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…
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…
