Kent Williams as Mr. Argento with Tomas, his pet monkey

• Lawson Taitte's review for the Dallas Morning News

• Alexandra Bonifield's review for Critical Rant & Rave

• KERA radio review:

• Expanded online review:

The Undermain Theater is presenting the world premiere of Len Jenkin’s dark comedy, Port Twilight. The play follows several storylines as they trail through the city – and all involve what might be called messages and 'alien contact.' Our narrator-guides to the city of Port Twilight are two out-of-work cabaret performers. They work day jobs at an outfit called OPME (Off-Planet Message Exchange), where they monitor interstellar radio noise for messages from other planets. A rogue biochemist angrily quits his job but soon gets hired by a cheesy filmmaker to work on his latest sci-fi script. It’s about travelling to another planet. And a despairing old rabbi, played by Bruce DuBose, wanders the city streets, peddling amulets and trying to call down the Messiah.

Ian Sinclair and Bruce DuBose, l to r

DUBOSE: “The desperate citizens of Port Twilight no longer believe in the holy names. They’ll starve me to death. No matter. After tonight, all will be changed and the End of Days will be upon us.”

Give a dozen designers the task of creating sets for all this, and the majority would try to replicate some aspect of the city, Port Twilight. They’d be foolish. They’d have to compete with playwright Len Jenkin’s fantastical language, the way his dialogue conjures a shadowy cityscape out of noir movies like Nightmare Alley. But then, his Port Twilight is also deeply surreal like something out of a Fellini film, with wax museums, an organ grinder and an old park –

DACK AND DONNA (the play's narrators): — “beyond the park, Raven Laboratories.
“And the limestone caves where gypsies live. Beyond the caves, the Dark Forest.”
“ Leopards.”
“Wolves.”
[Howling and music fade]

So – what John Arnone did for the Undermain production was skip the whole mythic city and delve straight into Jenkin’s sources of inspiration. Jenkin’s play is a sci-fi noir spinning out various futures: technological, religious and extraterrestrial. It mixes ancient Hebrew predictions with space maidens and genetic experiments. As a result, for the scenery, Arnone has wrapped the Undermain’s entire basement with a long canvas backdrop. He’s had it painted with big, bold images from movie posters, tattoo parlors, Mexican wrestlers' masks and Japanese comics (kudos to painters Linda Noland and Terry Hays). Even some of the scientific instruments used on stage are assemblages of Buddha heads, doll parts and vinyl hosing. The whole production has a neon, trash-culture aesthetic that suits both the play's noir and sci-fi elements, both the future and the decaying past. Think: extremely low-rent Bladerunner.

I’ve gone on about the production design like this partly because not many small stage companies have a Tony Award-winning designer like Arnone. And partly because so much of Port Twilight works on the level of texture, atmosphere and mood. It’s a mood of apocalyptic dread shot through with a vaudeville-baroque delight in theatricality and humor. At one point, we see a line of lab-coated scientists observing the orange flash of an explosion. The next time we see them, they’re a chorus line dancing stone-faced to the music of the “Science Dance.”

[music]

Jessica Cavanagh, Ariana Cook, Josh Blann and Christian Taylor, l to r

Directed by Katherine Owens, the Undermain’s production — everything from DuBose's music to Jeffrey Frank's video design — is a marvelous, funky, pop-culture collage. The cast is strong, including DuBose in two roles (rabbi and filmmaker), Kent Williams in a variety of comic cameos and Christian Taylor as a spookily opaque Messiah. Josh Blann has an electric presence as the spiked-hair biochemist, and Jonathan Brooks and Shannon Kearns-Simmons do a nice job, playing our showbizzy, tour-guide couple who can seem cheerful, sinister and clueless by turns.

The staging's only weaknesses are an occasional lack of poignance, of a human dimension that would let us feel something more for several of these characters, make them more than quick, comic types. A romance, for instance, between Blann's biochemist and a hired-academic screenwriter (Ariana Cook) seems to pop up out of nowhere. For his part, Jenkin has also researched and loaded in so many futuristic scenarios that the best Owens can do sometimes is just have characters stand there and swap ideas about mind-altering nanobots.

A nanobot is a microscopic machine. The theory is that thousands could eventually be injected directly into our brains and they’d shape our senses, our ideas. Language itself is a kind of mind-altering nanobot, and thanks to the Undermain, thanks to Len Jenkin’s language, Port Twilight makes for a haunting, mind-altering experience.

Heeeere's Auteurism! Chris Hury plays a desperate filmmaker and Martha Harms is his would-be starlet

• David Novinski's review for Renegade Bus
  

• Review by Mark Lowry for Theater Jones

• Review by Lawson Taitte for Dallas Morning News

• Review by Alexandra Bonifield for Critical Rant & Rave

In Allison Moore's stage thriller, Slasher, when we first meet a low-budget moviemaker named Marc Hunter, he's in a Hooters-style joint in Round Rock. He's trading film-school insights about horror films with Jody, a worshipful movie geek who wants to be his assistant (Drew Wall).

What is truly scary, Hunter tells Jody, about director Tobe Hooper's original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) is not Leatherface, the masked, mass-murdering maniac who inspired a hundred Michael Meyers and Jason Voorhees knockoffs. No, it's the family — the carnival of freaks who inhabit the old farmhouse with Leatherface. Chainsaw is a takedown of the locked-together, backwoods, American nuclear family and its inherent horrors.

Many theatergoers may think Hunter is blowing cineaste hot air here, trying to inflate a classic bit of gory, grade-Z movie fun with a lot of trendy academic pretension. But Hunter is actually offering a long-established analysis of Chainsaw — and one that neatly sets up the  family conflicts that will come soon enough in Slasher. Playwright Allison Moore clearly knows her stuff, particularly the details and mythology surrounding Hooper and Chainsaw. Round Rock, for instance, is just a smidgen north of where Hooper shot his film — in an empty farmhouse off I-35 in Pflugerville (set-decorated by the late Robert Burns, whom I knew in Austin).

But here's the problem: Marc Hunter actually is being mocked in Slasher. As ably played by Chris Hury in the Kitchen Dog Theater production, he's another Hollywood creep, a smarmy, lecherous moviemaker, desperate to save his dying career by helming his own splatterific entry, Bloodbath. Indeed, some of the better comic moments onstage in Slasher come when  Hunter's sorry, self-loving self gets zinged.

Hunter's remarks on Chainsaw — and how we're meant to view them — begs the larger question: What does Moore herself think of Chainsaw — and of the horror genre in general? You can't tell from Slasher. The play is clever, and a smart take on the topic ("The Horror Film Nexus: Excitement or Exploitation?") would be more than welcome. But for all of its attempts to delight in the happy carnage of the horror film — while also spoofing it and critiquing it seriously — Slasher is a muddle, a bloodbath of unresolved contradictions.

One way to understand the play is as a battle between second- and third-wave feminism, a tug-of-war over women's roles and self-determination in pop culture.  At the Hooter-ish joint, Marc hits on a young waitress, Sheena (Martha Harms), and convinces her that she'd be perfect for his film as the "last girl," the one who conventionally survives the maniac's onslaught. For her part, Sheena sees Bloodbath as her ticket out of her deadend job and out of her constricting family situation. She's supporting both a younger sister (Rebekah Kennedy) and their wheelchair-bound, painkiller-addicted mom. (Where the cannibal family in Chainsaw is all-male, the one in Slasher is all-female.)

For her part, though, Mom hates everything about Bloodbath. And she will do anything, including murder, to stop it.

Correct! That Hand Is Holding a Beer. Now Guess  What's in My Other Hand.  Harms, Wall, Kennedy, Hury and Leah Spillman, l to r, with Hassler avec machete

That's because Mom views the contemporary horror film with horror. Sheena sees slasher films as cheap thrills and sees herself as a bright, resourceful, free agent, choosing to scream and show some skin in order to get ahead (Harms is perfectly believable in this). But for her mother, Saw and Hostel and their gore-porn ilk are pure, patriarchal rape-by-entertainment; they're debasing exercises in sadism and sexism. Mom — played with unrelenting ferocity by Lisa Hassler — merges two types: the terrifying, repressive mother-figure from horror movies (see Carrie, Friday the 13th and even Psycho) and the cliched, old-school feminist, the humorless, sexless hag from, oh, a thousand cartoons, TV sitcoms and conservative talk-show portrayals.

All right, so Mom is an over-the-top caricature. Slasher is an over-the-top play –  staged with riproaring enthusiasm by Kitchen Dog director Tina Parker and her designers (Clare Floyd DeVries, Suzanna Lavender and Christina Vela). But unlike the caricature of Hunter, the director-lecher, the caricature of Mom is not particularly amusing. To add to her unpleasantness, Mom sees herself as a repeated victim (hence, the wheelchair). Wonderful. She's a raging whiner.

Nevertheless — like Hunter — some of what Mom says about Hollywood is quite true: the way the CSI and Law & Order franchises, for example, always seem to have a sexy prostitute-topless dancer-supermodel for a murder victim.

So how are we to take her analysis of the horror film? Shrill Puritanism or rigorous attack on masculine rage and profiteering? Interestingly, at one point, Mom turns to her traditional political enemy — anti-abortion Christian radicals — for help in shutting down the Bloodbath movie set. In other words, when playwright Moore needs to, she can ingeniously mix together unexpected ideological slants. But beyond ramping up the narrative tension with a violent, on-camera showdown of her trio — mother, daughter and director — Moore never really settles anything in their argument. She opts instead for the kind of wink-wink, contrived plot twists on which horror films often rely for their cliffhangers and denouements.

In all of this, of course, I sound very much like Hunter in that first scene, intellectualizing an experience that should be bypassing my brain and jolting me with laughs and frights. Yet this underscores what may be Slasher's greatest weakness: It's not that funny. Or rather, it's not funny enough, not clever enough for me to set aside  how these conflicting takes on the genre don't resolve. It's telling that some of the better laughs come when Jody must step in to play Bloodbath's own Leatherface, wearing a ghoulish mask, flashing a knife, threatening the torn and trapped Sheena — all the while exclaiming,  "Oh, I, ah, gee, I'm — sorry."

It's telling because Jody is deflationary. His little, nebbishy yelps are a surprise. He seems to have stumbled on this  movie set from some other, funnier play.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

A native of Peru, Fort Worth Symphony music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya has found a way to preserve and showcase the orchestral music of his country — and the other Latin American countries that were once part of the Incan Empire. He has started a series of concerts and recordings called Caminos del Inka — "Trails of the Incans." It features three centuries of music — from dance numbers written down by an 18th century Spanish cleric to Enrique Iturrigia's homage to Igor Stravinsky and contemporary Peruvian composers. The first CD was released earlier this year, titled Inti, the name of the sun in Quechua, the language of the Incans.

Harth-Bedoya has brought his multi-media presentation to other cities, including Chicago. But he returns to Bass Hall this weekend with the FWSO and a concert version.

Charles Dutton in Honeydripper

• KERA radio review:

• Extended online review:

On Saturday — for one night only — Charles Dutton performed his one-man show at Tarrant County College. It's  an autobiographical show — From Jail to Yale — Serving Time on Stage — and unlike many celebrities, Dutton has actually led a life well worth the recounting. But it wasn't his life story that made the evening so memorable.

People may know the Emmy Award-winning actor from TV shows like his old Fox sitcom Roc (he also directed the outstanding HBO mini-series, The Corner). But Dutton first made his name as an actor in the late August Wilson’s stage dramas, notably Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. In 1990, I was lucky enough to see him on Broadway in Wilson’s The Piano Lesson.

In fact, Dutton and Wilson’s joint efforts were one of those rare moments in American theater history. A major new dramatist found his stage voice through a major new actor. It was like Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando. Or David Mamet and Joe Mantegna. Seriously: Dutton went a long way toward defining the Wilson protagonist, the young black male trying to fight his way out of the painful legacies of the past — his own, his family's, his race's. They are haunted, burdened but determined — sometimes tragically determined — men.

So getting to see Dutton in Tarrant County College’s Joe Rushing Theater — presented by the Fort Worth alumnae of Delta Sigma Theta — was a remarkable opportunity. Rushing has only 256 seats; it's not much larger than Theatre 3 in Dallas — that’s how intimate it was. Halfway through, you could see Dutton had already sweated through his shirt. That’s how hard he was working. The evening — as a coherent piece of theater — is pretty much two pieces with not much linkage: half-life story, half-acting-demo.

Dutton does have an amazing life story. A hard-knock child of the East Baltimore streets, he’s a twice-convicted felon — once for manslaughter, once for assaulting a prison guard. Yet he wound up graduating from the Yale School of Drama. His salvation was an anthology of black playwrights that he mistakenly grabbed just as he was being thrown into solitary confinement (he'd wanted to grab Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth). By the light filtering under his cell door, Dutton managed to read Douglas Turner Ward's comedy, A Day of Absence. He found the play so funny, he set about creating a theater troupe to stage it for the prison's talent show. Mercifully, as he noted, back then, we were still serious about rehabilating criminals instead of just incarcerating them: Dutton simply had to convince the warden he was serious by getting his GED. He eventually earned a two-year associate's degree.

Charles Dutton (left) in the Yale Rep premiere of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

But as engaging as all this was — and as entertaining as Dutton was in relating what must, to him, be very familiar stories — the real payoff came in the show’s second half. Dutton performed scenes from August Wilson’s dramas – including a sizable chunk of Ma Rainey, in which he played four different members of Ma's band. He also played Loomis from Joe Turner's Come and Gone and Boy Willie from The Piano Lesson. It was like watching George C. Scott at the top of his game take a walk through his greatest hits.

Dutton can be that compelling onstage. That's because in prison, what Dutton had discovered wasn’t just theater. From his very first performance, he realized he could command an audience’s attention. But his tremendous stage presence isn’t just a matter of his burly size or voice. It’s that he’s fearless and utterly committed to the part, even if it's a wise old storyteller like Toledo from Ma Rainey.

And on Saturday in Fort Worth, Dutton was spellbinding.

The Globe, the Rose, the Theatre: They're some of the most famous names in the history of theater, yet we didn't really even know what they looked like until a Dutch drawing of one theater interior was found in 1888. It also turns out that the theaters themselvers were hardly fixed in some classic form. They were often hastily improvised, "ongoing projects" — with parts added on as needed. Or as the competition dictated.

One point, for example, that Julian Bowsher, senior archaeologist with the Museum of London, discussed during the Boshell Family Lecture on Archaeology at the Dallas Museum of Art, was the changes affected at the Rose (about which much more is known than the Globe). The Rose apparently took shape in 1587 without a fixed roof over the stage. Later, its circular shape was seriously altered — because a stage roof was added. That meant the sightlines along the sides had changed.  In effect, a flat-front proscenium stage had become a thrust stage — which is what the later Globe adopted.  The roof, Bowsher pointed out, also now permitted new "special effects." It could hold pulleys for "gods" to fly in and out. These explanations, Bowsher said, were arrived at partly through consultations with working actors.

To give some idea of the dimensions of the Elizabethan stage: At 75 feet across, the Rose's was a little smaller than the current stage at the Wyly Theatre. As for seating, the Wyly holds fewer than 600. The Globe? It held somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000. Imagine the lungs it took to be heard in the balconies' back rows.

Bowsher is the author of The Rose Theatre: An Archaeological Discovery and a new book, The Rose and the Globe (to be released in December). He spoke with Krys Boyd for Think.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

The Undermain Theater opens its 26th season Nov. 14 with the Len Jenkin play, Port Twilight, or The History of Science. The Undermain is the only Deep Ellum stage company founded in the '80s that still survives — still in Deep Ellum.

We took the occasion to talk with Katherine Owens, one of the founding members and the company's artistic director. Owens has directed more than 60 stage productions, including ones in LA, Europe and off-Broadway. She spoke about the Undermain's intractable but invaluable basement space, the sci-fi future that exists in Port Twilight, choosing playwrights for their language and her company's own Campaign for the Future.

Cedric Neal as Puck and Matthew Steven Tompkins as Oberon

• Lawson Taitte's review in the Dallas Morning News

• Critical Rant & Rave review by Alexandra Bonifield

• Laura Noble's review in SMU's Daily Mustang

• Mark Lowry's review for Theater Jones

• Joan Arbery's review for Renegade Bus

• Elaine Liner's review for the Dallas Observer

• Mary Clark's review for Pegasus News

• Arnold Wayne Jones' review for the Dallas Voice

• Renegade Bus compares/contrasts the DTC Midsummer and the University of Dallas Midsummer

• KERA radio review:

• Expanded online review:

For its debut in its new home in the Wyly Theatre, the Dallas Theater Center has taken William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream — and pumped up the volume.

[music from Keri Hilson's “Knock You Down”]

Despite his efforts with adding music to the play, Theater Center artistic director Kevin Moriarty hasn’t really made a musical comedy out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

He’s made a dance party re-mix.

Moriarty uses big pop hits – like “Knock You Down” by Keri Hilson and “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas – to inject a lot of high energy into this Midsummer. And he’s got youthful energy here as well. He’s filled out the cast with students from Southern Methodist University and Booker T. Washington Arts Magnet High School. So Shakespeare’s magical comedy of troubled lovers and troublesome fairies undergoes a kind of urban dance club overhaul. We get bubble machines, squirt guns, graffiti art and lots of audience participation.

This Midsummer is colorful, it’s physical, it’s fast. But it also lacks subtlety — to say the least. Moriarty has seriously cut and re-written Shakespeare's text. In perhaps his biggest change, he's dropped the entire sub-plot of the changeling child, the cause of the break-up of Oberon and Titania, the king and queen of the fairies. He covers this hole, for instance, by replacing "Indian boy" — a reference to the child — with "donkey boy," an unmetrical joke about Bottom being turned into an ass.

Other changes are more trivial, which actually makes them puzzling on occasion. Why does Bottom announce that the play he and his fellow mechanicals have devised for the nuptial feast at the end is not "preferred" — Shakespeare's original term — but "chosen"? What difference does it make?

In any event, I don’t object to cutting Shakespeare on principle. It's far more significant that in his direction, Moriarty has streamlined the characters and emotions of any darkness or doubts. This Midsummer's pell-mell race never pauses, never complicates. We don't encounter much that's truly heartfelt or thoughtful. By the end, passion's blindness, the bitter war between the sexes, these all get quickly resolved with Nerf guns. Would that we could.

Matt Tallman, Rukhmani Desai, Lee Trull as troubled lovers

Matthew Tompkins and Liz Mikel do manage one tender moment when they reconcile as the quarreling fairy king and queen. Kudos to them. Cedric Neal and Abby Seigworth are also likable as Puck and Helena. And once again, we get to enjoy Neal's terrific singing voice, previously showcased in last year's Tommy.

But we're more aware of these actors’ exertions as triathletes. Moriarty shows off the Wyly’s many levels and stairs by turning the space into an elaborate aerobicise center. The frantic cast runs and clambers and spins and climbs.

And then they dance-dance-dance.

[music from I Gotta Feeling – including the exhortation, “Jump on that sofa.”]

“Jump on that sofa.” Yes, this is a celebration — and a welcome one. With the Wyly, the Theater Center has a new home at last. Moriarty uses Shakespeare’s royal wedding party (and the blessing of the house) at the end of Midsummer to mark the occasion. The play may well have been written for an aristocratic wedding; the rituals chime with the moment at the Wyly. He’s also cast Robyn Flatt as Egeus, a mother of one of the young lovers (originally, Egeus is a father). Flatt, of course, is the head of the Dallas Children’s Theater. She’s also the daughter of Paul Baker. He was the founding artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center, and he died last Sunday. So the theater company’s past and its future are wedded here.

But by the end, one begins to feel less a sense of joy than of overkill. Chamblee Ferguson is one of our finest local actors, and he plays Bottom, Shakespeare’s great and touching comic creation. (As a member of the amateur acting company that puts on a play for the royal wedding feast, Bottom is also Shakespeare's most significant font of acting lore outside of Hamlet — not for nothing is the gentle Bottom rewarded with a most rare vision that he also, poignantly, loses.) But when Bottom must perform his tragical-comical-heroical death in the play, Moriarty has Ferguson die again and again and again, trying to top each death scene with something ever more outlandish. It's classic comic shtick and a bravura moment for Ferguson, but it's more than a little hammered home.

And then Moriarty actually has Marcus Mauldin as Flute, the bellows-mender, try to top that.

This betrays a certain –  insecurity. As with the climbing and the comedy, Moriarty can't seem to leave well enough alone, doesn't trust the text: The audience is being pummeled into enjoyment. After all, it’s one thing to end Midsummer – as Shakespeare himself does – with a collective physical release, a welcome dance number. Moriarty provides two dance numbers. Then a third, then a fourth and then the balloons cascade down — like the ending of a prom dance.

I don’t intend it as condescending when I recommend the Dallas Theater Center’s production to any parent who has a young teen they want to introduce to Shakespeare. This Midsummer is big, noisy fun. Shakespeare's most poetic romantic comedy has been turned into a clattering, knockabout farce — with dance grooves.

But is that all that Midsummer should be? Considering what Shakespeare has to say about love and madness, about marriage and sexual warfare, is big, noisy fun – enough?

[music from “I’m Yours”]

This is your last opportunity to reserve tickets for Free Night of Theater 2009. This year, 25 Dallas-area theaters are participating in the program.

This is the second year for the ticket giveaway, which is run through the Dallas Office of Culture Affairs.

On Mondays, you will be able to reserve tickets for shows coming up the following weekend. For shows beyond that weekend, you will need to wait until the Monday before those shows to reserve those tickets. Tickets will be available on five consecutive Mondays.

If you would like to reserve tickets, log on to the Free Night of Theater Web site at noon on Monday to make your picks.

We'll be doing our best to help you chose the show that's right for you. We've asked participating theaters to send us a guide to the shows that they are offering, and we'll post them in this space as they come in.

Here is a list of shows opening this week. After that, you'll find guides to future shows.

THIS WEEK'S SHOWS

Show: Blue Beach
Theater: Teatro Dallas
Free Night date(s): Nov. 5 at 8:15 p.m. and Nov. 6 at 8:15 p.m.
The story: In celebration of Days of the Dead and Halloween, we are presenting Blue Beach, a play that takes place in an unkempt old hotel in the Southern coasts of Mexico. The father of a family, an engineer and a politician, has invited his family to inform them of a problem that affects both the hotel and the family. When he presents them with a plan to save them and the hotel, this invitation opens doors that will reveal some of the family's darkest secrets. Blue Beach is presented in English.
Back-stage access: Blue Beach is a work of fantasy, a mystery reminding us of the haunting literature of Mexican writer Juan Rulfo.
This show’s for you if you like: Mystery, suspense and stories about the underworld.

Show: Premiere!
Theater: Rover Dramawerks
Free Night date(s): Nov. 5, 6 and 7 at 8 p.m.; Nov. 7 at 2 p.m.
The story: A comic look at the petty tyranny of fame from the creator of one of the most famous of petty tyrants. Gil is the comedic playwright of his day, doomed to hit after hit, when he just wants to be taken seriously, darkly, academically. Like…dare he say it? The Bard. A hilarious series of events leads to the discovery of a “new” long lost tragedy by, ahem, William Shakespeare. When does a forgery become art itself? Is truth absolute or a function of aspiration, democracy … and marketing?
Back-stage access: This script mirrors the convergence of real issues and events in Wasserman's life, especially as it neared its end. Best known for the Tony Award-winning Man of La Mancha, a musical so popular that several productions are running worldwide right this moment, he saw that work as well as most of his other successes as the virtue of the individual against the system, the state, the church and even against fate itself. Usually it's easy to sympathize with the poor, struggling and failed. So imagine the irony of having lunch with one of the most successful comedic writers of all time 25 years ago to find out he felt trapped and a failure, unable to produce “serious, impacting works.” We'd promised to protect the writer's name until Martha Wasserman, the playwright's widow, gives the “ok” – but three Broadway hits in a row kind of narrows it down, eh? To think of this successful writer as trapped is staggering. And there's only one more powerful name in the world that could do it. Yep, The Bard Himself.
Back-stage access 2: Our leading man has just appeared on the back page of Parade magazine on behalf of Nutrisystem!
This show’s for you if you like: Intelligent comedy with fun characters. And you Don’t need any Cliff's Notes about Shakespeare either!

Show: Talk Radio
Theater: Upstart Productions in conjunction with Project X: Theatre
Free Night date(s): Nov. 5, 6, 7 and 8
The story: Barry Champlain is Cleveland's most popular and controversial talk radio host: the outspoken pundit everyone loves to hate. Every night, he holds the looking glass up to the listeners of Night Talk, exposing America's flaws and blemishes with stinging indictments of the status quo, much to the entertainment of his audience and the corporate brass at Metroscan Broadcasting, who want to bring his show into national syndication. Nominated for the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and revived with great success on Broadway in 2007, this is a scathing look at contemporary American culture that is as shocking and compelling today as it was two decades ago.
Back-stage access: Following the performance – an Upstart Productions exclusive screening! Talk Radio: Life After Death: The 25th Anniversary of the Assassination of Alan Berg, an Interview with Judith Lee Berg and Stephen Singular, author of Talked To Death: The Murder of Alan Berg and the Rise of the Neo-Nazis, the book that inspired the 1988 film Talk Radio directed by Oliver Stone.
This show’s for you if you like: Network with Peter Finch and Faye Dunaway; Bill Maher; Alex Jones; Michael Moore; Larry King; Howard Stern; Reality TV

Also playing this week:

• The Last Call Comedy Showcase, Pocket Sandwich Theater, Nov. 6 and 7
• Don't Dress for Dinner, ICT Mainstage
• TBAAL's Children's Chorus and Youth Orchestra Concert, The Black Academy of Arts and Letters
• Port Twilight, Undermain Theatre

In the Saturday Spotlight, we're paying a visit to the doctor on Halloween. Dr. Frank N. Furter will appear on a pair of local stages Saturday in productions of The Rocky Horror Show. If you're in Tarrant County, check out Ohlook Performing Arts' staging in Grapevine. Denton County dwellers can catch the show at Greater Lewisville Community Theatre, which promises a special Halloween presentation.

This is the second in our series of video interviews with the four architects behind the Wyly Theatre and the Winspear Opera House. The first installment was Joshua Prince-Ramus, who worked with Koolhaas on the Wyly before the two split.

Questions for Rem Koolhaas from our one-on-one interview:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

From the press conference:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.