Manson Family Values

“A long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody’s crazy.” Charles Manson said that. If anybody’s qualified to weigh in on crazy, it’s Charlie Manson. He’s 77 now, in his 42nd year of a life sentence. In the Ochre House theater’s chilling, strangely thrilling new show Mean, set in…

Coyote and Collapse Twist Real-life Drama into Dark Comedy

As small, intense, pull-your-hair-out comedies, the new plays Coyote and Collapse have a lot in common. Coyote, playing a few more performances at Nouveau 47’s tiny theater at the Magnolia Lounge in Fair Park, puts us out in the Arizona desert with a couple of those trigger-happy “Minutemen” militia guys…

Giant Pumps a Dry Hole

A giant of a musical opened here the other night, but it wasn’t Giant, the horseless cowpoke operetta now plodding along at the Wyly Theatre, a co-production between Dallas Theater Center and New York’s Public Theater. It was Kismet at Irving’s Lyric Stage, a four-performance concert that ticked all the…

The 2012 Festival of Independent Theatres Will See You Now

You have 35 days to get that great play you’ve been writing finished and entered in the next Festival of Independent Theatres. FITfest, as it’s redundantly known, is the quirky-wonderful midsummer showcase of new plays and small theater companies, many of which don’t have their own home spaces to perform…

Melancholy Play Will Make You Sad (About the State of Plays)

Playwright Sarah Ruhl, still in her 30s, is a favorite of the “edgy” theater companies around here. But why? Her plays are witless and obtuse, hardly worth producing, much less paying to see. Melancholy Play, one of her early works (from 2001), is on view now at Upstart Productions at…