British playwright rips Texas as 'Third World'

Nearly every time I read the Houston Press, I come across something that makes steam shoot out of my ears. This time was no different:

Award-winning British playwright Kay Adshead has a new production on London's equivalent of Broadway that features, among other locales, a postapocalyptic Houston. Before the premiere, she wrote a piece for The Guardian about her three years in a Midtown condo here, saying, "More than once we have traveled on the bus as virtually the only non-amputees on board." Also, oddly enough, "Sexual tension buzzes around Houston with the mosquitoes."

Houston "was not at all what I was expecting...I was expecting a kind of city or state on the cutting edge of technology. I was imagining great prosperity," she says. "And I found Texas a kind of Third World country, really."

This is a town that routinely dispatches men into outer space, and it's where the finest doctors cure the uncurable. It's home to massively successful businesses -- from energy to airlines to computers, but it's still a town where people can live big on the cheap. I guess that's Third World Class.