What right do theatergoers have to expect two very different individuals–folks of vastly divergent age, experience, political, and religious sensibilities–to cross the chasm and embrace? Of course, we’ve come not just to expect such a thing to occur on stage, but to view it as a ticketbuyer’s privilege, if only…
The October of my sophomore year in high school, a small group of friends and I drove a short way outside Dallas to a haunted house called something like “Eternal Torture” or “Infinite Terror” or “The House of Endless Screams.” We should have been clued in to the experience that…
In 1995, a former Jesuit priest and scholar in Eastern languages published a religious study that has since become indispensable to Christians, agnostics, and pagans alike–a book that undertook a witty, irreverent, somewhat distant, but astringently observant investigation of all the sex, blood, pestilence, smiting, betrayal, and vengeance in the…
All you dumb asses who attend a Pocket Sandwich Theatre show with the desire to disorder the performers by pelting them with popcorn, beware: The actors have a unique opportunity for revenge in 20,000 Babes Beneath the Sea, and they seize it. I won’t reveal it here, but let’s just…
Mike White, the writer and star of Chuck & Buck, has grown a little weary of all the intense scrutiny from writers who interview him for the film. But he’s sensible enough to know that it’s part of the press drill for a hot indie property. He also understands why…
There’s enough new and engrossing theater between Dallas and Fort Worth that I don’t usually get the chance to review the same play twice when one area company opts to produce a script that another has recently staged. When I do see the same author’s work interpreted by two very…
Here’s my final report from the Second Annual Festival of Independent Theatres. Taken with last week’s review, I hope it will give an accurate account of the scope and ambition of a city event that has risen to eminence in a very short time: Echo Theatre revives a one-act by…
Artists often accuse critics of being frustrated performers, as a way to counter the opinions they don’t like–he/she wouldn’t have the guts to get up there and do what I do. It’s true that I flirted with actorly ambitions in high school and college, but I never wanted to publicly…
But any resentment has been set aside for what has evolved, in only two years, into a jaw-droppingly disciplined arrangement of quality fare. I saw four shows in five consecutive hours on my first go-round at the festival, and my butt didn’t ache once. The frequent breaks helped, of course–never…
Banter The brilliant arts pundits at The New York Times were profoundly perplexed about why the national ratings for this year’s Tony Awards TV broadcast were not only low (that’s typical), but among the lowest in the show’s history. Talk about confusing your fishbowl for the Atlantic Ocean. Since the…
How many regular patrons of Dallas Summer Musicals will wander innocently into Parade, the latest imported presentation, with images inside their heads of cheerfully tacky floats, colorful twirling parasols, and the painted round faces of children? This very new musical from playwright Alfred Uhry, director Harold Prince, and composer Jason…
Turns out it’s not as far from Waxahachie to Off-Broadway as we thought–or from the tights-clad bawdy high jinks of the 16th century to 21st-century neo-vaudeville. Those actors who bravely don English peasant attire to stroll through Scarborough Faire and harass sweating patrons can only be doing what in showbiz…
My philosophy is, if I throw enough words against the wall about how you should get out of the recliner and support your city theater artists, some of ’em have gotta stick. But this week, your second assignment is to head out to the coolest video/DVD store near you and…
A lot of people love Billy Wilder’s 1957 movie version of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution, if only for the chance to see Marlene Dietrich hag it up as the mysterious crone who delivers incriminating letters to a murder defendant’s attorney. Her dual role gave away the film’s most…
I was stretched out on my futon reading Harpers, the cat asleep on my stomach, when the fire alarm in the hallway went off. I have often heard fire alarms accidentally triggered, so at first I didn’t think much of the sound except how annoying it was. Then I looked…
As the opening-night world premiere of Fugitive Pieces progressed, I couldn’t shake the idea that playwright Caridad Svich was less inspired by Samuel Beckett–Waiting for Godot, specifically–than liable for intellectual theft under some copyright law. Anything worth having is worth stealing, as a colleague once observed, but the showcase production…
As the opening-night world premiere of Fugitive Pieces progressed, I couldn’t shake the idea that playwright Caridad Svich was less inspired by Samuel Beckett–Waiting for Godot, specifically–than liable for intellectual theft under some copyright law. Anything worth having is worth stealing, as a colleague once observed, but the showcase production…
Banter Despite repeated dashings, my hopes have been raised yet again by the recent opening of the Trinity River Arts Center, in the same complex as KD Studios. KD president and owner Kathy Tyner, who started off as a secretary in 1965 for model mogul Kim Dawson, says that it…
Some 2,400 years after it was first staged at the midsummer Dionysus festival in Athens, The Trojan Women is oft resurrected as a pacifist theatrical statement. That’s understandable. The show is grueling in its depiction of the agonies of women and girls who suddenly find themselves rounded up and treated…
There’s a moment in Mrs. Klein where Beverly May attempts to burst through the stone wall of premises and hypotheses to connect to her hurting daughter, played by Susan Sargeant. The two are sharing a bottle of wine but not much else, and May reaches over to pluck a piece…
Southern Methodist University professor emeritus Margaret Loft directs three prodigiously able and alert actresses through a cataclysmic afternoon and evening in the life of one of Great Britain’s most influential psychoanalysts. Mrs. Klein happens to be Melanie Klein, the Austrian Jewish titan who strode into The British Analytical Society in…
What a curious theatrical creature is Shakespeare for the Modern Man, Lesson 1: Macbeth, currently rattling the boards at Pocket Sandwich Theatre. I can’t count it as altogether successful, because there are so many sonic, thematic, and verbal threads running through it that playwright-adapter Scott A. Eckert couldn’t possibly work…
