RABE REVIEWS: Undermain Theatre has a good thing going with its relationship with David Rabe. His adaptation of Chekhov’s The Black Monk won raves when the theater performed it last season. And now Rabe’s The Dog Problem is scoring with the critics. “Rabe cleverly constructs The Dog Problem to deliver surprise after surprise, although the actual plot seems simple on the surface,” Lawson Taitte writes in his dallasnews.com review. And Front Row’s Lindsey Wilson says, “Ingeniously working within Undermain’s renovated and reconfigured performance space are seven (eight if you count Buddy [the dog]) actors who never waver in their commitment to making compelling choices.” The Dog Problem runs through Nov. 27.

BRAVE PLAYERS: First, it’s very cool that Denton has a group called the Monster Flute Choir. And it’s even cooler that the group is playing 10 Brave Combo songs for its show next week.  Brave’s woodwind player, Jeffrey Barnes, will join the group for the concert on Tuesday. And he tells the Denton Record-Chronicle that he’s got some catching up to do. “It’s strange to hear the band’s music played like this. But they sound good. And of course, they read rings around me.”

QUOTABLE: “I was listening to Wagner, the Siegfried funeral march, I think, and I was looking through an art appreciation book, and I stumbled on the painting by Franz Kline that had the exact same title. And I looked at that reproduction of that painting, and I was listening to this music, and I was going, ‘Oh, my god. This feels like that feels. This looks like that sounds.’ And a light bulb goes off, and then once you have that entryway, a door opens, and you’re set, and I just totally got into it.”

– Fort Worth artist Vernon Fisher, on how he made the jump to abstract art. Fisher talks more about his work and his current retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in the current issue of Fort Worth Weekly.