Don’t ask why, but about two years ago I found myself on a tour of a hospital located at the base of the Appalachian mountains. The hospital’s administrator, a Catholic nun, was explaining some of the unique pathologies seen at the facility, most of them derived from the effects of…
It’s one of the enduring enigmas of great literature. Why did Archie have such a fixation on Veronica, and such little regard for Betty, when the two females (hair color aside) were virtually identical? Why didn’t he just glom on to both of them? The timeless conundrum of sexual attraction…
When I die, let me come back as a guest in an English country home as depicted by Noel Coward or P.G. Wodehouse. Let there be plenty of potty English gentry about the place and calm, competent butlers named Jeeves or Jenkins to straighten out the inevitable romantic imbroglios. Let…
Cecil O’Neal, director of Kitchen Dog Theater’s pressure-cooker production of Oleanna, proclaims in the playbill that “no one is right in this play…Both characters are flawed.” Bullshit, Cecil. The dude is right, and the chick is wrong. You know it, I know it, and any one who sees this play…
Back in the ’60s there was a TV show called The Time Tunnel about two guys with military haircuts who get hurled through a time-space-continuum contraption and land in a different era each week. The first thing they had to do was figure out in what epoch they were, but…
It’s a debate that dates back to at least Plato’s time. What is reality–that which we can objectively perceive and quantify with our senses, or that which we interpret through our subjective and particular points of view? Teatro Dallas takes a crack at this timeless conundrum in Tales From the…
The one thing we all have in common is our separateness. Once launched from the womb, we are all so many Ishmaels seeking connection to a larger whole. Some people seem to feel this sense of isolation and rootlessness more keenly than others. For Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August…
What is it with Texas actresses and product endorsements gone wrong? First Brenda Vaccaro rasped about the absorbent properties of tampons, then Sandy Duncan chirped about the healthy, wholesome taste of Wheat Thins in TV ads that have hung like albatrosses around their necks ever since. Vaccaro couldn’t get arrested…
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…
