It’s refreshing to be reminded by the Undermain Theatre that Shakespeare wrote comedies, too. And that, slain in the right lunatic spirit, they’re damned funny in the least complicated way possible. Shakespeare’s plays continue to bear nutritious fruit, surprising when you consider that they are raided in and out of…
In many ways, Sam Shepard’s rigorously honed dramedy True West is more evocative of the funhouse floor on which the author stands than any of his other plays. Perhaps the most purely comic of Shepard’s quartet of family safaris (Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child came first, A…
Artistic director Bruce Coleman and his versatile New Theatre Company have just abandoned a semi-permanent home for a permanent one, alternating shows with Deep Ellum Opera Theatre at TOES (Theatre on Elm Street). Interest is burgeoning from corporate backers, and the company has added an extra performance to their weekly…
If Theatre Three’s comedies sometimes creak and lurch like a ship of fools set adrift, Norma Young and Jac Alder’s venerable Dallas theater-in-the-round has consistently demonstrated its wit and energy with musicals. You might’ve expected this standard to be compromised with 1995’s Lucky Stiff, a musical farce by Stephen Flaherty…
With the release of Jane Campion’s confused Portrait of a Lady, all eyes are on the gay American novelist Henry James. In the world of popular cinema, which pits great literary artists against one another as if they were Hollywood players, James is called the next Jane Austen. Like Britain’s…
Jean Cocteau, who died in 1963 at the age of 74, was the kind of artist almost nobody takes seriously anymore. Which is to say he was a man driven by the pure urge to create, rather than possessing a command of one particular medium. He wrote poetry, novels, and…
On one of the coldest nights this winter, I am led up a curving staircase that begins in the lobby of the Dallas Theater Center’s Kalita Humphreys space. Near the top of the steps is the open door to Frank’s Place, a rehearsal space cum mini-theater named after the designer…
I must admit that I wasn’t anticipating with delight Theatre Three’s perennial holiday production of The Fantasticks. Nothing against the nice folks at T3, but I’m the kind of fellow who considers seasonal sentiment a prison sentence. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker when she was a New York stage critic for…
There were two different performances happening the Saturday night I saw Deep Ellum Opera Theatre’s production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s holiday classic Amahl and the Night Visitors. One occurred when I closed my eyes, and it was easily the most charming of the twins–the voices of the performers were alternately…
If some doubted that the 20th-century black Sunday sermon doubled as spectacular theater, a story distributed last month on the Associated Press wire should convince otherwise. Apparently, African-American evangelical Christian churches in upstate New York have become hot tourist stops for Europeans vacationing in America. Tourist buses have made Sunday…
Dallas-based performance artist Dalton James fills his newest one-man show at the Swiss Avenue Theater, Wet Willie Loves Pyro, with all kinds of personal details–failed romance, family deaths and conflicts, childhood dreams, a leaky air conditioner that nearly drives him mad. At least, we assume that these are personal issues,…
They just don’t make purely theatrical animals like Noel Coward anymore, eccentric creatures with greasepaint for blood and a gloriously pathological need to project their own cultivated persona onto every character they write and perform. Like many of the playwrights-actors-composers of his generation, Coward erased the line in his own…
There are many reasons why Jonathan Tolins’ The Twilight of the Golds should become obsolete in just a few short years–or so you think as the Dallas premiere by Littlefinger Productions unfurls in front of you. Unfortunately, this problem plagues many scripts concerning contemporary gay themes, because as the gay…
Countless playwrights have this century tackled the Spanish legend of Don Juan, the man whose insatiable appetite for women represented what could be considered the first feminist cautionary fable. Even those writers who have explored the comic possibilities in Juan’s winding trail of broken hearts have rarely ignored the serial…
Feminist literary critics have tap-danced on the grave of every dead white male in the Western canon of letters…except for William Shakespeare. Willie the Shake has by and large escaped the scorched-earth academics who have reduced the likes of Milton and Marlowe to smoking cinders. The conventional wisdom is, in…
For Dallas theatergoers, the wait is over. We get to find out what happens between Joe and Louis, Pryor and the Angel, Belize and Roy, and poor wandering, hallucinating, but strangely lucid Harper. Dallas Theater Center stuck its neck out with a highly publicized, expensively promoted production of Tony Kushner’s…
Ticket buyers who decide to attend the Undermain Theatre’s world premiere of John O’Keefe’s new play, The Deatherians, will see a sign at the door of the theater that states the following: “This play contains adult situations and extremely graphic language. For mature audiences only.” That warning is the understatement…
Cora Cardona, artistic director of Dallas’ sole seasonal Latino theater troupe, Teatro Dallas, has in the past expressed good-natured frustration about what she perceived as a clash of cultures between the traditions of Latino theater and the expectations of Anglo critics. It’s true that in recent memory neither the Observer…
Long before movie special-effects wizards combined animatronic models and animation to make animals talk, the stage endowed our fellow mammals with a human voice–and more often than not, they criticized us. Shakespeare summoned an entire forest of quasihuman animals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to remind us that the mystery…
There are some who contend that Galt McDermot, Gerome Ragni, and James Rado’s 1968 musical, Hair, nearly dealt a fatal blow to the American musical. Without the ascendancy of Stephen Sondheim and the emergence of Andrew Lloyd Webber in the 1970s, musicals would barely have scored a blip on the…
In the canon of angry white males produced by William Shakespeare, Hamlet is hardest to figure out. Richard III chokes on self-pity; Macbeth buries himself alive with ambition; Lear is felled by the family neglect born of his own megalomania. To identify exactly which of Hamlet’s peccadilloes finally undoes him…
The 1950s often are cited as this century’s watershed for American theater. It was then that Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio, whose members worshiped at the altar of a Russian psychoanalytic guru named Stanislavsky, dominated Broadway and off-Broadway headlines with a method based on recalling real-life emotional moments and transferring them…
