For its Teen Scene Festival, the DCT is reviving all four ‘issue plays’ that Linda Daugherty has written about teen problems, such as eating disorders and bullying. But it was a reading difficulty that inspired it all.

Martin McDonagh’s darkly comic plays, notably ‘The Pillowman’ and ‘The Lieutenant of Inishmore,’ have required a new level of graphic violence when it comes to stagecraft, demanding cinematic-quality special effects. Which is why WaterTower Theatre hired an expert in bloody mayhem for its production of ‘Inishmore.’

DISD has been climbing out of the arts-education hole it dug back in the ’80s and ’90s. But it’s been able to do it with outside, non-profit money — from groups like the Wallace Foundation. We look at how Little Kids Rock is bringing the power of rock — for free — to young headbangers and songwriters in DISD.

Baroque music often sounds serene, glorious, confident in praising God, king and universal order. But the 17th and 18th centuries, the period of the Baroque, saw the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, religious strife and the conquest of the New World. This month, Circle Theatre and the Fort Worth Symphony give us THAT Baroque.

“Elsewhere, Texas” is a small show, mostly just color photos of 23 projects around the state from the past decade. But in his review, Jerome Weeks says ‘small’ is part of the point. These are not big-ego, big-ticket projects. But they point to what may be our future.

The 12th annual Festival of Independent Theatres opens at the Bath House Cultural Center. FIT, as it’s called, is the oldest theater festival in North Texas. But with the city budget cuts — for the past several years, not just the new ones — FIT continues mostly through the grit and creativity of the artists.

It’s hard to imagine children interested in any toy without a video screen. But KERA’s Jerome Weeks reports a new exhibition at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History features nothing but handmade toys. No batteries required. It’s a collection of 600 dolls, masks, puppets and games from Mexico City’s Papalote Museo del Nino, designed to show the country’s folk traditions expressed in wood, tin, string and paper.

Museum curators are some of the more invisible arts managers, yet their jobs demand they be diplomats, scholars and set designers. Associate curator Heather MacDonald has become a major presence at the DMA, helming (or co-helming) three shows, two of them now running, and the third, perhaps the DMA’s most significant show this year. It has already opened to acclaim in NYC.

It looks like science fiction: On a computer screen, you create a virtual image, and you feel the shape’s texture as you do. A few hours later, you hold the solid shape in your hand. Welcome to 3D printing, a process that seems like magic. Jerome Weeks writes about 14 North Texas artists who got a chance to play wizard. Plus a video report.

Neil LaBute has been called “the bad boy of American theater,” and in staging his “Beauty” trilogy in rep, the Dallas Theater Center highlights the way LaBute moves similar characters around the chessboard of human attraction and cowardice.