With Theater Jones by Kristin Colaneri I stepped into a lower Greenville coffee house favorite this week, to meet one of Dallas’ emerging talents, Carson McCain, happy to chat about her most recent directorial work, Lungs by Duncan Macmillan opening this weekend at Stagewest Theatre. A play driven by quick witted and deeply truthful conversation between a husband and wife in modern times. As her and I discussed the play and its contextual hue within our contemporary theater landscape,Read more
The Stepford Wives, A Light Into the Horror
The Stepford Wives and The Feminine Mystique Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives, published in 1972, is a satirically dark look at suburban life in the nineteen-seventies during a climactic time in American history—after the civil rights movement, amidst the height of the feminist movement, right before the Watergate scandal, and the resignation of Richard Nixon. In popular entertainment, the Hayes production codes were lifted on film and art was growing increasingly more sinister and risqué as a reaction toRead more
Lost in Paradise
“You looked so cute up there on the stage my dear. I know you have your trip to the Amalfi coast nearing tomorrow, so please be safe and enjoy your travels”…. These were the appeasing words of an older man she felt compelled to know better, intimately. He had been her professor in previous months but, for the time being, she was not under his mentorship, at least not paying tuition for it. This gave her some latitude to indulgeRead more
A Seductive Mirage
The notion of ‘Drama vs. Reality’ or the “stuff on which dreams are made on” as Prospero says in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, have long been contemplated in storytelling. Our fantasy life is ‘the stuff’ by which elaborate novels are created, aforethought of playful sexual desire, or often a psychological foil to a reality that may be too painful to reconcile as ‘truth’ in our lives. In the story of The Phantom of the Opera, a novel by the French writer,Read more
The Fashion Mythopoeia
Dark and light, push – pull, myth – reality, the head and the heart, love – hate …. Heaven and Hell. Duality has always been a strong force in our universe, and since the dawn of man, we have given meaning to each side. Through the depiction of Greek mythology or in this case… mythopoeia, our modern telling of fictional mythological characters and story. William Blake, a Romantic writer and artist, basked in this narrative drama creating worlds through poetryRead more
Jaques in the Vault of Reason
All the World’s a Stage and we merely players, We have our entrances and our exits, And one man in his time plays many parts…. This particular man, at this particular time, plays the contemplative, photo journalist. He sits in his windowless yet creative space, an old 1950’s bank vault, which smells of nostalgia and incense, searching for the perfect image to compliment the pages of the magazine. Editing and narrowing down the photograph that sells the homegrown-local stories ofRead more
The Clawfoot Tub
“That damn claw foot tub,”… she thought. How could so much of her joy rest in that tub…. Pristine porcelain white with the feet of a gargoyle but the elegance of an anonomous French madame’s bathing place, circa 1922. The prized possession of her bourgeois lifestyle. Could that tub be enough to uphold a marriage? Possibly. Yes, why not? Their love had been demonstrated there… they had washed each other like children and lovers do, but something had gone missingRead more
Theater Review: The Flick
The Flick, More Flame Than Flicker By Kristin Colaneri “Film is a series of photographs separated by split seconds of darkness” so adamantly stated by Avery, about the shift of film to digital in the play The Flick, written by Annie Baker and directed by Sam Gold, now playing at the Barrow Street Theatre, off Broadway running currently through January 10th. The didactic play is uniquely constructed around 3 disparate characters that are working in an old movie theater inRead more
She Became a Warhol
It was Andy Warhol that said “in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”. One of the most acclaimed American artists of the 1960’s who was most notably known for his work during the ‘pop’ art movement which marked a major shift in modernism. Artists such as Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, & Roy Lichtenstein sought to utilize images of popular American and British culture and mass production to blend into fine art representation. An extension but drastic break fromRead more
Sun Seeker
Touched by the sun and softly wrapped in chiffon made of the same scorched sizzling color, she moved like a phoenix through space and time. Her long, sleek, and finely bronzed body gliding across an unknown shore. With sand in her toes and the smell of the exotic air stretched from far away continents, woven with mystical salt crystals and the resonating soft sound of seagulls calling out to each other as faded mating whispers, she danced impassioned like anRead more
Kristin Colaneri 