Photo by Buddy Myers

Georgia Clinton brings our favorite fiery author to life in Red Hot Patriot.

At Fort Worth's Stage West, Texas' brashest political commentator lives again in the one-woman play Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins. Actress Georgia Clinton portrays Ivins in the production directed by Dana Schultes.

The 70-minute performance, written by twin journalists Allison and Margaret Engel, is built around the dilemma of Ivins having to write a column about her father's suicide. Conservative and authoritarian, Ivins' dad cast a large shadow over her life. Her reaction to his death is as unvarnished and critical as anything she ever wrote about politicians.

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Photo by Karen Almond

Join the swarm at the regional premiere of the kids' musical comedy Diary of a Worm, a Spider & a Fly, now onstage at Dallas Children's Theater. They do things big at DCT, but this may be their biggest show yet. Directed by Bob Hess, acted by grown-up professionals, it's a fabu-normous production that appeals on all levels.

Small fry will love its lively hip-hop songs and silly jokes about creepy-crawlies. Big fry will pick up on messages about ecology and the circle of life (earthworms help Mother Earth breathe, you know). Choreographer Jeremy Dumont has inserted wickedly clever visual references to musicals like A Chorus Line (for Spider's big number, "Legs") and Gypsy. (For the latter, Spider, played by the adorable Adam Garst, strips off his sweatshirt-hoodie exoskeleton, accompanied by insect fan dancers.)

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Mary Lang, Greg Lush and T.A. Taylor in The Birthday Party

The whiff of menace enters the room right at the top of The Birthday Party, the 1958 Harold Pinter dark comedy now on view at Deep Ellum's Undermain Theatre. An older couple, Petey and Meg (T.A. Taylor and Mary Lang), are going about their daily breakfast ritual in the dining room of the shabby British seaside boarding house they run. She asks him if his cornflakes are nice. He takes one bite and pushes them away. She asks him if his newspaper is nice. He keeps on reading and ignores her.

There are the requisite Pinter pauses -- long beats that leave just enough time for our imaginations to fill in the blanks -- and just enough humor in the Petey-and-Meg banter to trick us into thinking this will be light comedy. Oh, no. Things start to darken with the addition of boarder Stanley Webber (Gregory Lush) to the breakfast table. He's unshaven and dressed in a silk smoking jacket, sort of sexy and glam in a down-at-heels way. Meg dotes on Stanley, which he answers by complaining about the sour milk on his cereal and the dirty condition of his room upstairs.

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Photo by Cassie Bann

Matt Lyle's new play The Better Doctor has a lot to say about the American healthcare industry. But it says it without talking. As the latest in Lyle's series of "silent films for the stage," Doctor keeps the actors on mute. It's like The Artist meets ER.

If only the directors of this Upstart Production show, Justin Locklear and Cassie Bann, had studied more closely the old silent film comedies of Keaton, Chaplin and Lloyd. Or even taken a look at Jean Dujardin's tribute to those silent movie masters in his Oscar-winning performance in The Artist. Dujardin used his face so efficiently, sometimes just an eyebrow or a twitch of his lip to express a thought or emotion. On the screen, he got the luxury of a glowing close-up. On a stage that's some distance from the viewers and separated from them by a gray scrim, it's hard to see any actors' expression. (Upstart has new digs just west of the bridge off Singleton Boulevard. It's a warren of rooms that lead to a big warehouse space being used as theater. Renovation is still in progress.)

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Austin Tindle and Mathew Butler in Clams.

He skins them, gulp, "down there?"

For filthy fun, get your merkin to Jamie Morris' Silence of the Clams. Uptown Players is doing the outrageous drag spoof of the movie thriller about the cross-dressing serial killer and the butch FBI trainee who tracks him down.

In this version, performed in the Rose Room theater above the S4 bar on Cedar Springs, actor Austin Tindle tucks into the Jodie Foster role, now called "Clarice Startling." The character knows a bit about "clamming" from growing up with some mollusk-loving cousins. Her dad had run off with a truck driver named Vince "and a Labradoodle named Miss Liza Minnelli."

Clarice has to visit the evil prisoner "Dr. Lichter" (rhymes with "kicked her"), played with a creepily accurate Anthony Hopkins leer by Mathew Butler. The same actor also plays the other killer, called "Beaver Bob" here. Instead of making himself a girl suit, he's only collecting a certain fleshy mound. Never heard the term "fupa"? You will in this show, along with "gunt." Playwright Morris isn't exactly Oscar Wilde.

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Photo by Karen Almond

Abbey Seigworth and Christopher Sykes share a moment in Tigers Be Still

Young playwrights play the old shell game with their work these days. They write a TV sitcom pilot or a screenplay but try to pass it off as a piece for the stage. It's easier to get plays done and theater producers are always on the prowl for the next hot, young playwright.

And that's how you end up with a major production of Tigers Be Still by Kim Rosenstock. She's on the writing staff of the Fox comedy New Girl, for which this play could almost serve as a "very special episode."

Cutesy as hell but trying to communicate some meaningful message about mental health, Tigers Be Still, onstage through May 13 in the Wyly Theatre's upstairs Studio space, expects the audience not to notice its thin sitcom-like structure. Between the quick-cut scenes and breathy monologues, you can feel where the commercial breaks would fall.

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Steven Walters and Terry Martin in Next Fall

Next Fall, the Geoffrey Nauffts play now running at Dallas Theater Center, presents a family acting out more issues than an episode of Dr. Phil. Mom and Dad (played by Kieran Connolly and Candy Buckley) are divorced. Dad's an old-school Old South bigot who hates gays and minorities, but loves guns and God. Mom's an old hippie who may be back on the painkillers she once went through rehab to kick. Their 25-year-old son, aspiring actor Luke (Steven Michael Walters), is in a coma in a New York City hospital. He was hit by a cab. It doesn't look good for him.

Into the hospital waiting room runs Adam (Terry Martin, the WaterTower Theatre artistic director, returning to acting in a big way here). Luke's parents don't know it, but the 45-year-old teacher has been their son's live-in boyfriend for five years. Adam's hesitant to reveal closeted Luke's real life, but the hospital will only let "family" into the ICU to see dying Luke. Adam has to say something or be shut out.

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Photos by Jeffrey Schmidt

A new musical with a book by Joe DiPietro opened this week on Broadway. It's called Nice Work If You Can Get It and it stars Matthew Broderick and Kelli O'Hara singing Flapper Era songs by George and Ira Gershwin. The New York Times' critic Ben Brantley compared it to Billy Wilder's classic movie farce about the same period, Some Like It Hot. But he liked only the songs, not the book, of the new musical, which he nicknamed Some Like It Lukewarm.

Another DiPietro piece, a ham-handed mystery/farce, currently is running at Dallas' Theatre Three. It's called The Art of Murder. It doesn't have music by the Gershwins. It does have a recording of Doris Day singing "Que Sera Sera." It's not a good play. Some Don't Like It at Any Temperature.

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Photo by Boleyn Photography

Walter White as Dick Rowlands and Jenni Pittman as Sarah Page

The incident at the heart of the fact-based Erik Ehn play Diamond Dick: The Tulsa Race Riots of 1921 is as trivial as, say, a teenager walking home from a corner store with some Skittles in his hand. The Project X production of this skillfully staged one-act continues through this weekend at The Green Zone in the Dallas Design District.

One May day in 1921, a young shoeshine man, Dick Rowland (played by Walter White), shared an elevator in a downtown Tulsa department store with the young white elevator operator (Jenni Pittman). He bumped her; she screamed. He was arrested for assault. When the Tulsa newspaper ran a page one headline announcing the upcoming lynching of "Diamond Dick" -- a nickname applied by the paper -- a group of concerned African American Tulsa residents gathered to protest and to try to save his life. Whites responded with guns, lots and lots of guns. There were riots, vigilante shootings by whites and an outsized, trigger-happy response by the National Guard, ordered to the area by the Oklahoma governor. Some 300 blacks were killed, including children and women, and thousands more arrested. Black homes, businesses, theaters and churches were burned.

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Photos by Mark Oristano

There may not be another 3-1/2-hour play that says as much about contemporary family life, and says it with such gritty realism, as Tracy Letts' explosive, hilarious August: Osage County. Director René Moreno's fine production up at Addison's WaterTower Theatre winds up its three-week run April 22. It's a chance to see many of Dallas' best professional stage actors together in one of American theater's best plays. (It won the Tony and the Pulitzer, if you need proof.)

Gird your loins for the Westons of northern Oklahoma. They come together after the disappearance of their elderly, alcoholic poet-patriarch (played by Cliff Stephens, who has one amazing scene at the top of the play). As the daughters and cousins arrive at the three-story prairie house, with husbands, a fiance (Chris Hury), a nymphet daughter (Ruby Westfall) and years of resentments as extra baggage, tensions build. "This situation is fraught!" yells frowsy Aunt Mattie Faye (the wildly funny Nancy Sherrard). She's a browbeater, constantly uttering putdowns of husband Charlie (Tom Lenaghen) and son Little Charlies (Clay Yocum). Her comeuppance is a highlight of the third act.

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