FINE TUNING THE TUBE: Monday night, Theatre Three opened The Farnsworth Invention, which looks back at two men’s race to invent the television. Aaron Sorkin wrote the script, so you know there will be all the snappy dialogue you can handle. But for a glimpse at how Theatre Three captured the look of the late ’20s, take a look at the video above.

TAKING ON THE BULLIES: Dallas Children’s Theater’s current show is aiming to both entertain and educate. The Secret Life of Girls takes a look at girl-on-girl bullying and seems especially timely as bullying in general has been in the news of late with the It Gets Better project. And that tapping of the zeitgeist has pleased the critics. “When thinking about the purpose of this work, it is not so much to push the boundaries of theater as it is to present a very important message to the people who need it hear it most: teenage girls and their parents,” Lindsay Jenkins writes on theaterjones.com. “Nancy Schaeffer’s sensitive direction elicits extraordinary performances by the ensemble of local teens,” Nancy Churnin writes on dallasnews.com, where she also notes that each performance includes a talkback session afterward. Catch the show through Sunday.

EARLY PREP WORK: Cindy Sherman has been one of the photography world’s true provocateurs for more than 30 years now. And that role has landed her a sweeping retrospective that opens at the Museum of Modern Art this weekend. “She is always addressing issues at the heart of our visual culture,” MoMA associate photography curator Eva Respini tells The New York Times in a Sunday feature on Sherman. “In this world of celebrity makeovers, reality TV and YouTube, here is an artist whose different modes of representation seem truer now than when they were made.” You may want to go ahead and give the story a read and get a leg-up on your studying since the show comes to the Dallas Museum of Art in March 2013.