When Ochre House founder Matthew Posey gets his teeth into something, he takes big bites. For his latest play, Cicerone, he’s masticating his way through the life and loves of Tropic of Cancer author Henry Miller. As playwright, director and star of this production, Posey gives himself the best role,…

At Fort Worth’s Stage West, Texas’ brashest political commentator lives again in the one-woman play Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins. Actress Georgia Clinton portrays Ivins in the production directed by Dana Schultes. The 70-minute performance, written by twin journalists Allison and Margaret Engel, is built around…

Are we barbarians under our civilized veneers? Or are we just big babies in grown-up clothes, ready to throw tantrums when we don’t get our way? French playwright Yazmina Reza’s Tony-winning 2009 play God of Carnage (translated by Christopher Hampton) asks those and other questions about adults who should know…

Dallas writer Vicki Cheatwood’s new play Ruth is a modern retelling of the Ruth and Naomi story from the Old Testament. What Cheatwood went through personally while writing it, however, sounds more like the Book of Job. Debuting Friday, May 25, at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary as the centerpiece of…

Turns out Green Day and Molly Ivins had a lot in common. The musical American Idiot at the Winspear Opera House and the one-woman play Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins at Fort Worth’s Stage West both let their central characters rage at the rodeo clowns who…

Join the swarm at the regional premiere of the kids’ musical comedy Diary of a Worm, a Spider & a Fly, now onstage at Dallas Children’s Theater. They do things big at DCT, but this may be their biggest show yet. Directed by Bob Hess, acted by grown-up professionals, it’s…

The whiff of menace enters the room right at the top of The Birthday Party, the 1958 Harold Pinter dark comedy now on view at Deep Ellum’s Undermain Theatre. An older couple, Petey and Meg (T.A. Taylor and Mary Lang), are going about their daily breakfast ritual in the dining…

Something bugging you? Hop over to Dallas Children’s Theater to catch the regional premiere of the delightful Diary of a Worm, a Spider & a Fly. The 20-song “feeler”-good musical by Joan Cushing, directed by Bob Hess, adapts three eco-conscious children’s books by Doreen Cronin. In 105 minutes of creepy-crawly…

Matt Lyle’s new play The Better Doctor has a lot to say about the American healthcare industry. But it says it without talking. As the latest in Lyle’s series of “silent films for the stage,” Doctor keeps the actors on mute. It’s like The Artist meets ER. If only the…

For filthy fun, get your merkin to Jamie Morris’ Silence of the Clams. Uptown Players is doing the outrageous drag spoof of the movie thriller about the cross-dressing serial killer and the butch FBI trainee who tracks him down. In this version, performed in the Rose Room theater above the…

To get down with Uptown Players and Upstart Productions, you’d better be up on your movies. Both theater companies have shows right now paying homage to specific film genres. Uptown takes on the serial killer thriller with one of playwright Jamie Morris’ campy spoofs, The Silence of the Clams. It’s…

Young playwrights play the old shell game with their work these days. They write a TV sitcom pilot or a screenplay but try to pass it off as a piece for the stage. It’s easier to get plays done and theater producers are always on the prowl for the next…

Next Fall, the Geoffrey Nauffts play now running at Dallas Theater Center, presents a family acting out more issues than an episode of Dr. Phil. Mom and Dad (played by Kieran Connolly and Candy Buckley) are divorced. Dad’s an old-school Old South bigot who hates gays and minorities, but loves…

As Joni Mitchell sings it, “sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” That’s sort of the story of what happened to the play Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home, written by Texas actress and playwright Mary Rohde Scudday in the 1970s, when she was 24, and produced back…

Adam and Luke are the odd couple Neil Simon didn’t write. Funny, gay and in love, they’re the couple at the center of Geoffrey Nauffts’ tragicomic Next Fall, now onstage at Kalita Humphreys Theater. The Dallas Theater Center production was staged by artistic director Kevin Moriarty and features six damn…

A new musical with a book by Joe DiPietro opened this week on Broadway. It’s called Nice Work If You Can Get It and it stars Matthew Broderick and Kelli O’Hara singing Flapper Era songs by George and Ira Gershwin. The New York Times’ critic Ben Brantley compared it to…

With its second festival of new plays starting Thursday, Nouveau 47 can now call it an “annual” event. The theater company in Margo Jones’ old space at the Magnolia Lounge, Fair Park, regards their outfit as a “gym for playwrights,” with special focus on developing and polishing scripts for production…

The incident at the heart of the fact-based Erik Ehn play Diamond Dick: The Tulsa Race Riots of 1921 is as trivial as, say, a teenager walking home from a corner store with some Skittles in his hand. The Project X production of this skillfully staged one-act continues through this…

There’s only one mystery in Theatre Three’s latest, The Art of Murder, and that is how it ever made it onto a professional stage. Sans suspense but with beaucoup bits of flat, witless writing, the two-act play is the work of Joe DiPietro, perpetrator of the dreckola musical I Love…

There may not be another 3-1/2-hour play that says as much about contemporary family life, and says it with such gritty realism, as Tracy Letts’ explosive, hilarious August: Osage County. Director René Moreno’s fine production up at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre winds up its three-week run April 22. It’s a chance…