If you think of history as a big bowl of Neapolitan ice cream–and I do, all the time–then it’s funny how journalists and scholars become anal-retentive malt-shop clerks, slicing up the parallel layers and serving them in separate containers. Epochs, movements, controversies, regimes, and ideologies all melted into each other…
Critics and stage artists will ever have a dysfunctional, back-stabbing, roller-coaster relationship. Unlike, say, movie critics, whose opinions can be reassessed throughout the foreseeable future with one trip to the video store, the words of theater pundits celebrate or sting a little more because they are often the only available…
It’s a pretty sad state when a playwright has caricatured herself by the time her most successful script gets worldwide attention. Former SMUtant Beth Henley had not only cornered the market in eccentric, obsessive Southern women when Crimes of the Heart was first being produced everywhere, she appeared to be…
As a tardy replacement for Theatre Quorum’s previously announced second production this season (they ran into casting problems with a Marsha Norman script), Joe Egg is a peculiar selection. Almost everyone has heard of Peter Nichols’ 1967 script–though perhaps not with its original title, A Day in the Death of…
A cast member of How the Other Half Loves, the latest Alan Ayckbourn farce frothing at Theatre Three, reports that they are in a situation similar to the cast of Joe Egg–a bunch of Americans playing with British lilts in the midst of an authentic Brit. “She catches us on…
When William Shakespeare wrote King Lear (it appeared at the Royal Court in 1606, among his first tragedies) he was obsessed with sight, what it means to see, and the ways that faculty deceives and reveals. That’s arguably the dominant theme in his tale about an imperious but feeble king…
What right do theatergoers have to expect two very different individuals–folks of vastly divergent age, experience, political, and religious sensibilities–to cross the chasm and embrace? Of course, we’ve come not just to expect such a thing to occur on stage, but to view it as a ticketbuyer’s privilege, if only…
Frank’s Place, the rehearsal facility at Dallas Theater Center’s Kalita Humphreys Theatre that is often rented for performance, was almost tropical last Saturday night, since so many bodies were pressed in such close proximity to watch short productions from Soul Rep’s Fifth Annual New Play Festival. Downstairs at the box…
The October of my sophomore year in high school, a small group of friends and I drove a short way outside Dallas to a haunted house called something like “Eternal Torture” or “Infinite Terror” or “The House of Endless Screams.” We should have been clued in to the experience that…
In 1995, a former Jesuit priest and scholar in Eastern languages published a religious study that has since become indispensable to Christians, agnostics, and pagans alike–a book that undertook a witty, irreverent, somewhat distant, but astringently observant investigation of all the sex, blood, pestilence, smiting, betrayal, and vengeance in the…
All you dumb asses who attend a Pocket Sandwich Theatre show with the desire to disorder the performers by pelting them with popcorn, beware: The actors have a unique opportunity for revenge in 20,000 Babes Beneath the Sea, and they seize it. I won’t reveal it here, but let’s just…
Here’s my final report from the Second Annual Festival of Independent Theatres. Taken with last week’s review, I hope it will give an accurate account of the scope and ambition of a city event that has risen to eminence in a very short time: Echo Theatre revives a one-act by…
There’s enough new and engrossing theater between Dallas and Fort Worth that I don’t usually get the chance to review the same play twice when one area company opts to produce a script that another has recently staged. When I do see the same author’s work interpreted by two very…
But any resentment has been set aside for what has evolved, in only two years, into a jaw-droppingly disciplined arrangement of quality fare. I saw four shows in five consecutive hours on my first go-round at the festival, and my butt didn’t ache once. The frequent breaks helped, of course–never…
Artists often accuse critics of being frustrated performers, as a way to counter the opinions they don’t like–he/she wouldn’t have the guts to get up there and do what I do. It’s true that I flirted with actorly ambitions in high school and college, but I never wanted to publicly…
How many regular patrons of Dallas Summer Musicals will wander innocently into Parade, the latest imported presentation, with images inside their heads of cheerfully tacky floats, colorful twirling parasols, and the painted round faces of children? This very new musical from playwright Alfred Uhry, director Harold Prince, and composer Jason…
A lot of people love Billy Wilder’s 1957 movie version of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution, if only for the chance to see Marlene Dietrich hag it up as the mysterious crone who delivers incriminating letters to a murder defendant’s attorney. Her dual role gave away the film’s most…
My philosophy is, if I throw enough words against the wall about how you should get out of the recliner and support your city theater artists, some of ’em have gotta stick. But this week, your second assignment is to head out to the coolest video/DVD store near you and…
As the opening-night world premiere of Fugitive Pieces progressed, I couldn’t shake the idea that playwright Caridad Svich was less inspired by Samuel Beckett–Waiting for Godot, specifically–than liable for intellectual theft under some copyright law. Anything worth having is worth stealing, as a colleague once observed, but the showcase production…
As the opening-night world premiere of Fugitive Pieces progressed, I couldn’t shake the idea that playwright Caridad Svich was less inspired by Samuel Beckett–Waiting for Godot, specifically–than liable for intellectual theft under some copyright law. Anything worth having is worth stealing, as a colleague once observed, but the showcase production…
Some 2,400 years after it was first staged at the midsummer Dionysus festival in Athens, The Trojan Women is oft resurrected as a pacifist theatrical statement. That’s understandable. The show is grueling in its depiction of the agonies of women and girls who suddenly find themselves rounded up and treated…
Southern Methodist University professor emeritus Margaret Loft directs three prodigiously able and alert actresses through a cataclysmic afternoon and evening in the life of one of Great Britain’s most influential psychoanalysts. Mrs. Klein happens to be Melanie Klein, the Austrian Jewish titan who strode into The British Analytical Society in…
