Social scientists and cultural engineers are, even as you read, racking their brains to determine why sketch comedy has reached rock bottom. Could it be that amusing situations and snappy lines are finite resources that have been exhausted? Or are all the good writers busy working on The Larry Sanders…
George Bernard Shaw had a neat response for those critics who thought his plays were talky affairs full of nothing but words. “My plays were all words,” he pronounced, “as Raphael’s paintings are all paint.” As fond as Shaw was of words in general, it was the last word he…
Should a play, like a poem, not “mean” but “be”? Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams posed that question in his preface to Camino Real, in response to the widespread bafflement that greeted the play when it was first produced in 1953. Williams concluded that drama does not enjoy the same lack…
Got any out-of-town friends, relatives, clients or other cadgers coming to visit in the next few months? If so, consider taking them to see A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline, which is playing at the Caravan of Dreams in Fort Worth through June. Not only will your guests get to…
If plays were judged by the number of literary allusions they contain, The Swan would rate high. This elliptical, enervating drama by Elizabeth Egloff is rife with references and parallels to works including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Yeat’s poem, “Leda and the Swan,” Grimm’s fairy tales, and Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Unfortunately, it takes…
For most baby boomers, Tobacco Road was one of those books which, if encountered at all, was found in dad’s dresser drawer buried beneath the boxer shorts and the scented, monogrammed hankies. Its lurid cover–usually a WTV (white trash vixen) in a dirty, strategically decaying dress–made you ponder the mysteries…
To update, or not to update? That is the question facing directors today who wish to stage classic plays. Stay true to a classic’s setting, period, costumes, and text and you risk audience indifference. Revamp a play and set it in South Central Los Angeles or on a futuristic space…
Before Stanley and Blanche and George and Martha, there was Julie and Jean. The leads in Swedish playwright August Strindberg’s gripping psychodrama Miss Julie set the pattern for modern stage couples who take turns ripping great bloody chunks from each other’s psyches. The play is considered a seminal work not…
Let’s apply a little Queer Theory to the Harry Hunsacker plays. Before beginning this instructive exercise, however, it’s necessary to explain to the benighted what the Harry Hunsacker plays are. Harry is the bumbling, narcissistic hero of a series of stage whodunits performed at the Pegasus Theater in Deep Ellum…
The first recorded theatrical performance, according to anthropologists studying Paleolithic cave paintings in Lascaux, France, was an audience-participation comedy. Several Cro Magnon hunters reenacted how Og, the tribal fool, was run through the kidney by a woolly rhinoceros during a particularly raucous foraging party. Meanwhile, the audience encouraged the players…
Is the theater really dead? Not in Big D. In fact, a quickie look at area productions in the past year shows that theater in the Metroplex is a surprisingly lively, diverse, and resilient form of entertainment. Consider the options a curious (but not impecunious) boulevardier had to choose from…
Like a remorseless killer in a grade-Z slasher flick, The Fantasticks keeps coming back. You can strafe it, bomb it, drive it over the edge of a cliff, but it will not die. Since its May 1960 opening, this small, saccharine musical has run through 10,000 off-Broadway performances, and is…
If playwrights and producers would only subscribe to the “Journal of the American Medical Association,” they wouldn’t have to waste so much time worrying about the nature of laughter and what generates it. As the journal points out, laughter is merely a matter of the levator labbi superioris muscle lifting…
What, the Dickens again at the Dallas Theater Center? You bet your suet pudding. This is DTC’s 12th annual production of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and practice, as they say, makes perfect. With enough dazzling visual effects to satisfy the Andrew Lloyd Webber whizbang crowd, and with an emotional punch…
The shadow of marital infidelity falls dark and heavy over the theater, perhaps because that subject is particularly suited to the claustrophobic confines of the stage. Audiences can sit close to actors who piece together the tortured mosaic of betrayal and be forced to question their own boundaries of love…
Sin and redemption are the favorite themes of Janet Farrow, a skilled, intuitive adapter and a flamboyant, if sometimes overly mannered, director. Farrow imported her fierce love for classical literature from the American Shakespeare Repertory Theater in New York City to our arts-unfriendly city and created Classic Theatre Company five…
Goethe is one of those heavyweight writers (mostly Russian or German) who everyone admires but who no one reads. In fact, in these post-literate times, you can now get into Mensa just by being able to pronounce Goethe’s name correctly. You no longer have to study Cliffs Notes on Faust,…
With Ohio Tip-Off, the Dallas Theater Center takes aim at the merry dance of dreams and commerce that is professional sports. Unfortunately, it puts up an air ball. The play takes for its subject the Ohio Shakers, a team mired in the recesses of the downscale Continental Basketball Association. The…
“Back in the old days,” Chuck Carson, MC of the first annual Leon Rabin Awards was saying to a well-coiffed crowd, “Dallasites used to show their displeasure with a play by torching the theater. Now, we just don’t go.” Carson, a Dallas native and professional wiseacre, put his thumb on…
There are as many ways of looking at death as there are ways to die, and eventually we all have to pick the way that suits us best. Spanish playwright Alejandro Casona tinkers with this idea in The Lady of the Dawn, a spooky drama that fits the crepe and…
Katharine Hepburn took a lot of razzing for repeatedly rasping “The loons! The loons!” in the movie version of On Golden Pond. Insouciant young wags couldn’t help but point out that Katharine the Great was acting a bit loony herself. There’s plenty of other stuff in both the movie On…
“All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy’s famous opening lines to Anna Karenina lifted the lid on the pot of stewing emotions that exist in almost every familial setting. A lot of writers have poked around in that pot since, Arthur Miller…
