Perhaps the biggest deficiency of Dallas theater is the tendency to cast performers against type. The pool of committed actors in this town is small, and chances are if you think so-and-so would be just perfect for this role, he or she is already working in someone else’s production. Sometimes…
More than a couple of times in David Mamet’s rage-and remorse-filled trilogy of scenes, The Old Neighborhood, staged by New Theatre Company, one character is stuck trying to express himself and finally just says: “Do ya know?” The other character replies: “Yeah, I know.” It’s vintage Mamet–a concession that more…
Opening night, with its mix of season subscribers, journalists, theater folk, and assorted other naysayers and wellwishers who were able to scam comp seats, always hums with energy. And the opening-night audience of Dallas Theater Center’s Alice: Tales of a Curious Girl that watched as the lights dawned on Riccardo…
Maybe it’s because the show is set in the ultra-glamorous, intrigue-ridden world of journalism. Or maybe because there’s a glaringly unnecessary subplot about clairvoyance and ghost sightings. Or perhaps my cold critical heart has begun to thaw and leak watery pink juice. For whatever reason, the latest Pegasus Theatre comedy…
Samuel Beckett has become more useful as an allusion, an adjective to qualify the heirs and pretenders of his perverse comic legacy. Rarely is the novelist-playwright spoken of as a living voice. Perhaps being widely regarded as one of the most influential theatrical sensibilities of the 20th century comes with…
There’s one moment in Global Village, the Actors’ Stock Company world premiere by playwright-collaborator Tom Grady, that arrives just before intermission and knocks the breath right out of you. I won’t be so thoughtless as to reveal it here. Suffice to say it’s the culmination of a slow tragicomic buildup…
There is one standard I hold for so-called “experimental” forms, be it in the novel or the poem or the play: Does it ripple? A delightful, now-deceased college English professor lectured at length on the phenomenon of “rippling,” and it has become an ideal bullshit detector for works whose creators…
“Racism is a device that, of itself, means nothing,” says a character from Lorraine Hansberry’s unfinished African liberation drama Les Blancs. “It is simply a means, an invention to justify the rule of some men over others.” The character, however, goes on to confuse his listener by declaring that racism…
“All women who’ve wanted to break out of the prison of consciousness…are strange monsters,” declared travel writer and poet May Sarton, “who’ve renounced the treasure of their silence for a curious, devouring pleasure.” She goes on to name Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, and Sappho as examples, so we know she’s…
It has often been written that while film is a director’s medium, theater is the province of the actor. Except for that phenomenon known as “director’s theater”–on the plus side, the current New York productions of Cabaret and Swan Lake and, on the minus side, Franco Zefferilli’s recent animal-costumed, boo-inspiring…
History has always been among my weaker subjects: I carry around gaps in my knowledge that you could drop a war or a social movement through. But it was nonetheless startling to learn that Article III of the original Constitution was a clause forbidding theater critics. Frank Rich of The…
The biggest disappointment in Dallas theater in 1998 was the conspicuous omission of the 1997 Jimmys by the winners in their artist bios on play programs. Granted, last year was the first year they were presented, so the adjective “august” doesn’t come to mind when describing their status, and granted…
My early college years found me jumping back and forth between attraction and repulsion on the question of white people co-opting black culture-or, at least, black music. On the one hand, reading liver-spotted libidinist Norman Mailer’s inadvertently hilarious early essay “The White Negro” led me to adopt this ode to…
Dallas is Larry O’Dwyer’s stomping ground, and I am the Lilliputian who scurries amid the underbrush, firing projectile adjectives at his all-terrain-vehicle feet. Well, the dream I had after seeing Theatre Three’s manically funny production of The Miser went something like that. Mr. O’Dwyer is a founding company member of…
Virtually every Dallas theater company that’s managed to hang in there more than five years has a holiday show that will, hopefully, finance the less commercial excursions of the rest of the season. December is the month when people are willing to drop cash in symbolic recognition of all the…
Beginning in the mid-’80s, the devastation of AIDS opened the floodgates of theatrical imagination, engulfing audiences across the country. The Neptune King of the genre is, of course, Tony Kushner’s two-part epic Angels in America, and although the old boy still has some fire left in him, he is doddering…
The strained relationship between theater and the Christian church didn’t begin when Terrence McNally held a press conference to announce he was painting a lavender Jesus in Corpus Christi. Way back in seventh-century Europe, church elders declared a culture war against the cross-dressing, bawdy humor, and symbolic wine-pouring that honored…
When The Dallas Morning News printed the Dallas Theater Critics Forum results on November 1, it was frisky foreplay working up to the climax of November 2, when the Dallas Theatre League distributed the 1998 Leon Rabin Awards at the Irving Arts Center. They are, of course, separate but related…
Playwright Paul Rudnick captured the contemporary public’s disdain for William Shakespeare with one utterly accurate declaration from a character in his aptly named comedy I Hate Hamlet: “It’s like algebra on stage!” Just as millions of us sat through that high school mathematical torture learning just enough to pass (or…
Italian commie provocateur Dario Fo got kicked around but good in a recent New Yorker article concerning the sometimes nasty political entanglements of the Nobel Prize’s Swiss nominating committee for literature. The 72-year-old Fo nabbed the literature award last year, but nobody seems to know why–or at least, nobody in…
Who’da thunk Dallas was ready for a revival of the revue, the late-19th-century live entertainment that might best be called “short attention span theater”? Hell, in a city where stealth police cars are employed to curtail tailgating, speeding, and other restless by-products of road rage, the question should be more…
If some actors, directors, and designers from Dallas Theater Center and the Dallas theater scene didn’t already want to restrain me atop a stone temple and yank my beating heart out like one of those S.R.O. Aztec sacrifice rituals, they will now: I’m writing a review of a preview performance…
