Review by Susan Smith Nash in E-Learning Corgi Apr. 2024

When Rochelle Owens’s play, Chucky’s Hunch, was first performed Off-Broadway in 1981, critics lauded what they expressed as a tour-de-force performance by the actor playing Chucky, and they took the plot at face value. Click here to read more.

Review by Susan Smith Nash in E-Learning Corgi Oct. 2023

It’s hard to believe it has been almost 30 years since the long poem, “Black Chalk,” was published as a chapbook by Texture Press in Norman, Oklahoma. A companion video was filmed and produced in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, to be debuted at the Fred Jones Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. Click here to read more.

Review by Susan Smith Nash in TapRoot Issue #4 Feb. 1994

An experimental art film of seething, coming-to-the-surface violence and raging, polyphonous voices. The collaged surface of images and rich, color-saturated shots of artists speaking and repeating Owens’ poetry from behind veils or screens of rain-splattered glass or meshes of ropes suggest new ways of reading Owens’ poetry. One motif predominates: a strong, white-robed Native American woman striding through tall green marsh grass. This image connects the visceral with the earth, and suggests that colonized or exterminated peoples (or genders) still live in the core of the cultural imagination.

Review by Susan Smith Nash in E-Learning Corgi Sept. 2023

The short film, Oklahoma Too, written and directed by Rochelle Owens in 1987, is filled with wry humor and social commentary. In addition, it is an exploration of the capacity of language to classify, represent truth, human desire and behavior, and ultimately to contain the seeds of its own disruption of meaning(s). Click here to read more.

Review by April Kingsley, April 28, 1988

Rochelle Owens’ innovative video, OKLAHOMA TOO, stretched the medium of poetry by invading another — video — which in turn was expanded in the process. Surreal and absurd, yet biographical and true to life, Owens’ poem-video is a hybrid with brilliant plumage. The ellipses and thought jumps of poetry find perfect expression in the collage character of video and the results in Owens’ hands are hilarious at the same moment they enlighten. Video — a perfect union of image and idea — is a medium made for her. As an art critic who knows most of the artist-subjects of HOW MUCH PAINT DOES THE PAINTING NEED, which I heard her read last summer, I await its visualization with an especially focused interest.

Comment by David Antin, poet and art critic, April 27, 1988

Rochelle Owens is one of this country’s foremost avant-garde playwrights, has won many distinctions Off Broadway, had her plays performed and reviewed nationally and internationally, and she is also a poet of distinction. Recently she has begun working in video, and I have had the opportunity of seeing her first completed video piece “Oklahoma Too” and a new work in progress “How Much Paint Does the Painting Need.” Both of these works reveal an original sensibility and a way of working, employing both her verbal resources as a poet and comic dramaturgic capabilities for farcical improvisatory scenes that she combines with more formal verbal resources in a way that is entirely novel for video. I sense that if she keeps working with the medium she is going to make very important contributions to the field, with which as a long time art and video critic I am quite thoroughly familiar.

Comment by Joanna E. Rapf, Professor of Film Studies, May 12, 1988

ROCHELLE OWENS has a national—indeed, international—reputation as a poet and playwright who has been extraordinarily creative and continually productive both in New York City and now in Oklahoma where she has lived for the past few years. I have taught her play, Futz, in my film and drama course, and we also studied the film adaptation. The students were awed, and thrilled to have her give a guest lecture. She has also taught playwriting here at the University, given many readings, and helped to revitalize and reinvigorate the creative arts in our community.

She has recently combined her talents as poet and playwright in a new medium, video, and produced a witty and thought-provoking 30 minute film entitled “Oklahoma Too.” Using as a base the Oklahoma production of and fondness for nugget jewelry, she playfully satirizes middle-aged, middle America, our delights, perversities, and causes, with lyric intensity. The balance of sequences in the video varies the pace and focus so that visually and aurally I, as a viewer, was constantly engrossed. There is a careful pattern of repetition, giving a sense of structure and closure, and strengthening the memory of face, form, and content.

ROCHELLE OWENS is working in an exciting new medium for her. She is a committed, energetic artist, establishing new possibilities for creative expression, and bringing together a wealth of experience, and an intensity of voice and vision.