Short of dropping your pants, there’s no better way of exposing yourself than by writing a work of fiction. A novel or a play is just an author’s way of lifting the lid on the bait box of his or her brain to reveal the writhing, wriggling worms within. Open…
Flinty-eyed realists–men and women to whom cant is a four-letter word–will tell you Broadway musicals are generally limp, lachrymose affairs long on surface sentiment and short on subtlety. And, of course, they will be right. Take Carnival, which opened at the Lyric Stage in Irving 35 years to the day…
Coffee houses have made a comeback. Could Jean-Paul Sartre be far behind? The Nobel prize-winning author, if not directly responsible for the reflowering of Left Bank cafes in postwar Paris, probably provided their paint-smeared patrons with more conversational grist than any other writer. His varied contributions to philosophy’s big “E”–existentialism–have…
Congratulate artistic director Gretchen Swen and her Extra Virgin Performance Cooperative, which turns 3 years old this month. Toast her not only for surviving this long in a local theater scene paralyzed by crushing audience indifference, but also for refusing to trade her integrity in the bargain. Case in point:…
The realists of this world have the romantics by the balls, but the romantics refuse to cry uncle. Instead, they produce epics like War and Peace, Moby Dick, or Angels in America–works which suggest there is some kind of overarching moral or spiritual purpose to the universe, even though the…
Leather dildos, oral sex, untamable erections.These are the kinds of objectionable subjects that right-thinking Americans want to bar from their homes via the mighty V-chip. The rest of us, however, couldn’t imagine life without them. Neither could the ancient Greeks, those pioneers of such dangerous concepts as democracy and self-expression…
Try this for an impressive balancing act: Tony Kushner, 39, the most acclaimed American playwright of his generation, can wash dishes, grind coffee beans, and sling blade-sharp observations about Marx, Brecht, and the Christian Coalition with little apparent strain. He does all three at the same time during an hour-long…
Social scientists and cultural engineers are, even as you read, racking their brains to determine why sketch comedy has reached rock bottom. Could it be that amusing situations and snappy lines are finite resources that have been exhausted? Or are all the good writers busy working on The Larry Sanders…
George Bernard Shaw had a neat response for those critics who thought his plays were talky affairs full of nothing but words. “My plays were all words,” he pronounced, “as Raphael’s paintings are all paint.” As fond as Shaw was of words in general, it was the last word he…
Should a play, like a poem, not “mean” but “be”? Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams posed that question in his preface to Camino Real, in response to the widespread bafflement that greeted the play when it was first produced in 1953. Williams concluded that drama does not enjoy the same lack…
Got any out-of-town friends, relatives, clients or other cadgers coming to visit in the next few months? If so, consider taking them to see A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline, which is playing at the Caravan of Dreams in Fort Worth through June. Not only will your guests get to…
If plays were judged by the number of literary allusions they contain, The Swan would rate high. This elliptical, enervating drama by Elizabeth Egloff is rife with references and parallels to works including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Yeat’s poem, “Leda and the Swan,” Grimm’s fairy tales, and Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Unfortunately, it takes…
For most baby boomers, Tobacco Road was one of those books which, if encountered at all, was found in dad’s dresser drawer buried beneath the boxer shorts and the scented, monogrammed hankies. Its lurid cover–usually a WTV (white trash vixen) in a dirty, strategically decaying dress–made you ponder the mysteries…
To update, or not to update? That is the question facing directors today who wish to stage classic plays. Stay true to a classic’s setting, period, costumes, and text and you risk audience indifference. Revamp a play and set it in South Central Los Angeles or on a futuristic space…
Before Stanley and Blanche and George and Martha, there was Julie and Jean. The leads in Swedish playwright August Strindberg’s gripping psychodrama Miss Julie set the pattern for modern stage couples who take turns ripping great bloody chunks from each other’s psyches. The play is considered a seminal work not…
Let’s apply a little Queer Theory to the Harry Hunsacker plays. Before beginning this instructive exercise, however, it’s necessary to explain to the benighted what the Harry Hunsacker plays are. Harry is the bumbling, narcissistic hero of a series of stage whodunits performed at the Pegasus Theater in Deep Ellum…
The first recorded theatrical performance, according to anthropologists studying Paleolithic cave paintings in Lascaux, France, was an audience-participation comedy. Several Cro Magnon hunters reenacted how Og, the tribal fool, was run through the kidney by a woolly rhinoceros during a particularly raucous foraging party. Meanwhile, the audience encouraged the players…
Is the theater really dead? Not in Big D. In fact, a quickie look at area productions in the past year shows that theater in the Metroplex is a surprisingly lively, diverse, and resilient form of entertainment. Consider the options a curious (but not impecunious) boulevardier had to choose from…
Like a remorseless killer in a grade-Z slasher flick, The Fantasticks keeps coming back. You can strafe it, bomb it, drive it over the edge of a cliff, but it will not die. Since its May 1960 opening, this small, saccharine musical has run through 10,000 off-Broadway performances, and is…
If playwrights and producers would only subscribe to the “Journal of the American Medical Association,” they wouldn’t have to waste so much time worrying about the nature of laughter and what generates it. As the journal points out, laughter is merely a matter of the levator labbi superioris muscle lifting…
What, the Dickens again at the Dallas Theater Center? You bet your suet pudding. This is DTC’s 12th annual production of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and practice, as they say, makes perfect. With enough dazzling visual effects to satisfy the Andrew Lloyd Webber whizbang crowd, and with an emotional punch…
The shadow of marital infidelity falls dark and heavy over the theater, perhaps because that subject is particularly suited to the claustrophobic confines of the stage. Audiences can sit close to actors who piece together the tortured mosaic of betrayal and be forced to question their own boundaries of love…
