It’s a movie cliché that when someone is possessed by a spirit or Lucifer himself, the bewitched one takes on the mannerisms and speech patterns of the possessor. The effects can be subtle: demon-possessed victims singing a Rolling Stones tune in Fallen. Or they can be a bit more, um,…
If you have read this space before, you know that I advocate theatergoing as a habit rather than as a secular, arts-patron version of the token-church-visit-every-Easter kind of attendance. While the best theater is more visceral than anything in a multiplex or on DVD, many folks are unprepared for that…
I’ve spent some long evenings in the theater recently, but rarely has the time sailed by as intelligently and harrowingly as it did in Inexpressible Island, a U.S. premiere courtesy of Dallas Theater Center. And we’re talking about a situation, however based in reality, that seems like a gimmick manufactured…
At this point, the chance of scoring a ticket to Don Juan in Chicago, the new show by Lean Theater in Theatre Three’s Theatre Too basement space, is about as likely as finding an unwrinkled sheet on Don Juan’s heart-shaped bed. Word of mouth has spread throughout Dallas theatergoing circles…
“Fuckin’ long life, ain’t it?” Two characters in two different scenes of Jim Cartwright’s Road express this sentiment, not so much with weariness but as bitterly humorous testimony to all the ways they must distract their senses to make it through another night. Alcohol remains the diversion of choice, to…
Theatre Three prides itself on being the Southwest’s most frequent showcase for the works of Stephen Sondheim since 1969. The program for their newest effort, the complex and obtuse Company, features a photo of Sondheim onstage with artistic director Jac Alder. When the now 70-year-old composer came to Dallas in…
Folks who spent part of their college years watching Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson every Friday and Saturday night on HBO, and then CBS, can easily become confused about whom they actually hung out with back then. In my addled memory, when a couple…
One of the late Charles Ludlam’s drag secrets was bird seed. Bird seed for breasts, that is. He discovered that, so long as you seal the pouches tightly, you were assured of mammaries that were pliant and shapely and shiftable, not unlike the real deal. People often accuse Ludlam of…
There was a recent Dallas Morning News profile of a long-term lesbian couple intending to fly off and get hitched in Vermont, which has become the first state to grant homosexuals almost the same marital rights as heterosexuals. Included in the story, somewhat obtrusively, were the war-hero status of one…
Be Boyd, a recent transplant from North Carolina to the drama faculty of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, left the stage of Allied Theatre Group in tears at the close of Fires in the Mirror. Quite frankly, I’m surprised she didn’t have to be carried off on a stretcher,…
“If disenfranchisement is the father of rap,” says one performer in the gospel musical revue Travelin’ Shoes, “then meet its grandpappy — gospel music.” Certainly, you can find threads of black gospel in virtually every popular American musical form; rap and gospel are connected as part of the continuously evolving…
Here I sit, polishing this year’s Jimmy Awards and etching the names of actors, directors, designers, and productions in calligraphic script on the base plaques. Yet I can summon little enthusiasm for theater at the moment. It’s not because of theater itself, but because of the inevitable disruptions and dissipations…
The press release for the second production by Impulse Theatre of the Fearless promises the troupe will present a “new form of entertainment for bargoers in Deep Ellum and Denton: unique, cutting-edge theatrical events in bars.” The release continues that “people who wouldn’t normally choose to spend their Friday or…
“If God had meant us to think with our wombs, then why did he give us a brain?” You have to chew on that, one of playwright Clare Boothe Luce’s most famous quotes, for a while, and even then, you’re still not sure what you’re tasting. I interpret it as…
There is a wonderful collision of the best of theatrical possibilities in Christmas at Ground Zero, especially at this time of year. It offers real emotion, not mere sentiment; short bursts of inspiration, not two-act platitudes; and genuinely surprising subject matter woven into a holiday context, rather than rote tales…
Over the last few years, I’ve seen David Sedaris — that little smart-ass — read his work at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary, Southern Methodist University, Crossroads Market, and the Dallas Museum of Art. So I don’t consider myself just a fan of his, but an enlisted member in his unholy…
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One of the most impressive things about Art isn’t that it won a Tony and an Olivier and an Evening Standard, blah blah blah, but that the script has legs long enough to carry it across the world. Since Yasmina Reza’s play debuted in France in the mid-’90s, it has…
It’s not really unusual for gay men 35 and under never to have owned a single Bette Midler album. All joking aside, she really is a generational benchmark, beloved as much for her rise at a time when gay sex was healthy and plentiful as for her innocent bawdiness. I…
My slightly freaked-out attitude toward puppet shows (the more fluid and effective the puppeteers, the bigger the freak-out) is perhaps best explained by historical example. The Roman Catholic Church once relied heavily on puppets as evangelical devices used to illustrate Biblical stories about the birth and death of Christ and…
With all the accolades showered on a young Joe Orton (the very acclaim that, in part, caused lover Kenneth Halliwell’s silver hammer to come down upon the 34-year-old playwright-novelist’s head) during the mid-’60s, more than 30 years passed after his murder before the wicked farceur received his most fitting tribute…
When Broken Glass, Arthur Miller’s glimpse at the intersection of marriage and world community responsibility, opened in New York in 1994, it closed quickly after receiving mixed to horrible reviews. London audiences and critics, a few years later, bruised their palms in riotous ovations. I’m not sure what this reaction…
