Ivan Turgenev had paved the way for Anton Chekhov’s seething domestic storms in 1850 with his play A Month in the Country, which concerned educated individuals vacationing at a summer home who fail to make a love connection and are rendered miserable by it. He caught great acclaim from the…
If you lie down with critics, you get up with fleas, or some such pestilence. So the winners of the 1999 Dallas Theater Critics Forum Awards can gain solace that a certain persistent itch is at least accompanied by an award for “outstanding excellence in the field of stage virtuosity,”…
I would have said that the October chill had solidified resolve in the Dallas theater community, but temperatures have reached the upper 80s and lower 90s, so there’s some other explanation for the bold confidence displayed in this month’s productions. 11th Street Theatre Project offers up one of its simplest…
Gorey Stories, the autumn production of Scott Osborne and Patti Kirkpatrick’s Our Endeavors Theater Company, is an exciting theatrical event for one reason, shared by two entities: Sitting in the audience, you are watching a company (Our Endeavors) and an institution (Deep Ellum Center for the Arts) tumble out of…
And on the subject of turning an unwieldy performance space into a suitable showcase for theater, I have to say that Teatro Dallas artistic director Cora Cardona and her design crew have made me a believer in the potential of that shoebox of a “converted” rehearsal space that resides in…
If we stage critics think our deadlines are cruel to us, they can be murder to actors — especially when a preview performance must be reviewed. Psychological preparation is everything for a stage actor, because that safety net known as “retakes” in the film world doesn’t exist on stage. The…
I think I may have discovered the perfect formula for enjoying a popcorn-throwing spoof at the Pocket Sandwich Theatre — mid-sized audience composed of a big chunk of theater people consuming moderate amounts of beer watching a script written by Dallas playwright Steve Lovett. Yes indeedy, all the stars were…
With all the recent publicity about school shootings, a story about a classroom terrorized by a sadistic, witchy substitute teacher seems quaintly anachronistic — no Goth makeup, no consciences deadened by video-game violence, just disruptive little tykes who love recess and hate homework. I couldn’t help but wonder how many…
By 1954, when English playwright-composer Sandy Wilson wrote the book, lyrics, and music for his first and only major stage success, The Boy Friend, a celebration of the 1920s, America and England were experiencing a déjà vu of decades. Folks on both sides of the Atlantic were comparing the ’50s…
The marketers of so-called “race records” — blues, rhythm and blues, and jazz recorded by black artists for black audiences in the first half of the 20th century — often conferred royalty on their headliners in an American society that made them separate and unequal in the most mundane daily…
I recently received a letter signed by “members of the theater community” about a very negative review I gave to Echo Theatre’s production of Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends. Once I recovered from what I assumed to be a shot at my masculinity (these members said I was…
I don’t know if it was apocryphal or not, but the story goes that toward the end of her life, playwright Lillian Hellman was asked after a speaking engagement why, considering that she’d taken up arms against all manner of social injustices throughout her career, she’d never explicitly endorsed the…
I was privileged to spend this past weekend in the company of not three, but five masterful women actors, if you add to Toys in the Attic the Saturday matinee I caught of Grace and Glorie at the Bath House Cultural Center. Everything about advance reviews I’d read of Tom…
If British writer Robert Cedric Sherriff became best known as the co-screenwriter for films like Goodbye Mr. Chips and The Invisible Man, that’s only because his most famous play, Journey’s End, suffers from the same historical neglect as its subject. Plano Repertory Theatre currently offers this drama about life in…
If you happen to be of the opinion that Arthur Penn’s much-praised 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde has not aged well, you will come away from Inside Bonnie Parker, a one-woman show currently playing at Fort Worth’s Circle Theatre, with the joyous feeling that your dissent has been completely justified…
I don’t visit Joe Dickinson’s Pocket Sandwich Theatre very often, but lest the readers think I’m too snobby to lob a handful of popcorn with the Pocket faithful, let me rush to confirm that I’ve desperately wanted to hurl comestibles at a few shows during the just-ended Dallas theater season…
Actor-writer-director John Turturro’s engaging, episodic, occasionally confusing look at the turn-of-the-century theater in New York, Illuminata, has all the sexual shenanigans of farce without the plot structure to give the accidents and assignations lasting impact. One image that will linger with me, however, makes its first appearance within the opening…
“Is it art or is it pornography? I don’t think it matters what you call it,” said Annie Sprinkle at the close of her sold-out Friday-night performance of The Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real. Given that art, broadly speaking, isn’t illegal, and that the vice cops in attendance at…
As the late, legendary English critic Kenneth Tynan noted in his 1977 profile of the playwright Tom Stoppard, who was only that year enjoying the first decade of his theatrical success after his early smash hit Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard is something of a rare fauna in the…
OK, let’s see a show of hands from everyone who wants to retire the phrase “performance art” from the critical lexicon. Included in the sea of upraised palms are Laurie Anderson, Tim Miller, and two Dallas writer-actors, Dalton James and John S. Davies — enough votes to spur this humble…
In 1997, former Dallas Observer staffer Kaylois Henry wrote a story examining a national phenomenon of African-American theater. Some North Texas and national black stage artists quoted in it took umbrage at the nickname that these brassy, superficial, but successful touring musicals have earned — “the chitlin circuit.” That phrase…
For 27 years now, the reputation of playwright-actor Christopher Durang has grown but not necessarily evolved, if that makes sense. Certainly, his best-known plays are produced by small professional and adventurous community theaters all over the country (he can probably afford a house in the Hamptons on the residuals from…
