Peruse the online newspapers of major American cities in December, and it’s clear that Langston Hughes’ 1961 Black Nativity is almost as ubiquitous within African-American communities as all the varieties of A Christmas Carol are to so many Anglo playgoers. Cleveland, Philadelphia, Seattle, Fort Worth, and Washington, D.C., have long-existent…
What’s that great whoosh you hear this week as you step into Dallas theaters? It’s the collective breath of artists and audiences finally released after being caught in 12 months of anticipation. Your blue pallor can return to its natural rosiness, people; your gin blossoms will bloom gaily again. The…
I haven’t seen a stranger show in a while–one more packed with diverse agendas, crossed-genre elements, a bipolar alternating need to entertain and uplift–than the musical production currently running in the Stage West half of Allied Theatre Group. Indeed, because I could never quite get a bead on precisely what…
There are few theater types in town more aggressive than Steven Jones, founding producer of Irving’s Lyric Stage. He doles out both promotion of his company and criticism of the perceived deficiencies of other troupes (not to mention the city’s stage punditry) with plainspoken zeal. It can become abrasive if,…
You needn’t be a Catholic scholar to realize that the Virgin of Guadalupe, who first appeared just northwest of Mexico City in 1531, has pretty much surpassed her theological source, The Virgin Mary, in popularity from Texas through Central America. Often referred to as “The Patroness of the Americas,” she…
The Saturday matinee performance of A Christmas Carol at Dallas Theater Center’s Arts District Theater was between half and three quarters full, but when you consider these people had set aside ticket money and prime mall time to soak in Dickens at DTC, there was an odd taciturn air drifting…
We’ve entered that time of the year when those of us who bitch about plastic sentiment and sequin-sewn optimism during the other 11 months now complain that there isn’t enough of it–or rather, that the treacle we’re being served lacks variety. What’s up with us? Even when somebody does try…
Playwright Nicky Silver insists he wrote The Food Chain, which is enjoying a raucous if sometimes shrill run at Fort Worth’s Circle Theatre, as relief from a more painful play he had to discontinue. Some may think this is the equivalent of choosing, say, electric shock to the tongue over…
You must call it curious that the nontraditional holiday meal of Charles Dickens served by Kitchen Dog Theater is called Act of Passion. They didn’t christen it so, of course. Playwright John Tyson, currently a company member at Houston’s Alley Theatre, chose to plunge through the great Victorian moralist’s surface…
I have been neither fan nor foe of hip-hop. Most of my limited experience with the music has been filtered through the scrim of a good 15 years’ worth of near-hysterical mass media scrutiny. I have listened to it as “a cultural phenomenon” or “a social expression” rather than as…
“I don’t rant and rave about the terror of our racist society,” the playwright and screenwriter Lonne Elder III once remarked. “It is never directly stated; it’s just there.” Elder, who died four years ago and is probably more famous for writing the scripts to Sounder and A Woman Called…
The indefatigable Cora Cardona, artistic director of Teatro Dallas, has threatened on occasions when the itinerant troupe cannot find a stage to pitch a tent in a parking lot and perform there. OK, so it’s not a parking lot for the 2000 edition of their annual Dia de los Muertos…
British playwright Shelagh Stephenson worked extensively creating monologues for radio and television broadcasts on the BBC until one of her pieces–the harrowing Find Kinds of Silence, about a sadistic husband and father whose daughters murder him after a lifetime of abuse–earned so much acclaim, folks made the connection that language…
I thoroughly enjoyed Pegasus’ Southwest premiere of Sound-Biting, not for original thoughts on the contemporary, poll-driven political process but because of enough verisimilitude to get a clean, close shave. Eric Coble’s script, here under the direction of Pegasus founder and artistic director Kurt Kleinmann, climaxes with a debate between two…
Maureen Folan (Susan Sargeant), the 40-year-old spinster whose two sisters have abandoned her to care for their frail but wolfishly self-centered, aged mother, Mag (C.J. Critt), recounts a trip she took to England in search of work. The Anglos assailed this uneducated Irish woman with racist vitriol she could barely…
October is probably my favorite month: Reread Ray Bradbury, catch Teatro Dallas’ “Day of the Dead” festival (pushed back, sadly, to November this year), watch The Simpsons Halloween special, and rent the excessively bloody horror films I loved as a kid. I was hoping that Pocket Sandwich Theatre might add…
On October 7, the dining room table of Martha Heimberg’s gorgeous home in Lakewood looked more like a conference table of Wall Street investors and economists–people waving lists, pointing and shouting their proposed investments, their appraised disasters, their trend predictions. We were as boisterous as bulls and bears sipping from…
Here’s some free advice for theatergoers that’s actually worth more than the price: If you want to enjoy an earnest play for children unsabotaged, don’t sit next to a restive 5-year-old who has chosen to speak aloud the thoughts you barely knew you were thinking, so far had they been…
Kitchen Dog has taken arguably the most famous–or at least, the most plundered–tragic love story of the English-speaking theater and turned it into a 120-minute, intermissionless actors’ stunt. As it turns out, this benefits Romeo and Juliet without ennobling or improving it. You cannot best Shakespeare, because he is both…
Journalist, poet, playwright, and composer Dolores Prida is as radical in her politics and identity as the more famous stage artist Maria Irene Fornes (the two have collaborated in New York), yet, in my opinion, she goes about striking the establishment with a more conscious and formidable force–a sense of…
If you think of history as a big bowl of Neapolitan ice cream–and I do, all the time–then it’s funny how journalists and scholars become anal-retentive malt-shop clerks, slicing up the parallel layers and serving them in separate containers. Epochs, movements, controversies, regimes, and ideologies all melted into each other…
Critics and stage artists will ever have a dysfunctional, back-stabbing, roller-coaster relationship. Unlike, say, movie critics, whose opinions can be reassessed throughout the foreseeable future with one trip to the video store, the words of theater pundits celebrate or sting a little more because they are often the only available…
