friday september 12 2nd Annual Celebrity Garage Sale: America loves famous people, to the point that even the stuff celebrities throw out has a nimbus of glamorous mystery. Operating on the theory that a Dallas Cowboy’s roll of gauze is innately more valuable than yours or mine, Aardvark Studios in…
thursday september 4 Dancing at Lughnasa: Previously produced in Dallas by the Dallas Theater Center, Brian Friel’s ecstatically lauded family dramedy, Dancing at Lughnasa, gets another production by Fort Worth’s stellar Stage West ensemble. This’ll probably be your last chance to see Friel’s story of five unmarried sisters barely surviving…
Film critics rank just ahead of television meteorologists as the worst roadside psychics in the media: We make all kinds of predictions about a movie’s box office impact and Oscar-friendliness, and even anticipate whether said flick will be a beloved classic 25 years from now. Just like when weighing the…
Having seen two performances of My Head Was a Sledgehammer, the debut by Our Endeavors Productions of Richard Foreman’s scattered stream-of-consciousness script, I’m sure of only two things: This show is fast-paced and pleasurable, and it means absolutely nothing. You might disagree on either or both counts. That’s the beauty…
Eleven-year-old Chris Ballew is trying to talk about Jesus. Blood and laughter keep getting in the way. Chris is giggling in the men’s restroom at God’s Place International alongside his 11-year-old cousin and fellow Dallasite David Riddle because he’s bleeding. Big bubbles of dark red blow out of one nostril,…
thursday august 28 Amphitryon (Ye Gods!): Theatre Three is pleased to be able to present a premiere of a new translation by Richard Wilbur, a man who earned a Pulitzer for his poetry and the affection of English-speaking theatergoers worldwide for his translations of Moliere’s devastatingly witty 17th century comedies…
It’s tempting (and just a little bit cheap) to read all kinds of incestuous undertones in Paula Vogel’s poignant, occasionally acidic, three-actor comedy, The Baltimore Waltz, not the least because Vogel’s newest Off-Broadway hit, How I Learned to Drive, has offended some in the New York theater community. That emotionally…
thursday august 21 My Head Was a Sledgehammer: Scanning the two-page, small-type press release that Our Endeavors Productions prepared for its Southwest premiere of playwright Richard Foreman’s My Head Was a Sledgehammer induces a little chill in even the hardiest of experimental theatergoers. Foreman, a six-time Obie winner and acknowledged…
In critical circles, Harold Pinter has the reputation of being “an actor’s playwright,” mostly because he acted for a number of years in 1950s London under the pseudonym David Baron. His scripts go so far as to instruct the actors where and how long they should pause between dialogue. A…
thursday august 14 Landscape: Ever participated in those silly “Be Handicapped For a Day” office events where you ride around in a wheelchair or wear a blindfold to help you sympathize? There’s something about being able to remove your handicap at the end of the day that makes it…well, not…
Ask 34-year-old playwright Neil LaBute how he came to see his controversial debut feature In the Company of Men hit the big screen, and he’ll tell you he doesn’t quite know. “I became a filmmaker by accident, by proxy,” LaBute says during the Dallas stop on a 15-city international tour…
thursday august 7 New Talent Exhibition: Texas may rank near the bottom in state and city funding for the arts in America, but what little support does manage to trickle through often helps one of the neediest of cultural populations–new artists who have a devil of a time breaking into…
All you heterosexual men looking for a film to see with your girlfriend, consider this a warning–Neil Labute’s In the Company of Men is not a date movie. Nor is this slow-burn indie drama a “black comedy,” as some critics have dubbed it. The film could be described as a…
Ion was written some 500 years before the birth of Christ by a man who, infrequently honored with literary awards during his lifetime, wrote and lived alone in a cave. (Like all juicy tidbits about classical writers, this last item may be apocryphal, originally invented in the interest of characterizing…
thursday july 31 Ion: As the final production in its Adventure Series, Fort Worth’s Stage West has chosen a play written around 420 B.C. How adventurous, you might wonder, is a celebrated work by Euripides, the Greek master responsible for The Bacchae, Medea, and other classical lit staples? Well, that…
There’s a famous maxim, ofttimes attributed to Mel Brooks, that tragedy is when I slip on a banana peel; comedy is when you slip on it. We can polish this little gem about human nature to a harder, more specifically theatrical gleam by adding: “But when we both slip on…
thursday july 24 Oh, Say Can You See…: The Dallas Poets Community couldn’t let July pass without staging its own skewed commentary on Independence month and the whole rocky love affair an individual has with his or her country. While there will doubtlessly be no burning flags displayed in “Oh,…
There are two kinds of despair in literature–mature and immature. Immature despair is a cry for attention disguised as a suicide attempt–it’s easily dismissed, even satirized, because the author cannot contain his or her narcissism for long. What might begin eloquently as a lament for the fragile human condition eventually…
thursday july 17 Second Annual Have a Ball: Over 40 artists from North Texas and around the country swoop in to contribute work for a very good cause–the continued health of Dallas’ McKinney Avenue Contemporary, the artspace dedicated to nurturing theater, poetry, film, and visual art from Dallas and around…
Writer-director Finn Taylor is a young filmmaker who’s smart enough to steal from the best, even if his precocious talent doesn’t always use what he’s swiped effectively. Dream With the Fishes is Taylor’s debut feature, a tightly executed, occasionally contrived study of two men trying to outrun death. The movie…
Since there’s no theater district in this town, the intrepid Dallas stagehound must sometimes endure a symphony of city noises–auto traffic, low-flying planes, construction equipment, etc.–to get a fix. But based on my recent experience at Theater Too, the small but surprisingly effective basement space of Theatre Three in the…
When I was a kid, two events were truly special for my sister and me–eating at a steakhouse and staying overnight at a hotel. Often these situations coincided. When our family vacationed, my father might celebrate the occasion with that working-class ’70s emblem of aristocratic indulgence–the steak. And we kids,…
