You must call it curious that the nontraditional holiday meal of Charles Dickens served by Kitchen Dog Theater is called Act of Passion. They didn’t christen it so, of course. Playwright John Tyson, currently a company member at Houston’s Alley Theatre, chose to plunge through the great Victorian moralist’s surface…

Playwright Nicky Silver insists he wrote The Food Chain, which is enjoying a raucous if sometimes shrill run at Fort Worth’s Circle Theatre, as relief from a more painful play he had to discontinue. Some may think this is the equivalent of choosing, say, electric shock to the tongue over…

I have been neither fan nor foe of hip-hop. Most of my limited experience with the music has been filtered through the scrim of a good 15 years’ worth of near-hysterical mass media scrutiny. I have listened to it as “a cultural phenomenon” or “a social expression” rather than as…

“I don’t rant and rave about the terror of our racist society,” the playwright and screenwriter Lonne Elder III once remarked. “It is never directly stated; it’s just there.” Elder, who died four years ago and is probably more famous for writing the scripts to Sounder and A Woman Called…

The indefatigable Cora Cardona, artistic director of Teatro Dallas, has threatened on occasions when the itinerant troupe cannot find a stage to pitch a tent in a parking lot and perform there. OK, so it’s not a parking lot for the 2000 edition of their annual Dia de los Muertos…

British playwright Shelagh Stephenson worked extensively creating monologues for radio and television broadcasts on the BBC until one of her pieces–the harrowing Find Kinds of Silence, about a sadistic husband and father whose daughters murder him after a lifetime of abuse–earned so much acclaim, folks made the connection that language…

October is probably my favorite month: Reread Ray Bradbury, catch Teatro Dallas’ “Day of the Dead” festival (pushed back, sadly, to November this year), watch The Simpsons Halloween special, and rent the excessively bloody horror films I loved as a kid. I was hoping that Pocket Sandwich Theatre might add…

Maureen Folan (Susan Sargeant), the 40-year-old spinster whose two sisters have abandoned her to care for their frail but wolfishly self-centered, aged mother, Mag (C.J. Critt), recounts a trip she took to England in search of work. The Anglos assailed this uneducated Irish woman with racist vitriol she could barely…

On October 7, the dining room table of Martha Heimberg’s gorgeous home in Lakewood looked more like a conference table of Wall Street investors and economists–people waving lists, pointing and shouting their proposed investments, their appraised disasters, their trend predictions. We were as boisterous as bulls and bears sipping from…

Kitchen Dog has taken arguably the most famous–or at least, the most plundered–tragic love story of the English-speaking theater and turned it into a 120-minute, intermissionless actors’ stunt. As it turns out, this benefits Romeo and Juliet without ennobling or improving it. You cannot best Shakespeare, because he is both…

Here’s some free advice for theatergoers that’s actually worth more than the price: If you want to enjoy an earnest play for children unsabotaged, don’t sit next to a restive 5-year-old who has chosen to speak aloud the thoughts you barely knew you were thinking, so far had they been…

Journalist, poet, playwright, and composer Dolores Prida is as radical in her politics and identity as the more famous stage artist Maria Irene Fornes (the two have collaborated in New York), yet, in my opinion, she goes about striking the establishment with a more conscious and formidable force–a sense of…

Critics and stage artists will ever have a dysfunctional, back-stabbing, roller-coaster relationship. Unlike, say, movie critics, whose opinions can be reassessed throughout the foreseeable future with one trip to the video store, the words of theater pundits celebrate or sting a little more because they are often the only available…

If you think of history as a big bowl of Neapolitan ice cream–and I do, all the time–then it’s funny how journalists and scholars become anal-retentive malt-shop clerks, slicing up the parallel layers and serving them in separate containers. Epochs, movements, controversies, regimes, and ideologies all melted into each other…

It’s a pretty sad state when a playwright has caricatured herself by the time her most successful script gets worldwide attention. Former SMUtant Beth Henley had not only cornered the market in eccentric, obsessive Southern women when Crimes of the Heart was first being produced everywhere, she appeared to be…

A cast member of How the Other Half Loves, the latest Alan Ayckbourn farce frothing at Theatre Three, reports that they are in a situation similar to the cast of Joe Egg–a bunch of Americans playing with British lilts in the midst of an authentic Brit. “She catches us on…

As a tardy replacement for Theatre Quorum’s previously announced second production this season (they ran into casting problems with a Marsha Norman script), Joe Egg is a peculiar selection. Almost everyone has heard of Peter Nichols’ 1967 script–though perhaps not with its original title, A Day in the Death of…

When William Shakespeare wrote King Lear (it appeared at the Royal Court in 1606, among his first tragedies) he was obsessed with sight, what it means to see, and the ways that faculty deceives and reveals. That’s arguably the dominant theme in his tale about an imperious but feeble king…

Frank’s Place, the rehearsal facility at Dallas Theater Center’s Kalita Humphreys Theatre that is often rented for performance, was almost tropical last Saturday night, since so many bodies were pressed in such close proximity to watch short productions from Soul Rep’s Fifth Annual New Play Festival. Downstairs at the box…