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…
Can I compose a critical mash note to Dallas actor Terry Martin, star of the Texas premiere of Dan Butler’s The Only Thing Worse You Could Have Told Me, that doesn’t sound foolish? Probably not, but any such effort would contain some sentiment like: It’s hard as hell to make…
In print advertisements for its current production, Dallas Theater Center declares Eugene O’Neill’s 1940 Long Day’s Journey Into Night to be America’s greatest play. Leaving aside the strained hyperbole of calling any piece of art the greatest in its field, there are certainly other contenders for this specious honor, from…
We’re living in a world where Dilbert creator Scott Adams, supposed hero of the corporate grunt and Office Depot shill, has gone on the record with a major national newsmagazine with the comment that, ya know, downsizing may not be such a bad thing after all. Actually, you could argue…
If you’re Anglo, you might approach a night of theater titled Latin American Evening with the smug assumption of someone who knows what’s inside the tamale before you even unroll the corn husk. It’s a mindset whites would never have when confronting a show called “Anglo-Saxon Evening,” but then again,…
In taking five of author Willa Cather’s early short stories and distilling them into a brand-new musical he calls Cather County, composer-librettist Ed Dixon would seem to have located one of the great themes of a great American writer: how the land transforms us even as we transform the land…
If you’re looking for a tax write-off that also fortifies the First Amendment, not to mention the cause of artistic richness and innovation in our city, a wealthy Dallas businessperson could do worse than to drop a big wad of money into the lap of the Undermain Theatre. It prides…
How, you may ask, did 17th-century master satirist Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin was the handle on his birth certificate) write with such incendiary insight on the vanity and frailty of human beings? You don’t have to read too far in his bio to figure it out: The guy was trained as…
