Margaret Fuller was an American feminist pioneer. She was a literary ally of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau — she edited the literary journal of the Transcendentalist movement. Doesn’t sound like the subject for a fanciful new comedy? No? But happily, that’s what Kitchen Dog delivers.
Playwright Annie Baker is only 29, but she’s already had a Boston festival of her small-town New England comedies. WaterTower Theatre presents the area premiere of ‘Circle Mirror Transformation’ – wherein Baker’s gentle minimalism meets the power of a community-center drama class to mess up your personal life. Jerome Weeks reviews.
After a Tarleton State University student production of Terrence McNally’s “gay Jesus” play, ‘Corpus Christi,’ was cancelled, after a Fort Worth theater offered to stage the production and then rescinded the offer, after all the controversy, a long-running touring version made its debut Friday at the Cathedral of Hope.
The Fort Worth Opera took a daring departure from tradition with the world premiere of ‘Before Night Falls’ on Saturday. But any hope that the new opera would rival the success of Dallas’ recent ‘Moby-Dick’ was dashed before the lengthy first act was finished.
The triple Tony Award-winning musical comedy about puppets getting drunk and having sex comes to the Winspear. It works as more than just a smart-mouthed satire of Bert and Ernie, says Jerome Weeks, more than just an R-rated spoof of ‘Sesame Street.’
It looks wrong, but it’s not. The elongation of that stone face is not the fault of the photo. Contemporary Spanish artist Jaume Plensa deliberately distorts his busts of young women like that. And it’s those alabaster heads — eleven of them, six feet tall — that are the fascinating achievements in his new show, Genus and Species, at the Nasher Sculpture Center.
Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play finally comes to Texas, and Estelle Parsons gets to play the meanest-mouthed matriarch since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The drug-fueled, obscenity-strewn decline of an Oklahoma family eventually goes over the top, but the more-than-three-hour trip there is hilarious and harrowing.
Weird science, that is. In Port Twilight, playwright Len Jenkin creates a surreal city in which different visions of the future are being sought out and decoded: genetic, messianic and cinematic. The Undermain Theater’s splendid world premiere is a dark, comic carnival where scientists dance, an alien speaks, a rabbi despairs and a shlocky filmmaker worries about getting the future right. Jerome Weeks reviews.
Of course, you’ve probably read (or heard about) Edwin Heathcote’s takedown of the entire Arts District in the Financial Times. A tad overstated, perhaps, because Heathcote sees no viable model for a city except the classic European one: Dallas’ downtown, he writes, “is a melange of defunct US tropes: mirror-glazed blank-slab offices, massive multi-storey carparks, [...]
KERA radio review: Expanded online review: How to Sell: I love the title with its echoes of business advice books. It’s easy to imagine someone picking up Clancy Martin’s novel to get tips on closing a deal – only to get a shock. But I hope the book buyer will keep reading. How to Sell [...]
