it comes from the political right or left, tends to obscure important lessons. The 13th Annual African Awakening Conference will, according to…
If, while in the grocery checkout or ATM line, you find yourself standing next to a young man or woman with a shockingly inappropriate platinum dye job, there are two possible explanations–either the person shares Dennis Rodman’s hairdresser, or he or she is a cast member of Kitchen Dog Theater’s…
thursday october 23 The Collected Works of Billy The Kid: Reading the supple prose of Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning The English Patient and watching the beautifully photographed but rather vapid film version was like–well, the difference between a good read and a dorky movie. Michael Ondaatje again jumps between media,…
After earning worldwide accolades for her superb 1993 adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s classic The Secret Garden, Polish-born writer-director Agnieszka Holland is well aware that her equally intense new film version of Henry James’ novella Washington Square may pigeonhole her as a kind of reference librarian of world cinema…
Some wag once said that if you want to keep your appetite for sausage and politics, you should never watch either one being made. To that warning I add the process of making art. Since I consider writing, music, and the visual arts to be infinitely superior experiences to a…
thursday october 16 Master Magician Kozak: If television and movies drove a stake into the heart of the vaudeville circuit, then the fractured demographics of modern audiences is the ring of garlic around the corpse’s throat to keep it from ever rising again. Nowadays it’s almost impossible to conceive of…
The highest recommendation I can give Theatre Three’s Texas premiere of British playwright David Hare’s theological drama Racing Demon is that I emerged punch-drunk from the production. The jabs weren’t aimed at the audience, but if you have more than a passing interest in the internal politics of the contemporary…
thursday october 9 A Fine and Pleasant Misery: To find another cast of American characters as defiantly regional as Patrick McManus’ Blight, Idaho, residents, you would have to travel to Joe Sears’ and Jaston Williams’ Greater Tuna. McManus’ New York Times-best-selling short story collections chart the cranky, loony adventures of…
There were a couple of reasons why I entered Teatro Dallas’ 1997 Day of the Dead show, Lamia, with high expectations. First, knowing that Teatro’s autumn celebrations of the Latin American holiday El Dia De Los Muertos–a more historically rooted version of the North American Halloween–manage to scare up more…
thursday october 2 Dinosaur Domain: One good thing about having plunked down $6.50 to see The Lost World–among the silliest Steven Spielberg movies ever–is that it sent us back to a video of Jurassic Park to appreciate the first movie’s thrills all the more. Hoping to capitalize on the mega-success…
In a recent interview with The Dallas Morning News, Todd Waite, one of the two actors who play eight different characters in Alan Ayckbourn’s bleak two-part comedy Intimate Exchanges, was quoted as saying: “It’s impossible to act the same in a different wig.” Waite has appeal and confidence, as does…
thursday september 18 Ocho Pintores Mexicanos: The swank Ivanffy & Uhler Gallery usually specializes in 20th-century European visual art, but their fall 1997 season opens with a show of prominent contemporary Mexican artists. Ocho Pintores Mexicanos, or “Eight Mexican Painters” to us gringos, features more than 70 works in silk…
Canadian singer-songwriter-instrumentalist Jane Siberry is forced to bump our interview back by a half hour because her plane is delayed. She’s arrived late in her Nashville hotel room when I call, and has another telephone interview scheduled. Might we talk 30 minutes later to give the other journalist a chance?…
Not knowing a lick of French beyond a few pretentious little Continental phrases such as joie de vivre, I have no idea if Moliere’s original script of his sex farce Amphitryon is rote and lethargic, or if celebrated poet Richard Wilbur’s translation is the problem. Having read (though never seen…
