If time past and time future all point to the present, wrote T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets, then “all time is unredeemable.” World War II gathered like a flock of vultures as the great poet was scribbling this in England, but the idea that what we regret and what we…
There is an unsettling quality to the laughter — luckily, quite a bit of it — in the WaterTower Theatre’s regional premiere of Golf With Alan Shepard. Separation, the burden of memory, and the loneliness that too often descends on the aged are bound to rattle the nerves of anyone…
There are at least three people trying to ignore the truth in what has become a defining moment of their lives in Man of the Moment, the sometimes sad, sometimes acidic 1988 comedy by Alan Ayckbourn. The fact that this moment — a 17-year-old bank robbery thwarted by a meek…
“The only things the United States has given the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails” is a quote attributed to the martyred Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. “And they make better cocktails in Cuba.” This assessment was made after a two-year stay in New York City, during which his most…
Last October, when I was a guest on KERA 90.1’s The Glenn Mitchell Show discussing the 1999 Dallas Theater Critics Forum awards, a woman called in and bluntly asked, as per my solitary pan of Dallas Theater Center’s South Pacific, “What’s wrong with Jimmy Fowler’s mind?” Was this Richard Hamburger,…
There is so much good will straining against the levees of Tomfoolery, a buttoned-down revue of satirical tunes by 72-year-old smartass Tom Lehrer, that you don’t mind when, midway through, it floods over the songwriter’s self-conscious cleverness and cuteness. Because, after a while, the charisma of three men and three…
There are two scenes in One Flea Spare, the Southwest premiere of playwright Naomi Wallace’s pressure cooker of class and sexuality served up by Kitchen Dog Theater, that seem to be especially close to the heart of Adrian Hall, the show’s director and a nationally lauded stage visionary for more…
At or soon after the start of the 20th century, the almost mythical George Bernard Shaw became a vegetarian; a socialist who believed property ownership amounted to public theft; a fervent (and minority) defender of Oscar Wilde during that playwright’s gory public dismantling; and a champion of working women who…
About a month ago, the Dallas Theatre League held a meeting of theater reps from Theatre Three, Dallas Theater Center, Our Endeavors, Echo Theatre, and Lyric Stage, among others, and various media types, including yours truly and Tom Sime from The Dallas Morning News. Several topics were introduced and then…
The action in most of Edward Albee’s plays are lips flapping, fingers pointing, and people pacing and occasionally changing seats. His plays — from 1966’s A Delicate Balance to 1994’s Three Tall Women — are all talk. This includes Seascape, his 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy Circle Theatre is currently producing…
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…
