I have to confess, I don’t watch TV much anymore–the antenna on top of my set brings in only about five channels. But the rays I soaked as a chubby kid were a ratio of about nine cathode to one solar: a purer product of ’70s boob-tube-feeding you won’t find…
Paula Vogel has guts. Writing about incest, child abuse, and a girl’s sexual awakening without being melodramatic or making an audience cringe is tough. Writing a play about the seven-year relationship between a teenage girl and her uncle without turning the situation into a simplistic battle of good versus evil…
Last week in this space, I compared the Undermain Theatre to Teatro Dallas because of the often surreal and fabulist takes they share on life, death, and all the weird stuff that connects them like a string between two cans. This amounted to clairvoyance on my part, coming as it…
Russell Doak Walker’s home sits just a few doors down from Southern Methodist University, where his father’s high school fame blossomed into magazine-cover myth 50 years ago. Russ bought this place just a year ago and didn’t give much thought to its location at the time. But now, as he…
The small, about-to-be-homeless company known as Teatro Dallas makes art that falls through the cracks between contemporary entertainment boundaries, not to mention the Dallas theater scene. Are they too Latino, or not Latino enough? Should they be concentrating on folklorico rather than premiering political and philosophical voices from Latin American…
The phenomenon of suburban spread has, despite its tendency to homogenize everything in its steamroller path, sparked at least one enriching trend. Buried deep in the hearts of some of the pseudo-cities–Plano, Arlington, even North Richland Hills–are unexpected slices of *real art, almost as though the urban core of the…
Insofar as filmmaker Tony Gatlif’s justly admired “Gypsy trilogy” is an exploration of his roots and a search for his nature–he was born in Algeria to Gypsy parents of Spanish origin, but later educated at Paris’ L’Ecole des Beaux Arts–it comprises one of the most passionate and telling self-examinations in…
The Jonathan Demme-directed Beloved runs nearly three hours, and it’s a long haul. This adaptation of the 1987 Toni Morrison novel bursts with ambition. On one hand it tries to get inside the fevers of the African-American slave experience, but it also wants to be an epic family saga and…
The hero of The Mighty–the title character, in fact–is an eighth-grader known by the nickname Freak (Kieran Culkin). His might isn’t physical–he’s a small, frail boy who suffers from a degenerative birth defect. His spine curves painfully, and he’s able to walk only with crutches and leg braces. But he…
Kurt Kleinmann burns the candle at two ends–president of the Dallas Theatre League, whose Leon Rabin Awards are coming up November 2, and artistic director of Pegasus Theatre, which recently launched its 14th season. For ’98-’99, he has transferred some of that Theatre League passion for recognizing and saluting the…
One of the hottest summers in recorded history seems finally to be subsiding, or perhaps just giving us a week’s respite. In any case, there’s no better way to celebrate what feels like the first days of autumn than to step outside, pull up a chair or stretch out a…
thursday october 15 Actor Stanley Tucci, star and co-writer of last year’s sparkling Big Night, appeared on a recent episode of The Charlie Rose Show to discuss the state of the independent film industry. When he could get a word in edgewise–obviously, Rose is an expert on everything–Tucci said that…
I can feel Dallas Theater Center artistic director Richard Hamburger sending mental waves in this direction and to all the other armchair artistic directors in Dallas: OK, folks, you asked for more Dallas actors, and you got ’em. Now sod off! Local actors way outnumber imported ones in his very…
The Montreal World Film Festival runs for 10 days through Labor Day, and the Toronto Film Festival picks up a few days later and carries on for another 10. Twin colossi of the Great White North, they each unspool some 300 movies, and, as in the past three years, I…
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita still has the power to scare off people. Proof is the book’s new movie adaptation, directed by Adrian Lyne and scripted by Stephen Schiff and starring Jeremy Irons as the passionate pedophile Humbert Humbert, a man entranced by nymphets. Completed more than two years ago, the movie…
Most often, the difference between photography and painting is in terms of realism and clarity, though artists gleefully shatter such obvious expectations. From Patrick Faulhaber’s photo-realistic paintings of East Dallas neighborhoods to Marcos Rosales’ ultra-morphed photos of infant heads, skilled and bratty locals have certainly blurred the lines between the…
thursday october 8 Even people who haven’t been to the State Fair of Texas know what Big Tex looks like, standing tall and proud and jug-eared at the gates of the fair, greeting visitors with a booming “Howdy folks!” Some would say that he is cornier than the corn dogs…
Long before Stephen King made horror a national pastime, there was Shirley Jackson. Born in San Francisco in 1919, the author of the wickedly creepy classic The Lottery settled in North Bennington, a small village in Vermont, after her marriage to author and literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. Once there,…
I don’t know…sometimes you just don’t feel like spending your whole weekend lost in a drunken haze, propping yourself up against the bar while a really crappy band blows your eardrums out through the back of your brain. Sometimes sitting in a late-night, chi-chi restaurant, making fleeting eye contact with…
Is feminism dead? When Time magazine’s June 29 cover posed that question alongside a picture of TV’s short-skirted, ditzy attorney Ally McBeal, it was not in attempt to answer it as much as to render it moot. Indeed, one wonders what happened to feminists, as the women’s movement seems to…
He walks onto the outdoor court at the Four Seasons Resort and Club, and the cheers fill the thick late-evening air even before the announcer introduces him as “one of the greatest tennis players of all time.” John McEnroe raises his racket with his left hand, nods his head full…
Marriage is a most propitious arrangement for theatrical adventure, as playwrights have known for centuries. When you throw two people into a situation that’s both legally circumscribed and saddled with the baggage of both community and individual, you’re watching an arena contest transpire. The best playwrights don’t so much pit…
