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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Rarely have I been to a sold-out performance of a three-hour play where ticket-buyers, during intermission, laughed nervously about whether they had the fortitude to return. Mind you, I’ve been to three-hour shows where people fled during the break because the script or the performances were boring them silly or…
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…
In two separate moments of release from the steamrollering epic plot turns of Dreamlandia, offered as the main-stage production of Dallas Theater Center’s Big D Festival of the Unexpected, onstage characters directly implicate audiences. They spot us, identify us, and accuse us. The first happens when a supposedly retarded young…
Dial the number of the Deep Ellum Center for the Arts, and a recording tells you it’s no longer a working line. Step into the cavernous Commerce Street space on an upcoming weekend night, though, and you will discover the center is still very valuable in its dying gasp. Between…
A recent cover story in American Theatre discussed how the national network of prominent children’s theater in cities such as Minneapolis, Seattle, St. Louis, and Dallas was beginning to generate plays without “blue or pink plaid (and) fake furry animal costumes.” Issues of race, sexuality, and mortality had been introduced…
There appears to be quite a bit of flux in the Dallas theater scene now, with the ultimate destination for at least two companies still unknown. Right on the heels of the Theatre Three opening of Mizlansky/Zilinsky, or “Schmucks”, the regional premiere of a comedy by Jon Robin Baitz, a…
It’s easy to compound details and build an ominous “trend” for a whole scene, but one sad development I can confirm in this space: New Theatre Company, which since 1994 has produced some of the most disciplined and adventurous state, regional, and national premieres for Dallas audiences, is moving. Not…
Pegasus Theatre ought to be aware that one of the most successful Dallas Theater Center shows of this current season was, for all practical purposes, a Pegasus production. Of course, departed director Jonathan Moscone brought in out-of-town actors and designers as well as professional multimedia folks to soup up the…
