It has often been written that while film is a director’s medium, theater is the province of the actor. Except for that phenomenon known as “director’s theater”–on the plus side, the current New York productions of Cabaret and Swan Lake and, on the minus side, Franco Zefferilli’s recent animal-costumed, boo-inspiring…
History has always been among my weaker subjects: I carry around gaps in my knowledge that you could drop a war or a social movement through. But it was nonetheless startling to learn that Article III of the original Constitution was a clause forbidding theater critics. Frank Rich of The…
The biggest disappointment in Dallas theater in 1998 was the conspicuous omission of the 1997 Jimmys by the winners in their artist bios on play programs. Granted, last year was the first year they were presented, so the adjective “august” doesn’t come to mind when describing their status, and granted…
My early college years found me jumping back and forth between attraction and repulsion on the question of white people co-opting black culture-or, at least, black music. On the one hand, reading liver-spotted libidinist Norman Mailer’s inadvertently hilarious early essay “The White Negro” led me to adopt this ode to…
Dallas is Larry O’Dwyer’s stomping ground, and I am the Lilliputian who scurries amid the underbrush, firing projectile adjectives at his all-terrain-vehicle feet. Well, the dream I had after seeing Theatre Three’s manically funny production of The Miser went something like that. Mr. O’Dwyer is a founding company member of…
Virtually every Dallas theater company that’s managed to hang in there more than five years has a holiday show that will, hopefully, finance the less commercial excursions of the rest of the season. December is the month when people are willing to drop cash in symbolic recognition of all the…
Beginning in the mid-’80s, the devastation of AIDS opened the floodgates of theatrical imagination, engulfing audiences across the country. The Neptune King of the genre is, of course, Tony Kushner’s two-part epic Angels in America, and although the old boy still has some fire left in him, he is doddering…
The strained relationship between theater and the Christian church didn’t begin when Terrence McNally held a press conference to announce he was painting a lavender Jesus in Corpus Christi. Way back in seventh-century Europe, church elders declared a culture war against the cross-dressing, bawdy humor, and symbolic wine-pouring that honored…
When The Dallas Morning News printed the Dallas Theater Critics Forum results on November 1, it was frisky foreplay working up to the climax of November 2, when the Dallas Theatre League distributed the 1998 Leon Rabin Awards at the Irving Arts Center. They are, of course, separate but related…
Playwright Paul Rudnick captured the contemporary public’s disdain for William Shakespeare with one utterly accurate declaration from a character in his aptly named comedy I Hate Hamlet: “It’s like algebra on stage!” Just as millions of us sat through that high school mathematical torture learning just enough to pass (or…
Italian commie provocateur Dario Fo got kicked around but good in a recent New Yorker article concerning the sometimes nasty political entanglements of the Nobel Prize’s Swiss nominating committee for literature. The 72-year-old Fo nabbed the literature award last year, but nobody seems to know why–or at least, nobody in…
Who’da thunk Dallas was ready for a revival of the revue, the late-19th-century live entertainment that might best be called “short attention span theater”? Hell, in a city where stealth police cars are employed to curtail tailgating, speeding, and other restless by-products of road rage, the question should be more…
If some actors, directors, and designers from Dallas Theater Center and the Dallas theater scene didn’t already want to restrain me atop a stone temple and yank my beating heart out like one of those S.R.O. Aztec sacrifice rituals, they will now: I’m writing a review of a preview performance…
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…
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…
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…
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…
For now, Reed Easterwood is content to give away his music, quite literally. His new record, Absolute Blue, means so much to him that, until now, he has yet to sell a single copy; to profit from the music would, it seems, diminish its rewards. So instead, he has given…
Theater classes generally describe Marxist German playwright-poet Bertolt Brecht as being politically opposed to entertainment for entertainment’s sake. Theater artists should always keep audiences aware that they’re watching a play, he instructed us, and should try to remind audiences as much as possible of social injustices that collect like trails…
Joyce Carol Oates, a journeywoman of American letters who has probably been discussed more carefully than she’s been read, has written about rapists, child-killers, and animal mutilators through a poet’s eye. Throughout her career, she’s been accused of having an obsession with violence, which is correct as far as it…
The early plays of Anton Chekhov were given such a cool reception by late-19th-century Russian theatergoers that the poor bastard almost quit the biz to devote all his energies to family doctoring, the profession for which he was trained. Russian theatergoers were accustomed to watching actors paint their faces with…
The program for Bucket Productions’ latest show, the Southwest premiere of Anne V. McGravie’s Wrens, declares that the troupe is “dedicated to the production of fun, entertaining, watchable theatre. We don’t have any social agendas or themes, and we have no pretense of a grand artistic vision.” It’s a refreshingly…
