The lesbian blogs and web sites are buzzing today with news of Jodie Foster’s long awaited, much desired coming out. On the occasion of a women’s power meeting in LA (the 16th annual Women in Entertainment Power 100 breakfast), Foster received the Sherry Lansing Leadership Award and, for the first time, referred to her partner, [...]

Fiona Shaw in Beckett at the Kennedy Center

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I can’t resist dipping into what’s now quite a catalogue of lesbian-themed movies, even though most of them are light fluff or portentous melodrama. I find these films by reading about them in scattered reviews, sometimes in the Times or sometimes The Advocate, or I find them in queer browsing sites like Wolfe Video (http://www.wolfevideo.com/, which also [...]

I’ve been watching The Closer again, which brightened up the summer television season considerably. This year, Brenda Leigh Johnson (the inestimable Kyra Segwick) got some press for sharpening her wardrobe. True, she no longer looks like she shops for clothes at Walmart, but I enjoy that her clothes are still loud and flashy, way off the mark [...]

Feminism Redux: Attacked, Again

For an action-hero fantasy flick, The Bourne Ultimatum offers head-spinning editing and thorny plot complications along with a savvy political parable about the outrageous arrogance of our present administration. Bourne, as we know from the first two installments in the trilogy (The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy) is a killer-for-hire out to retrieve his real identity, which has [...]

Do excuse the long silence for the month of July. During my absence from this site, I attended, among other things, two different theatre conferences. I spent a week at the International Federation for Theatre Research Conference, held this year in Stellenbosch, a small town in the wine country outside of Cape Town, South Africa. [...]

A number of television shows and films beckon me lately, and once I’ve seen them, I hope to write about them. There’s the blockbuster Knocked Up, about which I’m entirely suspicious, given its pedigree and given what I’ve heard about the choices—or non-choices—Katherine Heigl’s character makes around her unexpected pregnancy. And then there’s the recently opened Evening, [...]

Constellation

Although the hot humid days in Austin rarely turn into cool comfortable summer nights, we got lucky a week ago when we saw choreographer Sally Jacques’s company Blue Lapis Light present their “site-specific aerial dance performance” Constellation between two federal buildings downtown. The typically enervating humidity lifted, caught between the storm systems that [...]

[Note: For any readers who might have caught an earlier, briefly posted version of this installment, please discard that one and read this one! It's been further edited, tightened, and considerably trimmed (although it's still a rather lengthy post). With thanks, the FS]

Although the recently announced Tony Award nominations held few surprises, my recent [...]

Friday Night Lights debuted to critical acclaim this television season, but didn’t pull in the viewers a show ostensibly about football might have predicted. But then again, if it was only a show about football, I wouldn’t be watching myself, since I’m the only one in my Steeler-faithful family who wouldn’t know a touchdown from [...]

Terrence McNally’s reputation as a bankable out gay playwright and adaptor precedes him, so it’s not surprising that this spring alone, he has two plays running in New York: Some Men, the Off Broadway trifle recently produced at Second Stage, and Deuce, starring Angela Lansbury and Marion Seldes as two aging tennis rivals, opening on [...]

The 2007 Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville

I’d never been to the notable Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL), which staged its 31st season this year, but the roster of talented women playwrights presented under its auspices drew me to explore what I’d long heard was a hotbed of exciting new projects. Over March 24th and 25th, I saw [...]

I enjoyed this—the fourth—season of The L Word more than any since the first. Producer Ilene Chaiken has returned to form, allowing a pleasing lightness back into the show, and slowing down the race to caricature and stereotype the characters. The star-billed guest artists enhanced the season, and the plot stayed on the more realistic [...]

Chris Rock’s just released comedy, I Think I Love My Wife, stars Rock as Richard Cooper, an upper-middle class investment banker whose seven-year, now sex-less marriage to an elementary school teacher bores him silly. Based on French New Wave director Eric Rohmer’s Chloe in the Afternoon, Rock’s adaptation turns in a slight comedy that documents [...]

[Note: For those of you who’ve never seen The L Word, or for those of you who are inveterate fans, the essay I wrote during the show’s earlier seasons might be useful. Here’s a link to the piece, “Fans of Lesbians on TV: The L Word’s Generations,” on FlowTV, posted April 29, [...]

I’ve been spending some time in Pittsburgh (my hometown) with my mother recently, while she recuperates from major surgery. She’s been unable to read very much, so I’ve watched a lot of daytime television with her, seeing shows that I’ve only read about otherwise. For instance, The View, with Rosie O’Donnell, Barbara Walters, [...]

Notes on a Scandal

The season ended last month for this new Showtime series, but it’s worth watching out for the DVD release and for the new season in 2007. Dexter Morgan is a serial killer (whose victims are rarely found or investigated) who kills for altruistic reasons, dispatching neatly (literally, neatly) with people who for various reasons “normal” [...]