“If God had meant us to think with our wombs, then why did he give us a brain?” You have to chew on that, one of playwright Clare Boothe Luce’s most famous quotes, for a while, and even then, you’re still not sure what you’re tasting. I interpret it as…
There is a wonderful collision of the best of theatrical possibilities in Christmas at Ground Zero, especially at this time of year. It offers real emotion, not mere sentiment; short bursts of inspiration, not two-act platitudes; and genuinely surprising subject matter woven into a holiday context, rather than rote tales…
Over the last few years, I’ve seen David Sedaris — that little smart-ass — read his work at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary, Southern Methodist University, Crossroads Market, and the Dallas Museum of Art. So I don’t consider myself just a fan of his, but an enlisted member in his unholy…
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One of the most impressive things about Art isn’t that it won a Tony and an Olivier and an Evening Standard, blah blah blah, but that the script has legs long enough to carry it across the world. Since Yasmina Reza’s play debuted in France in the mid-’90s, it has…
It’s not really unusual for gay men 35 and under never to have owned a single Bette Midler album. All joking aside, she really is a generational benchmark, beloved as much for her rise at a time when gay sex was healthy and plentiful as for her innocent bawdiness. I…
My slightly freaked-out attitude toward puppet shows (the more fluid and effective the puppeteers, the bigger the freak-out) is perhaps best explained by historical example. The Roman Catholic Church once relied heavily on puppets as evangelical devices used to illustrate Biblical stories about the birth and death of Christ and…
With all the accolades showered on a young Joe Orton (the very acclaim that, in part, caused lover Kenneth Halliwell’s silver hammer to come down upon the 34-year-old playwright-novelist’s head) during the mid-’60s, more than 30 years passed after his murder before the wicked farceur received his most fitting tribute…
When Broken Glass, Arthur Miller’s glimpse at the intersection of marriage and world community responsibility, opened in New York in 1994, it closed quickly after receiving mixed to horrible reviews. London audiences and critics, a few years later, bruised their palms in riotous ovations. I’m not sure what this reaction…
More often than not, I think Harold Bloom’s a pompous ass — except when it comes to his complaints about live Shakespeare, and then, he’s spot on. In his book The Invention of the Human, Bloom insists — as I do, which, of course, makes him right this one time…
The program notes for Absurd Person Singular, the latest show by New Theatre Company, are ominous, and they seem to confirm rumors that’ve been circulating since before Bruce Coleman resigned as New Theatre artistic director to take a staff position at Theatre Three. It appears that after seven seasons, new…
Pegasus Theatre brings us Eric Coble’s comedy with a few of the company’s patented missteps — comic styles that jar and occasionally grate when blended onstage — intact. But the script is so sturdy and compassionate, and the best performances are so filled with a variety of pleasurable little moments,…
I know I’m not the only critic in Dallas who was startled by the announcement that Kitchen Dog artistic director Dan Day had chosen Chris Carlos to play the title role in Othello. Carlos is one of the most charismatic performers working on our stages, a fellow who radiates good…
“I had a very passionate temper,” Victorian poet Christina Rossetti once wrote to an intimate about her childhood. “On one occasion, being rebuked by my dear Mother for some fault, I seized a pair of scissors and ripped up my arm to vent my wrath.” It is perhaps a classic…
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…
