Edward Albee’s most famous play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, so scandalized American theatergoers when it was produced in New York in 1962 that no Pulitzer Prize for drama was awarded that year because the committee was passionately polarized over the play, or so the legend goes. The ever cautious…
As long as there have been storytellers with the guts to explore all corners of the human experience, there have been listeners who’ve insisted–sometimes with the force of the state behind them–that nothing but harm can come from exploring traditionally taboo subjects…especially those that emanate from the dark, moist corners…
Although I haven’t always enjoyed Pegasus Theatre artistic director Kurt Kleinmann’s doggedly cinematic brand of live comedy, his dedication to it has a definite logic when you consider how the American stage and American film have both traded traditional theatrical acting for “authenticity.” Before Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, Uta Hagen,…
The special challenge of children’s theater–namely, how the heck do you make live performance not only accessible to kids, but competitive with the technological media forms–has been addressed before in this space. It’s not really so different from the challenge of making live performance accessible and competitive to adults, who…
The problem with the one-act, that most bladder-friendly of theatrical forms, is how to present what is essentially a live-action joke and make it look like something more than a joke. Even with the darkest of material–as in, say, Erik Ehn’s Red Plays–the denouement is still a punch line, indeed…
You don’t have to be a twentysomething to dread the idea of a bleak comedy written by a twentysomething playwright about twentysomethings who have no direction in their lives. I shall remain in this demographic for about 10 more months, and I’ve spent more than half of this last decade…
The metamorphosis of Theatre Three’s downstairs rehearsal space into the almost full-fledged black box known as Theatre Too is a particularly gratifying transformation for anyone who thinks that having a clear view of the actor’s face is needed for a rich theatrical experience. This is by no means a commonly…
All human life may be precious, but the arbiters of popular and scholarly history can be pretty forgetful when it comes to meting out posterity. Take genocide, a practice honed in the 20th century whose episodes have produced vastly disparate amounts of attention. Germany’s Holocaust has spawned a bona fide…
Obviously, a Pulitzer Prize just isn’t enough to imbed a playwright in the firmament of American stage greats. Or, to paraphrase a famous line from The Boys in the Band: “So who do I have to fuck around here for a little theatrical posterity?” Novelist and playwright Paul Zindel nabbed…
Harried parents don’t have time to wade through a review that yammers on about the sociopolitical ramifications of a children’s theater production. Yet being childless myself and, as a critic, inordinately fond of my own opinions, I can’t help but rhapsodize about the wonderful Wildean darts to the establishment heart…
The essays and book-length ruminations of Susan Sontag, the American zeitgeist’s preeminent fag hag, are accessible, friendly, almost conversational in their explorations of camp aesthetic and AIDS mythology. But her mammoth first novel, The Volcano Lover, from which I had the fortitude only to snatch scattered sections, felt like–horrors!–a veteran…
There have been numerous American plays that have grappled with what might be called “the morning after” dilemma–as in, “OK, what do I do the morning after I’ve spent the night with someone I just met?” Think David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago or Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny at…
Comic actor Coy Covington trowels on the base and mascara far too infrequently for Dallas audiences; underneath all that getup and goo, he has a bloodhound’s sense for the moment to play comedy up or down. While he stalks the daytime in man drag, he ought to consider teaching lessons…
Watching Kitchen Dog Theater’s ballsy new interpretation of Tennessee Williams’ dramatic warhorse The Glass Menagerie makes you feel as though you’re doing a high-wire act right alongside the actors. Director Tina Parker has taken Williams’ kitchen-sink staple from its claustrophobic apartment in St. Louis into the Big Top. At first,…
The 11th Street Theatre Project’s revival of Arthur Miller’s The Creation of the World and Other Business is timed well, as another of our premier stage moralist’s little-produced efforts, A View From the Bridge, has been generating a firestorm of critical and audience praise for its current New York production…
Longtime patrons already know that the Undermain Theatre can mix a mean theatrical drink–comedy and drama shaken together into one potent cocktail, served up on some treacherous rocks. Rarely has the house recipe been more potent when you gulp it–and rarely have the effects felt more disappointing, when the buzz…
Two weeks ago in this space, while reviewing Our Endeavors’ disappointing production of Albert Camus’ Caligula, or The Meaning of Death, I suggested that a rape that happens offstage in that show should be brought onstage to balance some of the windy philosophical stretches with a little raw emotion. Well,…
I learned an important lesson while watching Having Our Say, Emily Mann’s theatrical adaptation of the best-selling memoir from a pair of hundred-year-old black sisters in New York: African-Americans have indeed arrived in the mainstream. This huge Broadway hit celebrates the fact that they can be just as shortsighted and…
The caprice of totalitarianism burdened the thoughts of a 32-year-old Albert Camus when, in 1945, he staged a theatrical meditation called Caligula, or The Meaning of Death. He hid out while the Nazis plundered France, writing inflammatory articles for the Resistance and nurturing his philosophy of the absurd that would…
Playwright and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley loves words. Anyone with a similar depth of feeling for the currency of human communication cannot blame him; it’s easy to become enthralled with the sounds, even the look on the printed page, of words, and forget that they are symbols of meaning, not…
Driving to Mesquite to see a provocative, world-premiere play by a talented Texas playwright? Jeez, what’s next–performance art by a radical African-American collective in Garland? Actually, you shouldn’t be surprised that a stately construction like the Mesquite Arts Center, which sticks out like a good tooth among the day-care centers…
I recently spoke before about 30 members of the local volunteer arts fundraising group 500 Inc.–with more than a little trepidation. I was the guest of the Undermain Theatre, which, like all major recipients of grants from this group, must provide free “Sample The Arts” events for the organization. My…
