Staged Right: A Half Century of Passion and Performance

STAGED RIGHT A HALF CENTURY

OF

PASSION AT

AND

PERFORMANCE

DALLAS THEATER CENTER

STEVE MURRAY

I

STAGED RIGHT A HALF CENTURY OF PASSION AND PERFORMANCE AT DALLAS THEATER CENTER

“We will engage, entertain, educate, and inspire . . . ” —From the mission statement of Dallas Theater Center

n the sweltering Dallas summer of 1954, the dream for a theater company in Dallas was conceived in the backyard of Bea Handel in the Highland Park neighborhood. Over the next five years, creative talent, money, and facilities were pulled together. And in 1959, when the house lights dimmed for Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, a theater was born in Texas.

In the fifty years since then, the Dallas Theater Center has grown beyond anyone’s imagination. And the imaginations were Texas-sized, even then. Indeed, the opening play may have announced artistic director Paul Baker’s epic intentions, but even he would have been hard-pressed to envision later just how far the theater could stretch.

Today, DTC is one of the most respected theater companies in America. Never one to shy from audacious goals, it was launched in a facility designed by none other than Frank Lloyd Wright and has been the creative home of some of the country’s finest artistic directors. Staged Right—A Half Century of Passion and Performance chronicles their stories, their theatrical victories and challenges, their battles and, of course, their huge achievements.

Writer Steve Murray also provides slice-oflife peeks at the myriad behind-the-stage performers who never get a curtain call, but are equally vital to a successful production—from the set builders to the costume shop technicians, from the stage production manager to the board of directors and more. Additionally, Staged Right is sprinkled with reflections from members of the DTC family who have shared, in some cases, decades of their lives with the theater company.

In 2009, Dallas Theater Center made another bold move, claiming its next home in a dazzling, newly built theater in which the architecture is as innovative and striking as Wright’s design was in 1959. The Theater Center also boasts a new artistic director in Kevin Moriarty, whose debut production was an eyepopping rendition of The Who’s Tommy. Only the Dallas Theater Center could usher in a new era with as much flair and panache as thisone, announcing that the status quo of Americanstagecraft has yet again been redefined.

About the Author

Steve Murray is an award-winning writer and former newspaper theater critic. Additionally, Murray is an accomplished playwright, having had his works produced on both coasts. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, he now makes his home in Atlanta, Georgia.

Dallas Theater Center 3636 Turtle Creek Boulevard Dallas, Texas 75219 www.dallastheatercenter.org

Jacket Design by Matthew Jeffirs

Printed in the United States of America

Staged Right

Staged Right a half century of passion and performance at

Dallas

Theater Center

by Steve Murray

Staged Right Editorial Director ................................................................ Rob Levin Managing Editor................................................ Sarah Edwards Fedota Project Director.................................................................. Sarah Warnecke

Page 1: Tsidii Le Loka as Bloody Mary in South Pacific. 1998–1999 season.

Page 2–3: The Who’s Tommy. 2008–2009 season.

This page: Squeak Henderson pitches into the muscle-intense business of striking the set of The Who’s Tommy.

Dallas eater Center Liaison.................................... Melinda Nelson Publisher.............................................................................. Barry Levin Chief Operating Officer.................................................... Renée Peyton Writer................................................................................ Steve Murray New Photography........................................................ Mario Morgado Project Archivist .................................................................... Amy Lacy Design................................................................................ Laurie Porter Prepress...................................................................................... Jill Dible Copyediting and Indexing ...................................................... Bob Land All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Dallas eater Center, Dallas, Texas.

While the contents of this book are correct to the best of our knowledge, please note that research is a continual process. We encourage anyone who has relevant artifacts to contribute to our archive that might aid in said research to contact the Dallas eater Center.

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Copyright 2009 © Dallas eater Center Dallas eater Center 3636 Turtle Creek Blvd.

Dallas, Texas 75219 www.dallastheatercenter.org

Book Development by Bookhouse Group, Inc. Atlanta, Georgia www.bookhouse.net

Dedication

Y

ou are about to enjoy a commemorative history of the Dallas eater Center that was kindled and inspired by Linda and Bill Custard. It is an honor to dedicate this fiftieth anniversary publication to them and to thank them for fifty years of

imaginative and supportive care. ey are truly the First Couple of the Dallas eater Center.

With wisdom and grace, Linda and Bill have devoted themselves to this institution. Whether through board leadership,

generosity of time and resources, artistic insights, or just plain passion for bold theater that brings our communities together, they have nurtured the heart and soul of the Dallas eater Center.

Fifteen years ago, in honor of this theater’s thirty-fifth anniversary, Linda wrote a moving tribute to Waldo E. Stewart, whose tireless efforts since the earliest days of DTC helped propel this organization to the forefront of America’s greatest regional theaters. Linda and Bill are ardently building on Waldo’s solid legacy, strengthening our theater for its next challenges and triumphs.

For certain, the Dallas eater Center is blessed with strong managerial and artistic talent and also a board of trustees whose membership through the decades has been a virtual Who’s Who of Dallas civic, business, and social leadership. Any arts organization in the country would desire the innovation, dedication, and get-it-done spirit of our board. Linda and Bill Custard stand together with others who have brought the Dallas eater Center to this proud moment.

Bill and Linda Custard sign a beam at the topping-out ceremony for the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre at the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts.

e Custards’ longevity of involvement with DTC (which dates to the opening night in 1959), their foresight in preserving our story, and their

passion for both the art and the business of theater—all epitomize the very best in servant leadership. And now, a third generation of Custards—their children Allen, Marla, and Laura—are joining Linda and Bill on the threshold of our next fifty years. We are fortunate indeed.

With gratitude and celebration, the Dallas eater Center dedicates this book to Linda P. and William A. Custard.

Sarah L. Warnecke Dallas eater Center Trustee 50th Anniversary Season Chair STAGED RIGHT 7

Peter MacNicol (left), Jack Willis (center), and Rudy Young (right) in All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren’s tale of power-hungry politician Willie Stark. 1986–1987 season.

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Contents Dedication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Dallas Theater Center Artistic Directors . . . . . 12 Act One: Art, Drama, and Texas Tornados . . . . . 15 Act Two: Transitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Appendix Board Chairs and Presidents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 2008–2009 Board of Trustees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Guild Presidents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Production History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Photo Credits

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126

Dallas Theater Center 2008–2009 Staff . . . . . . . . . . . 127

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

STAGED RIGHT 9

A group of teens get in step during a dance clinic in Frank’s Place, learning the choreography from The Who’s Tommy. Pictured: Joshua Greenfield from Booker T. Washington High School for the Visual and Performing Arts.

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Acknowledgments

T

his book was written by Steve Murray, but as with any publishing project of this magnitude, there are numerous people involved who contributed time, institutional knowledge, guidance, and support from so many different corners.

Both Bookhouse Group and the Dallas eater Center would like to acknowledge those valuable contributors. If

anyone has been omitted, the fault is Bookhouse’s alone and please know that it was truly an oversight.

First, our thanks to Sarah Warnecke, the 50th Season Anniversary Chair, who found us. Without her due diligence, holding our feet to the fire, and wielding a potent cocktail of diplomacy and arm twisting to make things happen, then . . . well, nothing would have happened. Likewise, this project owes a special thanks to Amy Lacy, 50th Season Curator, who has spent a fair amount of her life building the remarkable DTC archival collection currently housed at the Dallas J. Erik Jonsson Central Public Library. is book is visually richer thanks to her intimate and encyclopedic knowledge of those records. In addition, it should be noted that many of the beautiful images in this book were photographed by Linda Blase, whose association with the Dallas eater Center stretches back many years. Without her keen and imaginative eye, Staged Right would not be as captivating as it is.

From within the DTC staff, the project was blessed with enthusiastic cooperation and assistance from everyone. Of special note were the generous amounts of time provided by Kevin Moriarty, Mark Hadley, Cynthia Calabrese, Lisa Holland, and Lauren Zugaro. On a day-to-day basis, however, we couldn’t have progressed without help from Melinda Nelson, who coordinated the efforts and deadlines of many different people, which is probably not unlike herding cats. e actual editorial direction of the book was envisioned by an energetic editorial committee, whose members we met with either individually or as a focus group. is valuable list comprises Tina Barry, Diane Brierley, Kay Cattarulla, Joan Clark, Linda and Bill Custard, Bess Enloe, John Howell, Judy Mathis, Karol Omlor, Barbara Page, Frank Risch, Ruth Robinson, Deedie Rose, and Don Warnecke.

Lastly, a very special debt of gratitude goes to former artistic directors Paul Baker, Adrian Hall, and Richard Hamburger. e

stories of their theatrical greatness and their sometimes colorful departures from DTC have been amply documented through the years. As such, these gentlemen had no obligation to participate in this project. But it was current artistic director Kevin Moriarty who voiced the hope that this book would not only celebrate fifty years of supreme stagecraft and usher in the next fifty years, but would also serve to let the organization reach out and embrace once again those who made the Dallas eater Center the brightest star in Texas.

Rob Levin President & Editor Bookhouse Group Inc. STAGED RIGHT 11

Paul Baker’s inaugural production of Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River reflected his interest in adapting literature for the stage, and the use of multimedia elements, including film and projections.

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Foreword

F

ifty years ago, my parents purchased four tickets for the debut of the Kalita Humphreys eater, and with it the theatrical launch of the Dallas eater Center. “Invite someone,” my mother said. It was Christmas vacation of my senior year in college where I was a speech and drama major, so this was a terribly exciting moment. I asked an attractive young banker named Bill Custard to accompany me.

For the five decades since emerging from the three-and-a-half-hour marvel that Paul Baker staged of omas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, both Bill and I have been devoted fans of the Dallas eater Center. We have often served in official capacities and have always been there to support the theater. And yet . . . there remains the feeling that no matter how much you may contribute to an arts organization as good as DTC in terms of support, time, or leadership, it never quite matches the emotional satisfaction you take from it at the end of a great performance. And there have been so many great performances.

As DTC enters its second half-century and moves from one historic theater into another, I have been asked several times to reflect on what has been the one constant in this theater company’s history. Why has the Dallas eater Center not only survived, but thrived for two generations while other regional theaters have struggled or failed?

Personally, I believe it was, and will continue to be, courage—the courage both artistically and administratively to meet challenges posed by so many forces. ese forces have ranged from an ever-evolving artistic culture in Dallas and wild swings in the economy to the trials and triumphs of working with bold, cutting-edge artistic directors. DTC’s artistic directors—Paul Baker, Mary Sue Jones, Adrian Hall, Ken Bryant, and Richard Hamburger—and the board of directors may not always have agreed on the direction of DTC, but make no mistake, the performing arts in Dallas are richer, deeper, and more encompassing because of their presence.

And their presence was made possible by a board that never hesitated to take the road less traveled.

Now, moving into our new theatrical home, with artistic guidance being provided by the remarkably talented Kevin Moriarty and the steady executive leadership of managing director Mark Hadley, the Dallas eater Center is poised to reach ever-greater heights.

Art and change are synonymous. And once again, the Dallas eater Center—our theater—has moved with courage and conviction. at night fifty years ago when Bill and I entered the Kalita Humphreys eater, it was filled with breathtaking magic. In the decades since then, I’ve yet to get my breath back. I hope you feel the same.

Linda P. Custard Dallas, Texas May 2009 Linda Custard is a life trustee of the Dallas eater Center, a director of the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts Foundation and chair of the President’s Advisory Council. In addition, she sits on nine other boards and five foundations. Her husband, Bill, is a life trustee and past president of the Dallas eater Center Endowment Fund.

STAGED RIGHT 13

Dallas Theater Center Artistic Directors 1959–2009

Mary Sue Jones 1982–1983

Paul Baker 1959–1982

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Adrian Hall 1983–1989

Kevin Moriarty 2007–

Ken Bryant 1990 Richard Hamburger 1992–2007

STAGED RIGHT 15

14

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Act One

Art, Drama, and Texas Tornados

O

n a scorching August day

in 1954, ten of Dallas’s

cultural and community

leaders met on the backyard terrace of arts advocate Bea Handel’s home in Highland Park. While sipping cool drinks to ward off the summer heat, the guests got to the business at hand: brainstorming the creation of a homegrown, professional theater with a strong educational program. e idea had been sparked and lit for years, only to briefly burn and flicker out again. But now the arts community had additional fuel in the form of Bea Handel, who had just moved to Dallas from Cleveland, where she was on the board and director of development of a very forward-looking theater, the Cleveland Playhouse. In her mind, Dallas was well overdue for developing an institution of the same stature.

STAGED STAGEDRIGHT RIGHT 15 15

Theater As Storytelling

“

It’s storytelling in a way that makes me see something that I didn’t see or understand before. It may not be big, but it

makes me curious, and it does what other art forms that I value do. It makes me see something in a new way.

”

—Life trustee Deedie Rose Paul Baker, with playwright John Logan, confronted modern Dallas tragedy with 1974’s Jack Ruby, All-American Boy. Pictured: Steven Hetzke, B. J. Theus, Paul Dollar, Ken Latimer

Being overdue, however, didn’t mean it would be easy. “ere was not a lot of money in Dallas for supporting the arts back then,” recalls Robyn Flatt, founder of Dallas Children’s eater. “Margo Jones, who founded earlier theaters in Houston and Dallas, did a lot of great stuff, but she didn’t have major financial support. People were saying things like, ‘is isn’t the right place to start a theater.’” s Artistic director Adrian Hall with Theater

Center supporters Jane and Jim Heldt, May 1986.

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s Sylvan T. Baer (left), who donated the Turtle Creek

site to the Dallas Theater Center in his parents’ honor, with Paul Baker and Robert Stecker.

Handel and her group—organized by e Dallas Morning News amusements editor John Rosenfield, and ultimately

Early Days As a Whistle-Stop including core leaders Robert Stecker, Waldo Stewart, and Paul Raigorodsky— disagreed. e meeting now taking place on her back terrace had, in fact, been on the drawing board for months. Late that summer, Handel had visited Rosenfield at his newspaper office where he expressed his own exasperation. Looking straight at Handel, he told her, “We have been talk-

T

he idea for the Dallas Theater Center did not emerge from a vacuum. Jeremy Gerard, former theater critic for The Dallas Morning News, says, “There’s something

extremely attractive and seductive about the Texas spirit that gave us both Margo Jones and Nina Vance—two of the key forces behind the creation of the resident theater movement.”

Vance founded Houston’s Alley Theatre in 1947. The same year, Margo Jones—the so-called Texas Tornado—opened Theatre ’47 in Dallas, a venue where she introduced staging-in-the-round, nurtured the early work of Tennessee Williams, and, until her death in 1955, premiered a wealth of new plays, including Inherit the Wind.

ing long enough about another Dallas Little eater,

Previously, professional theater in the United States was largely

Cleveland Playhouse, or what have you. Let’s do some-

limited to New York or to national touring companies that included

thing about it. I’ll call a meeting on ursday, August 19, at your home and we’ll start the idea rolling.”

And so it was.

Dallas among their whistle-stops. Founded in 1920, the Dallas Little Theatre had closed its doors in 1943. Its absence was keenly felt in the 1950s, when the idea for the Dallas Theater Center was first brainstormed.

“The possibility of a life in the theater simply didn’t exist in the forties and fifties, except in the four or five blocks on Broadway,” says director Adrian Hall, who worked briefly with both Vance and Jones as a young actor before heading to California to continue his

Burl Ives and his skittish, four-legged co-star in Joshua Beene and God. 1961–1962 season.

apprenticeship at the Pasadena Playhouse, under its founder Gilmore Brown. “The idea of being part of a family of theater—an idea that existed in Europe and Asia—that idea didn’t exist here.”

While at least three nonprofessional theaters were active in Dallas in the mid1950s, no dedicated company existed that embraced community and professional actors of all ages, while also offering training in theater arts from a seasoned staff.

That was destined to change with the

s Clockwise from center: Burgess Meredith and guest,

Robert Stecker, Mrs. Paul Baker (Kitty), Charles Laughton, Mrs. Robert Stecker (Dora), and Paul Baker inspect a rendering of the Kalita Humphreys Theater.

founding of DTC.

STAGED RIGHT 17

s

Not a golden ticket, but just as valuable: An invitation to the Dallas Theater Center’s gala 1959 opening.

s In the Kalita Humphreys Theater, which boasts an

intimate relationship between audience members and the actors onstage, there truly isn’t a bad seat in the house.

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Playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky (Marty, Network) discusses The Latent Heterosexual with Paul Baker and Burgess Meredith, who directed the play.

s s Bea Handel, who—together with a handful of

civic leaders—conceived the Dallas Theater Center in 1954.

eir model—which Rosenfield initially dubbed the Dallas

He was already nationally known. American star Burgess Meredith

Playhouse and Academy—was an institution that split its focus between

and British actor-director Charles Laughton were champions of his

professional theatrical performance and the education and training of

dynamic, experimental work. Meredith starred in a production of

emerging theater artists.

Hamlet, for instance, that unfolded on multiple stages, with theatergoers

ey didn’t have to look very far to find someone who knew how

following the action from swiveling seats. Drawing on the abstract art

to balance both programming facets. Born in small-town Hereford,

movement, Baker’s 1953 Othello was designed as a chess game. ough

Texas, and educated at Trinity, Wisconsin, and Yale universities,

the heavily made-up, harlequin-like actors seem like a tired cliché now,

Paul Baker had been teaching and staging theater in Waco at Baylor

that’s only because what Baker was doing—audacious at the time—soon

University since 1934—but not in obscurity.

became the lingua franca of other American theater directors.

Continued on page 24 STAGED RIGHT 19

The Kalita Humphreys Theater— Building What’s Wright Stewart, chair emeritus of the board of trustees, told her: “When Frank Lloyd Wright got off the plane in Dallas, the very first thing he said was, ‘Who’s got the money?’”

Money, initially, wasn’t the problem. The mother of Kalita Humphreys—an actress whom Paul

of discussion.”

Life trustee Deedie Rose recounts the 1930s’ tale of Neiman Marcus scion Stanley Marcus’s commission for Wright to design Marcus’s new home. Wright’s eventual plan featured open-air sleeping porches, rather than enclosed bedrooms;

Baker had worked with who died in a 1954 plane crash—donated one hundred thousand dollars for the building of the theater in her daughter’s name.

(It would ultimately cost $1 million.)

No, money wasn’t the problem. Frank Lloyd Wright—lionized for decades as America’s architectural genius—was.

“Mr. Wright built exactly what he wanted,” life trustee Charles Wyly says. “He wasn’t open for a lot

that’s because when Wright had visited Dallas, the weather just happened to be mild.

“And then, there were no closets in [his floor-plan]—and here is Stanley Marcus, the king of sartorial splendor,” Rose says. “Wright didn’t listen very well. He wasn’t very interested in your program.” (For the record, Marcus resorted to a local architecture firm.)

Paul Baker was known for productions that

The Kalita Humphreys Theater— a flurry of construction in the middle of parkland.

Frank Lloyd Wright at his Arizona home, Taliesin West, December 18, 1959.

T

he only freestanding theater designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Kalita Humphreys is a symbol of great pride and historic strug-

gle.

Struggle is what you’d expect from an architect who boasted, “This building will one day mark the spot where Dallas once stood.”

The theater’s design dates to 1915, originally commissioned for a Los Angeles venue, then later dusted off for a company in Hartford, Connecticut.

Both projects failed due to budget shortfalls.

Judy Mathis, former president of the Dallas Theater Center Guild and an expert on the theater’s curvaceous ins and outs, recalls something Waldo 20

STAGED RIGHT

Construction of the theater’s enormous, 127-ton concrete drum.

shook up traditional staging rules. In his new theater, he wanted three different stages—spaces that could be so easily reconfigured, the audience and performing areas could be reversed. What he got from Wright was a single stage—and an architect as inflexible as his blueprint.

Designed in Wright’s nature-inspired organic style, the theater originally had no right angles, except where walls meet floor and ceiling.

No one disputes that Wright was a genius. But he had no clue how a theater actually works. He saw it as a pristine temple, unaware of the sweaty, frenetic, hivelike environment of a working backstage.

Paul Baker’s practical knowledge clashed with Frank Lloyd Wright’s abstract idealization. But Baker found he had an unlikely ally, recalling, “His wife, Olgivanna, did say to me that when two very strong-willed people met and battled things out, things generally improved.”

Sometimes yes. Sometimes no.

Wright originally wanted the theater’s stage to be a revolving elevator platform, a novelty that would have been dangerous for actors—and cost one hundred thousand dollars all by itself.

Baker managed to nix that idea. But his biggest objection was to Wright’s design for two curved,

concrete ramps connecting the prop and scenery shop in the basement to the stage above.

Symmetrical, elegant, and impractical, they fit Wright’s organic aesthetic: on the floor plan they resemble fallopian tubes, curving up to the metaphoric womb of the stage.

“Frank Lloyd Wright became quite furious with me for disagreeing with him over the fact that the ramps from the workshops to the stage were not useable, because they were too narrow and lacked flexibility,” Baker says. “And the lighting slots in the ceiling of the theater were very skimpy and made it

there,” Baker remembers. “I said, ‘Mr. Wright, I’m forty miles in the country here. I have no way to get back to Phoenix to catch an airplane.’

“Later, his very friendly and talented son-in-law met with me and said, ‘Frank Lloyd Wright is old and we will change the plans—but never let him know we’ve changed them.’”

That man was William Wesley Peters, who agreed to replace the stage-left ramp with a freight elevator. Judy Mathis met Peters during a later visit to Dallas, and he claimed that, while Frank Lloyd Wright was a great designer, he had a limited sense

extremely difficult to light a show in any but one specific way.”

The cold war brewing between the men flashed into open hostility over Baker’s design objections.

Frank Lloyd Wright invited him to his home in Taliesin West, in the Arizona desert.

“He met, shortly, with me and told me that he wanted to terminate our relationship then and

of how to make his ideas work in the real world.

“He could do the drawings, but he depended on his engineers to make it happen,” Peters told her.

So the elevator was built, without the architect’s knowledge. “When Frank Lloyd Wright was scheduled to visit the almost-completed theater, that bit of architecture was boarded up,” Paul Baker says.

Arriving at the airport in Waco to discuss building a new Dallas theater, Frank Lloyd Wright wanted first to be sure all the money was in place.

STAGED RIGHT 21

“Unfortunately, [he] did not live to make the visit and never knew his plans were changed.” Wright died in April 1959. A black-and-white photo of his face graces the rear wall of the elevator, a fond tweaking of the stubborn visionary. Someone long ago posted a caption beneath it: “NOOOOOOO ELEVATOR IN MY THEATER!!!”

The Baker-Wright battles continued throughout construction. While Baker was away during the summer auditioning actors, Wright ordered that the

The theater’s most striking external feature is the enormous concrete drum that caps the stage. Its walls are poured concrete eight inches thick, forty feet tall, weighing 127 tons, cantilevered over the stage and braced by three levels of dressing rooms at the rear.

Spectators gathered to watch the bracing removed after it had dried; they expected to witness the whole thing come crashing down. “But Frank Lloyd Wright said, ‘If I built it, it will stay,’” recalls

production space. We couldn’t get things in and out!”

The theater consulted Wright’s successor in Arizona to design the additions and modifications.

The Dallas Theater Center donated the venue to the city of Dallas in 1973, though it retains the lease for one dollar a year through September 2013.

In 1990, the porte cochere running between the Wyly Wing and the theater was enclosed to expand the lobby. The stairs descending to the restrooms were straightened to ninety-degree angles to prevent

Visiting Frank Lloyd Wright’s Arizona home, Taliesin West. Left: Paul Raigorodsky.

Middle: Waldo Stewart and Paul Baker.

Right: Raigorodsky and Baker.

enormous air-conditioning units—meant to be housed in a separate external structure—be placed in the basement. They swallowed up half of the area, including space intended for rehearsal.

“There wasn’t a thing Paul Baker could do about it once he got back,” Judy Mathis says.

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Mathis.

In 1969, the Wyly Wing, including the Lay Studio and Frank’s Place, were added to provide more elbow room. “There was not enough room at the back of the stage to produce the plays,” Charles Wyly says. “We needed rehearsal space. We needed more

disoriented patrons from falling. These improvements helped, but the Kalita Humphreys’ tight backstage has always posed a challenge to directors.

Former theater critic Jeremy Gerard recalls touring the theater in the 1980s with incoming artistic director Adrian Hall and his designer Eugene Lee

Evening falls on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kalita Humphreys Theater.

on their arrival.

“Adrian is realizing for the first time that this may be the worst theater ever built,” Gerard says with a laugh. “There’s no fly space, no trap space.

He is looking around, saying, ‘But where will my angels come from? Where will my devils come from?’”

Hall himself remembers things differently.

“I really liked it, even though it was impossible to use traditional scenery,” he says. “It was not a practical space. Frank Lloyd Wright had the very

imaginative idea of bringing in the scenery through a tunnel that wound up into this round theater. It seemed like a good idea, but it really wasn’t.”

Even so, regardless of the headaches for artists behind the scenes, the theater was a gift for theatergoers out front. The stage and rows of seats have an intimate proximity rare for a venue of its size. Of its 491 seats, not one of them is bad.

“It’s a wonderful place to watch theater,”

says life trustee Deedie Rose, cochair of the building committee for the new Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre at the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts. “The setting is wonderful and the house is wonderful. It’s the crazy Frank Lloyd Wright details that make it difficult.”

But it’s those very same crazy details that make the Kalita Humphreys Theater a cityprotected, historic space. Whether it outlasts Dallas itself, as Wright prophesied, it remains one of the city’s most striking landmarks.

STAGED RIGHT 23

Continued from page 19

“He did things considered very edgy in the fifties and was even written up in Life magazine,” recalls Linda Custard, whose first memory of the eater Center was attending its grand opening gala on December 28, 1959, with her husband-to-be, Bill. e Custards’ support of the theater would extend for the next fifty years; ultimately, they would both become life trustees.

Charles Laughton recalled Baker as a man without fear. Having played hunchback Quasimodo onscreen and directed one of American film’s eerie classics, e Night of the Hunter, he knew something about fearlessness.

Randy Moore, then a student of Baker’s at Baylor, would act at the Dallas eater Center for more than three decades. Excited disbelief still colors his voice when he thinks back: “Here were Charles Laughton and Burgess Meredith coming to Waco-freakingTexas to work in a Baptist university because of this man!”

Frank Lloyd Wright’s theater boldly emerges from the green parkland alongside Turtle Creek.

s Original board members Waldo Stewart and Charles Beard

inspect the skeleton of the Kalita Humphreys Theater with Paul Baker.

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Living Organism

B

Laughing Wild

“

efore the house lights lower and the stage lights rise, a theatergoer

The Marriage of Bette and Boo

can open the program and

was a great company show. Most

identify all the actors onstage and the

of my stories are about laughing

roles they’re playing. Easy enough.

onstage, because the play was so

It’s a little harder to recognize all the

funny . . . Nance Williamson,

people offstage—people who work for

Candy Buckley, and myself. One

weeks, months, even years to make the

time we were laughing so hard,

evening’s performance come alive for those few fleeting heartbeats underneath

“

our chapel veils slipped off our

the spotlights.

heads. It was ‘the giggle show.’

While the theater echoes with

—Actress Linda Gehringer

applause as actors take their bows on s Christopher Durang’s The Marriage of Bette and Boo,

from the 1985–1986 season, was one of director Adrian Hall’s personal favorites.

opening night, across town another group of actors are at their homes or in coffee shops, memorizing lines for the next production.

A view from the catwalk of The Who’s Tommy.

2008–2009 season.

New bolts of cloth are being rolled out in the costume shop to be fashioned into clothes for the show after that.

In the prop shop, Scrooge’s headboard is being stripped and refinished for A Christmas Carol.

And the artistic director is carrying home scripts to read, determining what plays the Dallas Theater Center will mount next year. Or even the year after that.

In the life of a working theater, there’s no such thing as an intermission. Theater is a living organism, made up of dozens of people constantly creating, planning, and moving forward.

STAGED RIGHT 25

s

“Paul Baker was bigger than life. He had a mind of his own, that’s for

Edward Hermann and Bill Gabarino in You Never Can Tell.

1966–1967 season.

sure,” says Charles Wyly, chair of the board in the 1970s. “With his Yale background there was sophistication about Paul, but there was also an earthiness. He was a complex person.”

In the eyes of some, complex was an understatement. As Charles Laughton observed, Baker, who is now living on his ranch in Gonzalez, Texas, was also “crude, irritating, arrogant, nuts . . . and a genius.” It was this arrogant genius who became the Dallas eater Center’s first, and longest-serving, director.

TOTAL THEATER Paul Baker says, “I felt I had developed at Baylor a . . . group of actors and actresses who

s

made up a very creative, strong ensemble, which could be moved from Waco to Dallas almost intact.” at’s what happened.

His students and some of his fellow staff members formed

s Paul Baker with Annette Strauss, mayor of Dallas from

the eater Center’s core, with graduate students from Baylor

1987 to 1991 and lifelong advocate of the arts. Annette Strauss Artist Square in the Arts District was named in her honor.

University’s drama program earning their MFAs while receiving practical training at the theater. e idea of a permanent company solidified in 1962.

Writing his philosophy for the eater Center in the months before it opened, Baker explained, “It is not a school in the usual sense; it is a laboratory for work.” (In 1963, the theater’s academic affiliation transferred to Trinity University, in San Antonio, when Baker left Baylor after its president shuttered a 1962 campus production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, objecting to its mild profanity.)

26

STAGED RIGHT

Zero Mostel and Chris Richard in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1968 comedy, The Latent Heterosexual.

Baker’s Baylor productions had caught some celebrities’ eyes, and

FISHY SURPRISES

Joshua Beene and God in the 1961 season) and Zero Mostel (the lead of

During the 1966–1967 “ season, I was acting in

Paddy Chayefsky’s world-premiere e Latent Heterosexual in the 1967

You Never Can Tell,

season, directed by Burgess Meredith).

and I was pregnant. A

would attract more over the years, including Burl Ives (who headlined

But Baker was firmly opposed to star worship.

big meal had to be

“As a director, it was much more creative to work with several people

served and eaten by

than to have to kowtow to a star and give less emphasis and importance

the actors during part

to everybody else and the production concept,” Baker says. “I was more

of the show, and a

excited about the European theater’s ensemble system than the American

local B&B agreed to

star system—which operated at the expense of the rest of the company.”

provide the food.

Edward Hermann and Barbara Gilstrap in You Never Can Tell.

“What they sent over was fish—fish Barbara Gilstrap, Mona Pursley, Campbell Thomas, Penny Metropulos, and Randolph Tallman in 1967’s You Never Can Tell. The show held a fishy surprise for fellow actress Robyn Flatt.

frozen, then warmed up again. I sat down to eat, and it was all I could do not to be upchucking all over everything.

“After the show I said, ‘I can’t come near this table if you don’t get rid of that fish.’” The menu, accordingly, changed.

“Another time, in Three Sisters, I was playing Irina. I’m sitting there doing flowers and occasionally taking little tidbits of food from the table.

“Opening night, I take a taste of this food and— unbeknownst to me—one of my fellow actors had decided to provide us caviar. So I had another food crisis. He really meant to be celebratory and make this sweet gesture. I just wish he’d warned us!

”

—Actress Robyn Flatt

STAGED RIGHT 27

s

The 1966 cast of George Feydeau’s A Bug in Her Ear, a co-production with Theatre de France. (Note posters from DTC’s first-season productions on the wall.)

Young people who arrived at the eater Center looking for

e young would-be actor was memorably recruited into service

glamour were handed a mop or hammer instead. Baker’s whole-theater

for the grand opening December performances of Eugene McKinney’s

philosophy, the integration of abilities (also the title of his book),

stage adaptation of omas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River.

translated into a hands-on approach to every aspect of the theater.

28

Visiting family in Dallas for Christmas, Moore headed over to the

“He believed in the hierarchy of work,” Moore says. “He wasn’t a

spanking-new, Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Kalita Humphreys

big believer in—I hate to say this—talent. He believed you could get

eater one afternoon during final rehearsals and slid into a back row to

there by work. We did everything—box office, props. And if we were

see what was happening—just in time to see Baker feuding with the man

striking a set, Paul Baker would be there striking the set, too.”

who was supposed to run the lighting board. e guy stormed out.

STAGED RIGHT

“is was a couple of days before the opening night,” Moore remembers. “Paul Baker turned around, looked at me, and said, ‘Randy, get up to the light booth.’”

His Baylor classmate Robyn Flatt (who is Paul Baker’s daughter) was assigned to help

Perfect Casting

“

In their portrayal of the enduring couple in On Golden Pond, Ryland Merkey and Mary Sue Jones were perfectly cast, age- and relationshipwise. And they had that rare talent to corral the entire audience and bring us to that moment and place in time. The conflicted relationships

”

and facing death were themes they both seemed to express effortlessly.

—Patron Joan Clark

him man the cues for the gala opening. Before them lay a huge, complicated light board donated by Texas Instruments. e evening passed, says Flatt, and it is “absolutely chiseled

Ryland Merkey, John Figlmiller, and Mary Sue Jones in On Golden Pond.

1980–1981 season.

in our memories.” ere was much more to Baker’s work philosophy than an excuse for cheap labor.

“He wanted people to understand their own strengths, but to also have experience in an area that was someone else’s strength,” Flatt says. “He very much wanted to build a team that respected the different disciplines and understood what it took to design a set, or be a lighting designer, or be a playwright.” rough Baker’s teachings, everyone at the theater shared a language.

“A lighting designer could talk to a set designer and a costume designer,” says Linda Blase, a Dallas photographer and lighting designer who joined the eater Center as a graduate student in 1969. “Everybody could talk about the color or the rhythm of a piece, and everyone understood what they were talking about.”

“Paul Baker was very instrumental in creating a kind of methodology and a vision for

STAGED RIGHT 29

the work I do now,” says nationally acclaimed playwright Octavio Solis (Santos & Santos), who earned his bachelor’s in 1980 and his MFA at Trinity University in 1983. “He had a philosophy of seeing the arts as elements, breaking things down into form, color, texture.” e opening production, Of Time and the River, reflected Baker’s interest in adapting literary works for the stage. One of the most successful of these was Journey to Jefferson, a version of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying that Baker directed and took on tour in Europe in 1964.

“We went to Paris and Frankfurt and Brussels, the summer after the Kennedy assassination,” recalls Moore, an original cast member.

“Everybody in Europe was going, ‘Why did you kill him?’ at’s why we’d changed the name of the play. Stanley Marcus, who was on the s The women’s chorus in 1972’s Lysistrata sported

authentic Greek costumes, courtesy of the National Theatre of Greece.

s The VIP list for the Lysistrata Glendi included

high-profile personalities such as Vice President Spiro Agnew and Aristotle Onassis.

30

STAGED RIGHT

s A multilayered moment in 1974’s Jack Ruby, All-American Boy.

Chequita Jackson as Tigerlily and Norma Levin in the title role of 1970’s Peter Pan.

Suffering for Art

Liz Mikel acted in David Petrarca’s 1991 A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Arts District Theater, which was converted into a giant sandbox. “You should have seen me, stretched out as a fairy. We’d roll around in that sand—I got a rash from that sand.” Then there was the idea to feature live animals in the show. Including a pig.

“But as soon as that pig hit that sand—well, you know what happened,” Mikel says with a screech. “We were like, ‘Nooooo—we’ve got to lay down in that sand!’

board, said, ‘You can’t take a play called As I Lay Dying from Dallas to Europe.’” e production won the Special Jury Prize at the eater of Nations assembly in Paris.

Baker directly addressed the historic stain on Dallas’s reputation in 1974, co-writing and directing Jack Ruby, All-American Boy. “He took that on, and it made a contribution to this community,” life trustee Charles

“It rained on the sand, too, during the show. So by the end of the week they

would try to blow-dry [the set] between shows. I finally wised up. I would go backstage, strip all my clothes off, take a

Wyly says. “Dallas had a tough time. e city was never responsible [for the assassination],

shower, and redress for the third act. It

but we had to deal with the fact that it did happen here.”

was a nasty mess, but it was a beautiful

Confronting difficult topics is part of the job description, Baker says. “A director needs to have a great deal of confidence in his own way of thinking, which allows for trying out

show to watch. Or so I’ve heard.

—Company member Liz Mikel

any new creative idea which comes his way.”

Not everybody, however, was always happy with such confidence. “ere were times when Baker produced something that was considered just a little too risqué for the Dallas market,” Wyly recalls. “It infuriated some of our civic leaders.

I can remember more than one play when some folks were storming out of there.”

STAGED RIGHT 31

s Celebration—and confetti—erupt in Lysistrata.

One subscriber wrote Baker to complain that 1974’s e Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia “presents the worst usage of cussing that I’ve ever experienced . . . and that is considerable.”

He thought the actors were pretty good, though.

Another subscriber wrote about Jack Ruby, “It seems to me that this country is experiencing enough decadence and deterioration as it is without making heroes of night club proprietors, strip-tease girls, and murderers.” Nonetheless, she renewed her subscription for the following season.

Paul Baker’s programming reflected his ongoing interest in European theatrical innovations.

German director Harry Buckwitz staged Bertolt Brecht’s e Caucasian Chalk Circle (1966–1967 season) and Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade (1969–1970), and Baker invited Greek director Takis Muzanidis to helm Lysistrata (1971–1972).

32

STAGED RIGHT

Caesar’s Head

“

Stories? You mean like the day Julius Caesar’s head rolled off during the funeral? Or that production of Peter Pan, where Nana the dog and Peter Pan—who was blind as a bat—fell offstage during the blackout, and ended up in the lap of a man in the front row?

”

—Photographer and lighting designer Linda Blase s Columns bordering the Kalita Humphreys Theater lobby

bear the architect’s distinctive detail.

In the 1970s, Baker focused on developing new scripts, inviting producers from around the nation to the annual New Play Market, featuring work by DTC artists. “at was a long time before the Humana Festival in Louisville,” says Randy Moore, who remembered being approached by fellow actor Preston Jones, whose other main job was selling tickets.

“While sitting in that box office, Preston started writing his plays, hand-printed on a clipboard,” Moore says. “He came up one day and said, ‘I’ve got a play I want you to read.’” Late that night, Moore woke up his wife because he was laughing so hard. at was the beginning of the Texas Trilogy, starting s John Henson as Captain Hook, the nemesis in the play

Peter Pan. 1970–1971 season.

with the salty Knights, which Baker directed. “It was a smashing success in the Down Center Stage, a very restricted space which we wrestled from Frank Lloyd Wright’s basement,” Baker remembers.

STAGED RIGHT 33

A New Hamlet

“

Meanwhile, the director’s dedication to education found a new out-

I had already produced Hamlet at Baylor several times and had done a great deal of study in the traditional ways to present Hamlet, and thought it was high time we did a Dallas Theater Center version with a whole new interpretation.

magnet school for performing and visual arts. Baker became one of the revamped school’s founding principals. en chair of the theater’s board, Charles Wyly recalls, “Paul came to me and said, ‘I’d like to help the school district. I love working with teachers, and I can help them get their curriculum started.’ I said, ‘You

“The character of Hamlet was broken into three arts. Randy [Tallman]’s music was a primary element of the piece and particularly captivated young people, and

take all the time you feel is needed.’”

“His real strength,” Moore says, “was teaching people how to be in touch with their creative self. He was a brilliant educator.”

from there we rethought every important moment in

However, some people began to see Baker’s focus on the high

the play. The set and costumes were redesigned, and

school as an impediment to the theater’s professional potential. Baker

we introduced an extremely ramped stage.

himself recalls that actress Greer Garson and her husband, Buddy

“All in all, the play took a new view of the inside of Hamlet’s mind. The title of the script is Hamlet ESP, meaning: looking inside Hamlet’s mind. There was not

”

a single stodgy note in the entire play.

—DTC founding artistic director Paul Baker

STAGED RIGHT

s

Robert Eason, Reginald Montgomery, Randolph Tallman, and Howard Renensla in Hamlet ESP. 1970–1971 season.

34

let in 1976, with the refashioning of Booker T. Washington High into a

Fogelson, attended a production of Knights. Afterward, Fogelson told Baker he was interested in backing a production of the show on Broadway.

“at was a very exciting offer,” Baker says. “However, at the same time, I was just beginning to form some very creative ideas for a new arts magnet high school in Dallas, which I had been asked to lead by the superintendent. Producing Knights of the White Magnolia in New York would have put a stop to that development.”

s Linda Blase (standing) checks out lighting cues.

As an early member of the Theater Center, Blase was trained to be a lighting designer and photographer, among other skills.

Scenes from the 1971 production of the Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick musical The Apple Tree.

STAGED RIGHT 35

Randy Moore likewise recalls that, during the previous decade, Baker had balked at an offer to take Journey to Jefferson to Broadway, because the New

Ken Latimer, Paul Porter, Robyn Flatt, John Figlmiller, and Randy Moore in Journey to Jefferson. The adaptation of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying won the Special Jury Prize at the Theater of Nations assembly in Paris in 1964.

York producers didn’t want to transfer the original Dallas cast to New York. “He didn’t like the fact that there was some outside organization telling him what he could and could not do.”

Since its opening, the eater Center had worked without a contract with Actors Equity, the national union for professional stage actors. Baker continued to rely on casts largely made up of former and current students.

“Because of Baker’s reliance on the student acting company . . . productions at the Dallas eater Center did sometimes have an amateurish, community theater flavor,” e Dallas Times Herald theater critic Bob Porter wrote in a survey of the 1960s’ Dallas theater scene.

Actress Robyn Flatt and fellow cast members enjoy the European tour of Journey to Jefferson while bringing some old-fashioned down-home music to 1964 Europe.

s

36

STAGED RIGHT

“It was a good local, community theater graduate program,” says life trustee Bess Enloe, who joined the

The doorway that for fifty years has led to unforgettable performances. In October 2009, the Dallas Theater Center will move into a new home.

board of trustees in 1979 and acted as its chair in the late 1980s. “Paul never really had any ambition to play on the national theater stage. He didn’t want Equity actors, and we thought that we would get better actors if they were Equity—and we did.” Consequently, the theater achieved a more professional status.

“Clearly there was a faction that felt the eater Center was never going to play on a national stage as long as it was primarily an educational institution,” says Jeremy Gerard, e Dallas Morning News theater critic from 1982 to 1985. “Paul Baker was absolutely adamant about having it be, essentially, a semi-professional institution at best.”

Even longtime company members began to doubt the status quo. Linda Blase remembers seeing actors spending their free time outside the rehearsal hall tallying box office receipts. “I thought, you know, we may be giving our arts short shrift.”

Dallas-based playwright D. L. Coburn delivered a public black eye when he refused to let the eater Center stage his 1978 Pulitzer Prize–winning e Gin Game, specifically because “the possibility of a weak production is too high,” he told the Times Herald.

STAGED RIGHT 37

In 1979, the theater suffered an internal blow with the sudden death of its writing star, Preston Jones, due to surgical complications. He was only forty-three. “ey lost their court jester, their resident genius, someone they really thought would guide them into the next era,” playwright Solis says. “It left everyone a little stunned.”

Yielding to the changing times, Paul Baker reluctantly signed an agreement with Actors Equity in 1980. e same year, the theater followed the national trend of dividing leadership responsibilities between two posts: Baker, as artistic director, and naming Bruce Swerdfager as managing director, who was succeeded by Al Milano.

At the start of the 1980s, the arts were bustling in Dallas, with fresh blood like SMU graduate Kjehl Rasmussen starting a theater company designed to nurture new scripts with Broadway ambitions. “at project went bust pretty quickly,” critic Gerard says, “but for a time it was one of the things that was invigorating the Dallas theater scene.”

Meanwhile, Paul Baker was nearing seventy. “ere were some people on the fund-raising side of the theater who, I think, felt they needed a new name

Company member/photographer Linda Blase and Preston Jones in 1976, with the cover photo she shot of him for a Saturday Review feature on Jones’s acclaimed Texas Trilogy.

s

At the opening of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, renowned British critic, playwright, and translator Eric Bentley was on hand to sell copies of his English-language version of Brecht’s script.

s

Judith Davis (left) in the 1967 production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

38

STAGED RIGHT

Kaki Dowling and Edward Hermann in The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

On Hands And Knees

“

I remember seeing grown men out of their seats, on their hands and knees pounding the floor laughing, literally out of their seats. It spoke to the audience so much; it was so quintessentially Texas.

They went crazy over the show. An amazing

”

event.

—Actor Randy Moore, who starred in Preston Jones’s Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia

Longtime company member Randy Moore aged well beyond his years to play the title character of Preston Jones’s The Oldest Living Graduate in 1974. He’s seen here (above) with Mona Pursley and Robyn Flatt and (below) with Pursley and John Henson.

s Zero Mostel and Preston Jones in Paddy Chayefsky’s

1968 comedy The Latent Heterosexual.

STAGED RIGHT 39

to raise money,” Flatt says. After two decades of innovation in the theater on Turtle Creek, Baker appeared to an increasing number of board members to be stuck in gear. His own words, from a speech he delivered on receiving an honorary degree from Trinity University in 1958, might have been turned against him: “If a professor quits growing, either fire him or retire him.”

Events and emotions came to a head in a public meeting in May 1982 in the Kalita Humphreys eater. “It was not pretty, with people shouting at each other,” Randy Moore remembers. “It was highly emotional, because you had people on the board who had been supporters for years now wanting him to leave. e whole company was there, and we supported him. But it’s not like we had any power.”

Playwright Solis echoes him: “Paul Baker did not go gently into the good night. We were all on his side.” And in the wistful words of one trustee, “I often said it was the best theater that was ever in that room.”

Paul Baker’s strong and oftentimes groundbreaking performances quickly put the Dallas Theater Center in the national arts spotlight.

40

STAGED RIGHT

In the Booth

As she speaks into her head mic, her surgically cool voice issues from the backstage intercom speakers, giving actors the theatrical equivalent of “on-your-mark”: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your places call for top-of-the-show. Have an excellent one.”

A few seconds later, the five members of Denton-based band Oso Closo slink onstage to kick off the loud, bright, carefully orchestrated chaos of Tommy.

For over an hour, Daroff coolly calls cues to the light board operators and backstage assistant stage managers. Signaled by Daroff, they orchestrate the gunfire, floods, and rainfall, and the traffic pattern of whirling actors.

The job is to make it all look easy, so that audiences never (or shouldn’t) glimpse the frenetic activity backstage. “It’s perhaps a bad metaphor, but a lot of theater is about triage,” Daroff explains in the quiet following a performance.

“It’s about making things better in as fast and simple and safe a way as possible. In a lot

of ways, running a backstage on a big show is like an emergency room.”

Some shows are bigger than

others, but even the simplest can have complex cues.

The Who’s Tommy has nearly four hundred cues over a seventy-five-minute running time, or roughly one every ten or twelve seconds.

Things go wrong sometimes. Daroff recalls working at a theater where the headset system crashed, cutting off communication with her crew.

She had to signal cues by blinking a flashlight through the booth window. Another time, for a two-actor play, she had to delay the curtain for an hour and a half.

“One of the actors was nowhere to be found for forty-five minutes,” she says. “And when we did find him, he was very far away.”

Everything that happens (good and bad) gets written up in a performance report after every show. During tonight’s performance, one body microphone failed. A light fluttered. A gun failed to fire.

Sometimes, a stage manager not only has to police the people onstage, but also those in the audience. Take, for instance, the hand-written report from Jack Ruby, All-American Boy on April 26, 1974: “Audience is sneaking drinks into the theater.” Some things never change. s

S

he shifts her weight from leg to leg—like a sprinter before the race or a boxer preparing to climb into the ring. Or maybe what she most resembles is a puppeteer.

In the glassed-in gloom of the booth overlooking the Kalita Humphreys stage, speckled by blue light from computer screens, production stage manager Melissa Daroff gets ready to call the cues for an evening performance of The Who’s Tommy.

Kalita Humphreys, a Texas actress Paul Baker had worked with, died in a 1954 plane crash. The Frank Lloyd Wright–designed theater was named in her memory.

STAGED RIGHT 41

e next day, the board began a nationwide search for a permanent replacement. “It was a horrible process, and it left an awful lot of hard feelings,” life trustee Bess Enloe says.

A Queen Onstage and Off e board’s yearlong search for a leader who would take the institution in fresh directions was safely in the hands of Mary Sue Jones, a woman who knew the Dallas eater Center better than most—from backstage to center stage, as a teacher, administrator, director, designer, and leading lady.

Under her maiden name of Mary Sue Birkhead, Jones enrolled at Baylor University in 1948, initially planning to study visual art. But, like many other students, she felt the gravitational pull of Paul Baker’s program. s A lesson in makeup: a graduate student experiments

during the 1979–1980 school year.

The Bruised Tree, the Spooked Mule

“

In the 1961–1962 season, Paul Baker directed the world premiere of Joshua Beene and God, starring Burl Ives as an itinerant preacher in East Texas.”He hadn’t been onstage in a long time, so his long-term memory was not the best.” As a result, the scenery was built with places for a prompter to hide onstage, in case Ives forgot his lines.

“The first scene was him sitting on a big log, talking to God. And next to it was a very large tree, inside of which was the prompter. [Ives] said, ‘If I hit the tree with my cane, then you give me the line.’ He did OK the first night. But the second night, he practically beat the tree to death.” Then there was the mule, which Ives rode onstage at the start of the play. Well, for the first performance, anyway.

“He came in on this mule, singing a hymn. It was wonderful. And the mule was fine, no problems—until we got an audience. Burl Ives comes on singing a hymn, and the audience went nuts. They cheered and clapped and stomped.

“The mule went what?!?—jumped up, turned around in midair, and started getting offstage with Burl Ives trying to stay alive and get off that

42

STAGED RIGHT

”

mule. He would never get on that mule again.

—Actor Randy Moore

Theatergoers relax in front of the Kalita Humphreys Theater before a performance.

“She started out wanting to be an artist,” says her nephew,

at’s when she wasn’t wearing all her other hats. “She was

Trey Birkhead. “But I think she realized she could be creative in

a renaissance theater person,” Birkhead says—in other words,

so many ways in theater.”

exactly the sort of artist Paul Baker wanted around him.

Jones earned her master’s degree in drama in 1955, began

Tall, with a full-throated, husky voice, piercing features, and

teaching acting and design at Baylor, and then followed Baker

a theatrical way of gliding into a room (both offstage and on),

to Dallas, where she became an assistant director at the eater

Jones could be intimidating to those first meeting her. But then

Center—as well as one of its most recognizable faces.

the next day, you might find her schlepping set furniture around

Jones was a very powerful character and leading actress, whose impressive range ran the gamut from Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart to the female leads in Medea, Long Day’s Journey into Night, A Streetcar Named Desire, and other roles.

or painting scenery. “You realized she was just like everybody else,” says Birkhead.

Married first to Roy Fridge, an artist who designed some of the eater Center’s posters, she divorced and wed colleague STAGED RIGHT 43

and incipient writing star Preston Jones in 1964. ey were the theater’s starriest couple, and among its hardest working.

In 1980, the year after Preston Jones’s sudden death, Paul Baker named Mary Sue his associate artistic director. In 1981, she agreed to become Baker’s co–artistic director, sharing the theater’s top job. She also agreed, at that fractious 1982 board meeting, to remain as sole interim artistic director for a year—although it was clear that the board was intent on finding a new leader with international ties and no previous connection to Paul Baker’s legacy.

“Mary Sue did an extraordinary job for us,” says Bill Custard. “Paul Baker named her his co–artistic director without any conference with anyone else. But it turns out it was a very good thing. With Paul’s departure, she really did take on the reins. She kept it all together. Mary Sue was a lovely person.

She represented all the good things that came out of that group.”

s Paul Baker (left), and James Nelson Harrell (right), with

Mary Sue Jones—a core member of the Theater Center who would become its second artistic director.

44

STAGED RIGHT

s

Actor-turned-playwright Preston Jones and life trustee Dora Stecker.

Why Theater?

“

It’s the most communicative art form there is. Especially plays with great language. You feel it, you taste it, you hear it. And when it’s done really well, you think about it over and over and over again.

”

—Costume shop manager Barbara Hicks

Draper Amanda Hendrickson at work in the costume shop.

In 1983, when the new artistic director was appointed, Mary

Another Texas Tornado

Sue Jones—Dallas eater Center’s second artistic director and

It’s a cliché—that big-sky, oversized-personality caricature

the only female one in its history—moved to New Mexico. As

of Texans. But if anyone could live up to that kind of stereotype,

artist-in-residence at the College of Santa Fe, she taught acting

it was Adrian Hall.

and directing, becoming a full-time faculty member there in 1988. She died in Santa Fe in June 1992.

“He was a national figure in the resident theater movement —plus, the fact that he’s an outsized Texan himself was an enormous advantage,” Jeremy Gerard says. “He appealed to that kind of Dallas bravado.”

Continued on page 48 STAGED RIGHT 45

Making It Up

W

ithin the thirty-eight-thousandsquare-foot John William Potter Production Studio, the prop shop is partly a furniture warehouse and repair shop, a pirate’s pile of jewels (fake) and weaponry (fake and real), and a trove of costumes representing countless historic periods.

Feathers, skulls, and eerie faces are just run-of-the-mill items in the prop shop.

As much as anything else, it’s a mad scientist’s lab.

“My job is to realize the design vision of both the scenic designer and the director,” says property master Rich Gilles. He leads the way across the vast main floor of the shop, along the edge of a circle that marks the exact measurements of the Kalita Humphreys stage.

“We can completely erect a set here, paint it, take it down, then move it to the theater,” Gilles says. At the moment, the ceiling structure for The Good Negro is lying upside down in the circle. Beyond it,

46

STAGED RIGHT

Scrooge’s wardrobe has been dragged out of storage and is awaiting a touchup, overseen by a giant skull hanging on the wall.

For set design, the prop department shares chores with the technical director and his crew.

“The technical director and the carpenters build the walls and the floor, but anything that goes on the walls and the floor is essentially a prop,” Gilles explains. Such props include furniture, onstage lights, carpets, food, flowers—whatever is required. If there’s a tree onstage, the carpenters will build the trunk . . . but Gilles and his staff provide the leaves, vines, and grass around it.

Yeah, it gets complicated.

Take costumes, for instance.

An umbrella, say.

“If it’s just a plain black umbrella, neither male nor female, it’s going to be considered a prop,” he says.

“But if it’s a lady’s parasol, with lace and whatnot, it’s going to end up in the costume department.

“Men’s wallets and briefcases are props, but women’s purses are costumes. It all sort of depends on where the costume designer wants to have a style influence. Did you follow all that?”

Gilles walks past letters on the wall, reading ART PIRATES TOIL FOR COINS—the waggish anagram from a sign that originally read RESTORATION SPECIALISTS.

He leads the way through rooms of suits and ball gowns, racks of gleaming shoes, and heaps of swords, past stacks of dismembered mannequin limbs and a dummy nun on wheels. And in the conference room, there’s a bloody, life-size wolf—built for The Mystery of Irma Vep, and borrowed by theaters around the country.

Gilles also points out the break room, with kitchen appliances and a bed. “I’ve pulled plenty of all-nighters here,” he says. Assembling the bejeweled chandeliers for 2008’s The Misanthrope kept him in the shop for two nights. “Twenty-minute catnaps,” he says.

“I highly recommend them.”

The prop shop has just about any kind of chair you can imagine. The only challenge is getting it out of this massive puzzle of furniture.

Maggie Boos strips and refinishes a piece of furniture in preparation for its stage debut.

In addition to providing all the—well— stuff a show needs, Gilles works to solve some very theatrical problems, like creating a believable, fake penguin that could be butchered onstage, then eaten, by actors in the Antarctic drama Inexpressible Island in the 1999–2000 season.

“We made a penguin cake,” Gilles says.

During a rehearsal, “We did the first tryout

onstage. Preston Lane, the director, turned to us and said, ‘No, I was wrong. If we use this cake, the audience is only going to pay attention to the penguin if we do this.’”

There was another fowl assignment, one Gilles sees as his toughest . . . and not totally successful: an exploding chicken. For this, a character in 1997’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid shot the ill-fated (fake) bird off

the top of another man’s top hat. “We came up with something,” Gilles says wistfully.

“The chicken exploded, and feathers went everywhere—but it was almost comical instead of dramatic.”

Life in the props department can be messy.

STAGED RIGHT 47

Continued from page 45

Something Magical

“

Artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode

There’s something magical or spiritual that hap-

Island, the tall, gangly Hall was as famous for his personality as his power-

pens to me when I’m in a room with other peo-

ful stage work. Born in small-town Van, Texas, a veteran director of Off-

ple, watching actors present something. Whether

Broadway fare in the 1950s and 1960s, Hall was tapped in 1963 by the

it makes me laugh or it just connects to some-

Providence board of directors to lead its professional theater.

thing deeper. I think there’s a spiritual side of people that we have to feed.

“You can certainly do that through your religious preferences, but I think you can also do

”

But in 1976, concerned by budget shortfalls and Hall’s increasingly provocative programming (“abortions and homosexuality,” the director quips), Trinity Rep’s board moved to fire him. Elsewhere in the country, this would have been a done deal. But this was Hall, and Hall refused to budge. Support from his acting company and the community led the board

that with theater.

—DTC managing director Mark Hadley

to reverse its decision.

In other words, Hall became famous for being a director who fired his board, instead of

Artistic director Adrian Hall, speaking at Southern Methodist University.

vice versa.

“I don’t think the eater Center had a clue what it was getting into when it signed Adrian on,” Gerard says.

Well, yes and no. If they wanted someone to raise the company’s national profile, Hall could and did do that.

“In a way it was a brilliant choice, because Adrian had a commitment to local companies and local actors,” says Jerome Weeks, theater critic for e Dallas Morning News from 1986 to 1996. “Arts in general were riding high in the 1980s.”

Dallas was already a thriving movie-production hub, home to an abundance of actors making good money from TV (from that nighttime soap that took the city’s name as its title, for one thing) and industrial films,

48

STAGED RIGHT

as well as stage work.

Making It Real

T Robert Black (seated) as Tommy Joe, with Bill Bolender (white hat) as Darryl, and James Fields (black hat) as Big Boots in Kith and Kin, written by Oliver Hailey and directed by Adrian Hall. 1985–1986 season.

Hall recalls being first contacted at Trinity by Michael Langham, former artistic director of the Guthrie eater in Minneapolis, who told him the eater Center was seeking a new artistic director.

Hall claims he wasn’t initially interested—until he realized he could score a free flight to Dallas and visit his mother and sister. e search committee also flew up to Trinity Rep to observe his work.

“I was rehearsing e Tempest at the time, and of course it was a stunning production,” Hall says. “It hooked them, I think. ey offered me good money and everything. But I said, no, I couldn’t do that, because I wouldn’t give up Trinity. Several days later they came again and asked, ‘Would I consider running both places?’ because they wanted to become a world-class theater.”

Others remember the situation differently.

“He had the crazy idea—and we were not smart

echnical director Fred Schoening leads the way up a corroded, spiral metal staircase.

Corkscrewing up into the ceiling, it’s suspended by massive, rusty-looking chains.

What looks like a crumbling industrial dungeon is really the freshly built set for The Who’s Tommy.

“It sounds pretty lofty, but it’s true,” Schoening says. “The set is a character in a play.”

And, like the actors, playing their roles, the set isn’t exactly what it appears to be. Hidden from audience eyes, the backside of its battleship-gray walls glows with the amber of raw, unpainted wood.

Also hidden from audience view: massive plastic reservoirs, which flood the stage with water during every show.

Beneath the staircase, stagehands are drying the stage, pushing squeegees across a waterproof swimming-pool liner that’s painted to look like a wooden floor.

“This is one of the most exciting things I’ve ever seen on the stage,” Schoening says. “Even though putting this up was a grueling, grueling task, it was very satisfying. When you sit in the audience, when Tommy throws water up in the air at the end and the rain starts coming down, it just gets me every time.”

As technical director, he was instrumental in making it all work. “Basically, what a technical director does is to take the set designer’s drawings and engineer them into real-life, working drawings,” he explains.

The job requires wearing a lot of hats: plumber, carpenter, electrician. It also demands ample time, effort, and compromise to make it all come in on budget.

Those massive chains, for instance? They’re the real deal.

“We were going to get plastic chains, because they’re a lot cheaper,” Schoening says. But plastic wouldn’t have held the set pieces up, and would have required additional (and distracting) cables to provide actual support. So this is an example of a technical director’s job: factoring function, aesthetics, and cost into one equation and making a decision.

It’s not an easy job. “You’re working sixty-, seventy-, eighty-hour weeks sometimes,” Schoening says, especially when a new set is being loaded onto the stage and during the intense tech week before opening night.

“Why do I do this instead of work in a cubicle somewhere and make three times what I do here?” he says, rhetorically. “Because if you really care about what you do, this is a great profession. You build something real. It’s there—concrete.

“You can look at it at the end of the day and say, ‘This is what I did today.’”

enough to know it was a crazy idea—that he could run STAGED RIGHT 49

Trinity and Dallas eater Center at the same time,” a DTC

For his opening show in the 1983–1984 season, Hall staged

board member recalls. “But we were fairly desperate to get

Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, a good example of the style of epic,

somebody in. Ticket sales were in the tank.”

muscular theater he favored.

Regardless of who came up with the dual-directorship

“e first year I wanted to set a standard of production that

proposal, the theater hired Hall in the spring of 1983, and he

would just blow everybody out of the water,” Hall says. “I knew

arrived in mid-June. “I was very impressed that they went for

Paul, and Paul was not an ungifted man. But he never wanted to

somebody who was really committed to creating, in Dallas, the

become Equity. He was still kind of in academia, so [the theater]

best theater that was going on then around the country—and

was pretty much a local situation.”

having a resident company of the highest level, and really lifting it out of its amateur confines,” Gerard says.

e next two shows were e Wild Duck and Fool for Love

by Sam Shepard. Randy Moore says of those high-energy

Adrian Hall directed this production of The Tempest for the 1987–1988 season,

taking full advantage of the Arts District Theater’s size and flexibility.

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Jack Willis and Peter MacNicol portrayed the two lead characters in Adrian Hall’s All the King’s Men, which is remembered as one of the signature productions of the Arts District Theater.

1986–1987 season.

STAGED RIGHT 51

productions,“It was bang-bang-bang. He hit hard, and the audience was like, ‘Holy [bleep], what is this?’” “ The professionalism and the artistic excellence were immediately apparent,” Bess Enloe says. “He created some masterpiece productions.”

Jerome Weeks adds, “Adrian was doing easily some of the best work in this area, if not in American theater in general. His specialty was epic theater. His productions of e Tempest and All the King’s Men were two of the high points.”

Even theater staff, board members, and critics who ran afoul of Hall’s flamboyant personality during his tenure tend to admit, two decades later, that he was a Promethean director who did exactly what was wanted: bring the eyes of the theater world to Frank Lloyd Wright’s concrete temple on Turtle Creek.

s Caroline Rose Hunt, life trustee Linda Custard (center),

and Peter Donnelly, managing director during Adrian Hall’s tenure.

New Home In response to the physical limitations of the Kalita Humphreys eater stage, Hall had its seating banks raked more steeply to improve sightlines, and the auditorium walls painted hunter green to reduce bounce-back glare from stage lights. But to attain the real staging flexibility he wanted, he worked with longtime Trinity set designer Eugene Lee, a three-time Tony winner, to build a corrugated-steel shed. It went up in three months.

“We built a barn in the downtown arts district, which nobody but the artists understood,” Hall says.“I knew we had to have a space to work in that was nothing, that was an empty space.” e Arts District eater opened in 1984. Built to last only a few years, it remained a viable second venue for the eater Center through 2005, when it was demolished for the construction of the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts in the Arts District.

s It was only meant to stand for a few years in

downtown Dallas in the 1980s. The Arts District Theater was the birthplace of some of the greatest productions of the Dallas Theater Center.

52

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One Hot Hairpiece

“

We were doing A Christmas Carol at the Arts District Theater, and it was close to curtain call. I’d gone and put my [Ghost of Christmas Present] costume back on. I had this huge gold dress and this intricate hair. So for the curtain call, I come out on stage. And there are all the various characters of Scrooge’s past, present, and future, his nephew and everything. And I come out, and I smell something.

“I just thought it was a [lighting] gel burning up, because that happens in theater. But then everybody onstage turns and looks at me! [The actor playing Mr. Fezziwig] turns to me and says, ‘Leave the stage, leave the stage!’ So I ran offstage and hurled that wig like a football toward the back-

”

stage crew. The smoke was just billowing.

s

—Company member Liz Mikel

2009 company member Liz Mikel played the Ghost of Christmas Present in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol twelve times from 1991 to 2005.

“e most exciting stuff was being presented

In that low-tech barn, the stage could take any form. e

downtown—and it was fantastic,” Jeremy Gerard

rolling deck of a ship for e Tempest, say, or a competitive

says. “Clearly it was where they put their love. ey

playing field, with theatergoers facing each other on bleach-

continued to do shows at the Kalita Humphreys eater, but the really cool stuff—as well as the moneymaking A Christmas Carol—was going on at the Arts District eater.”

ers on either side, as in All the King’s Men. at was the first production that life trustee Deedie Rose saw there. “It just did what theater should do,” she says. “It moved you, and you kept going back to it—so years later I still remember that production.”

STAGED RIGHT 53

Unfortunately, the theater’s flexibility came with a steep price, literally: the manual labor hours needed to reconfigure the space for each production sent costs soaring. For that and other reasons, DTC quickly found itself a million-and-a-half dollars in debt.

While some loved the new venue, others weren’t so comfortable.

“Older members of the audience didn’t know where it was located, and the parking lot was full of potholes,” Deedie Rose says. “It was difficult and dangerous. You could trip, and then you didn’t know where your seat was going to be—and there were some terrible seats.

It’s a miracle we didn’t have an accident on those bleachers.”

s A scene from Adrian Hall’s production of The Tempest. 1987–1988 season.

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Patrick Hines and Randy Moore in Galileo. 1983–1984 season.

For his inaugural production, artistic director Adrian Hall announced his interest in epic, heightened theatricality with Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo.

District eater’s ever-changing configuration, their reserved seats would be in a different place

s

Adrian Hall recalls some subscribers grousing when they realized that, due to the Arts

A story in The Dallas Morning News noted that the Dallas Theater Center finally hired a paid acting ensemble.

for every show.“I find that argument fallacious, because the seat is not what theater is about,” Hall says. “Real theater is about the audience coming and facing the thing that’s going on in front of them. It’s a confrontation between one and the other.”

Adrian Hall aimed to elevate plays into an impassioned interaction between actor and audience, rather than just an evening’s entertainment, wedged between smart cocktails and a late dinner. “I think it was Brecht who said, ‘Art ain’t nice.’”

Another of his innovations, after his first two years, was the formation of a permanent acting company. Hall explains, “When you are able to work with a company for three or four years, on all kinds of material and situations and spaces, you know how far this actor can be pushed, STAGED RIGHT 55

Linda Gehringer and Joseph Hindy in Adrian Hall’s production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.1988–1989 season.

how far that one can be pulled back. You know when to rely on your cast.”

While many of the actors came from Providence, a few

Ken Bryant, a stage manager at Trinity. At the eater Center, the young man would grow unexpectedly as an artist.

eater Center regulars, including Randy Moore, were tapped

“We had never been to Dallas, so we watched the televi-

for the company. “He cleaned house,” Moore says, “but not

sion show,” Gehringer remembers from her home in Califor-

totally.”

nia, laughing. “We thought we would be living on a ranch

“His creation of the acting company was a landmark event,” Jerome Weeks believes. A permanent artistic home argued for the importance of actors being connected to the community in which they lived, “so they weren’t just gypsies.”

56

Actress Linda Gehringer moved to Dallas with her husband

STAGED RIGHT

somewhere, but when we got there, it was just a very American city.” e acting company, she adds, “became this big family.

Adrian was introducing to us a sense of style and performance

Getting Connected

that I don’t think any of us had known before, the clarity and bravery. It was such a formative time. For Ken and me, during our years there, it was everything we’d ever dreamed of.”

One thing everyone agrees on: Adrian Hall loved actors, and actors loved him back. “e actors were well aware of his eccentricities, more than anyone—how crazy and erratic he could be,” Jerome Weeks says.

“Flights of genius could be followed by flights of folly, but they loved him.”

“He was like the Billy Graham of the theater,” Randy Moore agrees.“He was an evangelist—and the best stager I’ve ever worked with in my life. An eccentric, wild, funny, funny man.” e theater became a ground zero of creative upheaval. Hall was famous for making enormous, last-second changes, like altering the final scene (and the set) for Galileo two days before opening. He was also known for stepping in on guest directors’ shows and grabbing the creative reins.“He could change everything on a dime—and did,” Moore says.

One famous example was All the King’s Men on the night of its first preview.

“It had elements we knew were going to blow the lid off it,” Hall says, “but it ran on for over three hours with that first performance, and people left in droves. at really shook me up very badly. I knew if I was going save the [play], I had to whittle it down to size.”

During a five-hour rehearsal the following day, he rearranged and deleted scenes, slicing a whopping forty-five minutes from the running time. “Was it terrifying? As terrifying as it gets,” Randy Moore says, sounding happy at the memory. “You were

“

My connection to theater started shortly after my wife and I met at Penn State and went to see a student production by the drama department. We were just entranced with the whole thing.

“For my wife and me, starting out with very little, the idea of an evening out in the theater was the ultimate luxury. We went to theater three times a year: two birthdays and an anniversary. We pulled out all the stops to buy a theater ticket—though they were a lot cheaper then than now.

“There’s a certain magic that happens on a stage. You have some props on a stage, and some folks come out and start talking. And suddenly, you’re drawn into the story that’s unfolding in front of you.

“Theater creates a basis for communication among the audience. You watch something happening on the stage and think, Now why did that happen? And, gee, what if, instead of that happening, something else had happened?

“That can engage people to talk to one another, so there becomes a community of interest among the people in the audience. Everyone is absorbed in the same story— but coming at it with their own individual reactions.

“It’s both a collective and

”

an individual experience.

—Frank A. Risch chair of the board of trustees

STAGED RIGHT 57

always on edge.”

But the energy and expense of Hall’s tenure couldn’t last forever. Exhaustion threatened.

In 1986, the eater Center hired Seattle Repertory Company’s Peter Donnelly as managing director to keep the budget in check. Hall and Donnelly had been professional friends, but Jim Marvin and Robert Seevers (as the horse), Equus.1976–1977 season.

tensions arose. In Moore’s words, “You had two bulls in the same pasture.”

“Very quickly I realized that the board liked Peter Donnelly much better than they did me,” Hall says. “He was a respectable young businessman, and I was this wild thing trying to do things that people didn’t understand. e rift grew, you know. e board did not like me. ey felt I was high-handed and so forth.”

One increasing problem, board members recall, is that Hall spent more and more time away from Dallas and stopped communicating with them. In his absence, the theater’s offerings suffered. Jerome Weeks says that guest directors hired during those years usually weren’t on Hall’s level. ere were other problems, too. “is was one of the weaknesses of the acting company system,” he says. “Adrian had to find directors who would agree to cast from this company, and there were some directors who just wouldn’t do that. at limited the kind of directors he could bring in. Some of his seasons tended to have several peaks, but a lot of middling other works—and even valleys.”

In May 1989—in a less public way than with Paul Baker in 1982, but equally painful— the board informed Hall that his contract wasn’t being renewed. Looking back, Jeremy Gerard says, “I think Adrian Hall and Eugene Lee did what they were brought in to do—but at great expense, and great Sturm und Drang.”

e Home-Grown Hope is time, there was no need to scout the nation in search of a new artistic director. He was already there. Brought from Trinity Rep as a stage manager, Ken Bryant had quietly begun trying his hand at directing in his early years in Dallas.

Linda Gehringer recalls that, during the 1984–1985 season, her husband directed a

(seated front), with Ken Bryant and Linda Gehringer for the 1990 Centerstage gala.

58

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s

Managing Director Jeff West and his wife, Jan Allison

production in the theater’s basement space.

“Adrian was very taken with it and immediately gave Ken the job of directing A Christmas Carol the next year,” she says. “Adrian loved what Ken did with it. Adrian’s version had always been very lavish, but Ken made his very, very simple.”

In the 1986–1987 season, Bryant directed two main stage shows—Noises Off and An Enemy of the People—and four of the seven productions the season after that. “He was Adrian’s protégé,

Linda Gehringer gets down to her skivvies in Noises Off. 1986–1987 season.

and Adrian had never really had a protégé before,” Weeks says. “But Ken was very diligent, very hard-working. Ken told me, ‘I want to learn from the best, and there he is.’

“But he knew he couldn’t just be Adrian Jr. He had to assert a separate identity, a separate style. He was a great student, willing to learn from anyone and anything. Also, he was very kind to local actors, and he went to other theaters and saw their work.”

“Ken and Linda were a golden couple, and we felt hugely blessed,” recalls life trustee Linda Custard. “And it is to Adrian’s credit that he

Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, the ultimate backstage farce, was directed by Ken Bryant.

1986–1987 season.

STAGED RIGHT 59

would bring on someone with such talent to be an associate. ”

Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People was among the plays that began to mark Ken Bryant as one of the theater’s finest directors. 1986–1987 season.

“Ken had a way with people that was just intoxicating,” Bess Enloe says.“He was absolutely charming, and he did some brilliant work for us. I think he would have become a really fine artistic director.”

Named Adrian Hall’s replacement, Bryant had just begun his first full season in his new role, directing Gogol’s e Inspector-General. Driving to rehearsal on the morning of October 2, 1990, he lost control of his car and scraped up against a roadside railing. Feeling dizzy, he agreed to let emergency workers drive him to the hospital for a basic checkout.

In the ambulance, an EMT mistakenly dosed Bryant with concentrated lidocaine rather than a dextrose drip, causing immediate cardiac arrest, followed by a coma. “e entire company was there at the hospital,” Linda Custard recalls.“We were all just sitting around, holding hands

60

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s

Randy Moore and Martin Rayner in An Enemy of the People.

and breathing together.” By sunset Bryant was dead. He was thirtyfive. “ere was not a nick on him,” Gehringer recalls, of seeing her husband laid out at the hospital. “He looked like he was asleep.”

Ken Bryant came to the Dallas Theater Center with Adrian Hall as a stage manager. In a few years, he reinvented himself as one of the theater’s finest directors—and became its fourth artistic director, for a tragically short time.

Ken Bryant and cast rehearse Wallace Shawn’s corrosive comedy-drama Aunt Dan and Lemon for the 1988–1989 season.

Shock and disbelief flooded a theater still recovering from the previous leader’s departure. “I felt like I had lost a leg or something,” says Jerome Weeks, who had become both a friend to Bryant and an admirer of his work.

“Ken really was the local prince,” he adds. “He was formed here.

To have Ken come up through the ranks at the eater Center was a real recognition that we could produce our own talent” and not have to import it. “His rise was, emotionally, very much tied to the community here.” e loss, in other words, was not confined to one institution.

“Ken was young and had so much energy, and he was just a beautiful man,” Gehringer says. “He had his position at the eater Center, but he was interested in all the theaters in Dallas, the small, upstart theaters. He very much wanted to include all of them, to be STAGED RIGHT 61

Memory Play

“

The Marriage of Bette and Boo is, I think,

Bill Bolender and Ford Rainey in Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play Buried Child, directed by Ken Bryant.

1989–1990 season.

a great, underestimated play. It’s not in the tradition of George S. Kaufman, but it’s an absolutely great play about family dysfunction. . . . It goes over the top in comedy and yet breaks your heart.

“The first time I directed it, [playwright] Christopher Durang came. He hated my production. He hated it! In the back of the published book, he said his play was about an upper-middle-class family, they didn’t live in the slums, and he didn’t understand the set. He really hated it. He had seen [the characters in his play] as caricatures.

“But for me it was a memory play. It was about that boy actually remembering his mother. And so, the memory actually took place, as far as I’m concerned, in a hotel room, someplace. The bed opened up and the stars began to twinkle and his family came out of the bed. And the play began. It had that kind of really fragile yet

”

funny, silly quality to it.

—Adrian Hall, artistic director

s Beverly May and Dolores Godinez in Ken Bryant’s

production of Romeo and Juliet. 1989–1990 season.

62

STAGED RIGHT

the sort of mother ship at the Dallas eater Center. So there was a great loss for the whole arts community.”

What stability remained from the passing of leadership from Adrian Hall to Ken Bryant began to unravel, especially for members of the acting company. “With Adrian’s departure and Ken’s death, most of them dispersed,” Weeks says. In 1991, the theater formed a new search committee. But instead of searching the country for Bryant’s replacement, the board, as an auditioning process, hired promising directors to helm productions in the 1991–1992 season. eir new artistic direc-

Nance Williamson played the morally forthright heroine and Kurt Rhoads the dangerously obsessed boyfriend in Ken Bryant’s production of The Secret Rapture. 1989–1990 season.

s Ken Bryant directed wife Linda Gehringer

(top), Nance Williamson (left), and Dee Hennigan (right) in David Hare’s The Secret Rapture.

1989-1990 season.

s

Kurt Rhoads, Sean Hennigan, and Jack Willis in Ken Bryant’s production of In the Belly of the Beast. 1988–1989 season.

STAGED RIGHT 63

tor would start his first season with a production that acknowledged that past sadness while providing a bridge to the future.

Classics, Music, and Multiculturalism Richard Hamburger, artistic director of Portland Stage Company—who directed e Substance of Fire in that audition year—began as the eater Center’s fifth leader during the 1992–1993 season. “e Dallas eater Center is in the center of the country, and there were great opportunities to be part of the national dialogue,” Hamburger says from his home in New York. “I had come from a homogeneous community in Portland, Maine, so I was eager to be really fully engaged and do plays of every variety. Paul Baker, Adrian Hall, and Ken Bryant were very

Stephen Kalstrup and George Morfogen in The Substance of Fire.

64

STAGED RIGHT

s

Stephen Kalstrup and Dee Hennigan in The Substance of Fire.

Guest-directed by Richard Hamburger, the production was key to earning him his place as the Dallas Theater Center’s fifth artistic director the following season. 1991–1992 season.

Richard Hamburger directed Dreamlandia, by playwright and Paul Baker’s former student Octavio Solis, in the 1999–2000 season’s Big D Festival of the Unexpected. With an emphasis on diversity and new voices, the Festival sought to reflect the nation’s full ethnic variety.

An Element of Human Risk

“

[Theater] is the only art form I know where there is a real element of human risk to it. A painting gets done. It’s there forever, and you look at it. There’s a way to play Mozart and Beethoven, and you perfect it. And there’s a way to learn an opera aria, if you’ve got the talent.

“But if you’re speaking the spoken word on a stage in close proximity to a company of people, the probability of it being the same time and time again is almost

”

nonexistent. It’s going to change. And that’s fascinating.

—Life trustee Bess Enloe

STAGED RIGHT 65

Susan Gibney played conflicted housewife Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Richard Hamburger’s innovative direction reconfigured the Arts District Theater’s stage for each of the play’s three acts. 1992–1993 season.

66

STAGED RIGHT

progressive and adventuresome, with a sense of real theatricality and a high standard of excellence. I felt very much part of that tradition.”

If Of Time and the River predicted Paul Baker’s fondness for literary adaptations, new scripts, and multimedia effects, and Hall’s Galileo introduced that director’s European, Grotowski-inflected tastes, then Richard Hamburger’s opening production of A Streetcar Named Desire similarly spoke to his core interests.

“I was looking for something distinctly American that should also be a great play,” Hamburger says. He loved the tension between the mythical aura of the Old South, exemplified by Blanche DuBois, and the immigrant, northern energy of her nemesis, Stanley Kowalski.

Linda Gehringer (with Stephen Kalstrup, below)

returned following husband Ken Bryant’s death to play Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire in 1992. It was the inaugural production of Richard Hamburger as artistic director.

“It was a battle of titans for the destiny of the country,” he says. “It was very much part of the dialogue that’s going on in our country still: where are we going and how much do we hang on to our traditions?

“Change can come at a great price, and yet it’s essential.” e change signaled by his arrival as new artistic director was acknowledged center stage, literally.

Linda Gehringer returned to Dallas, taking on the role of Blanche.

“Someone had offered me that play at one of the other Dallas theaters a couple of years before,” Gehringer says. She’d turned it down, thinking she wasn’t the right person to play Tennessee Williams’s STAGED RIGHT 67

Members of the Janus Players in Day of Absence.

1970–1971 season.

fading heroine. “en Richard called. Ken had died two years before, and I suddenly had a very different feeling. I reread the play and thought, Anyone who would turn down that part is insane! Plus, of course, I had a fragility that I hadn’t had before. But there was something really healing about it, to go back on that stage and start a new era.”

Making his mark in that new era, Hamburger says that “one of the biggest changes was diversifying the programming.” e first year of his Big D Festival of the Unexpected, which continued annually through 2000, included future Pulitzer Prize– winner Suzan-Lori Parks’s e America Play and Chay Yew’s Porcelain. Zora Neale Hurston’s Spunk and Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill appeared on the main stage, part of

Martin Kildare and Sherry Boone in My Fair Lady, Richard Hamburger’s last production in the Arts District Theater before it was demolished. 2004–2005 season.

outreach had a precedent. Under Paul Baker, in the early 1970s, the eater Center had developed an offshoot company, the Janus Players, incorporating African American and Latin s

American actors and scripts.)

Members of the Janus Players perform

Lorraine Hansberry’s play To Be Young, Gifted and Black. 1972–1973 season.

s Santos & Santos by Octavio Solis was inspired by a series of

events that occurred in South Texas in the late 1970s involving the murder of Federal Judge John H. Wood. 1994–1995 season.

68

STAGED RIGHT

s

Hamburger’s drive to reflect the nation’s ethnic variety. (is

Mary Bacon and Mark Waltz sail away from a shipwreck reminiscent of the Titanic at the top of Richard Hamburger’s production of Twelfth Night. 2000–2001 season.

s Richard Hamburger emphasized multicultural stories, live music,

and striking visual elements from some of the nation’s finest designers.

“I wanted to do programming that truly reflected the country’s diversity,” Hamburger says. “A company cannot be white bread.” at philosophy underscored his acclaimed revival of South Pacific, digging into the show’s examination of racism, and his staging of both parts of Tony Kushner’s “gay fantasia,” Angels in America—possibly the riskiest production since nudity appeared onstage at the eater Center with Equus in the 1970s.

If diversity was one of Hamburger’s imperatives, he also had a love for Shakespearean, American, and European classics, and for mixing music and bold design elements. His inaugural production of Streetcar featured a live jazz trio and a striking spiral staircase.

s Playwrights’ panel from the Big D Festival of the Unexpected,

1992–1993 season. Left to right: Pulitzer Prize–winner Suzan-Lori Parks (The America Play), Eric Overmyer (Alki), Melissa Cooper (Festival producer and director of Alki), Chay Yew (Porcelain), and Roger Babb (Otrabanda Company’s Simpatico).

STAGED RIGHT 69

Randy Moore recalls, “I heard Richard say—this is a direct

remote, in Jerome Weeks’s opinion. He singles out a production

quote—the most fun for him was working with designers. And

of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Hamburger reconfigured the set for

his shows were gorgeous.”

each of its three acts: first a proscenium, then a modified thrust

“He worked with some of the best designers in the world,

stage, finally a black box.

and he did some terrific, terrific

“It was stunningly staged and

work,” says playwright Octavio

ingenious,

Solis, whose Santos & Santos

represented revolutions in the

Hamburger directed in the

history of theater,” Weeks says.

1994–1995 season. “He also

“But it was a theatrical idea im-

brought in some fantastic talent

posed on the play. It had nothing

that he nurtured and helped

to do with the emotional life of

build from the ground up.”

the characters at all.”

(

T

h

e

that

it

y

e idea of an ensemble

include Jonathan Moscone, now

company, endorsed in different

artistic director of Berkeley’s

ways by both Paul Baker and

California Shakespeare eater.)

Adrian Hall, was history. “By

Solis adds, “Richard finds a

the time I arrived most of the

way of depicting things that can

acting company had already left

happen only onstage, not TV,

town,” Hamburger says, “but in

not film—only on the stage and

a very healthy way, as most of

in a completely theatrical way.”

them had gone to Los Angeles

Hamburger’s emphasis on

and New York.”

designers from the Northeast theater scene disappointed some Dallas-based artists.

Others followed. “I would be Richard Hamburger, artistic director emeritus of the Dallas Theater Center.

cast in two or three shows a year, but it wasn’t a full season and it

“Richard is a brilliant mind,

wasn’t enough,” Randy Moore

but a New York kid through and through,” Bess Enloe says.

says.“I started having to go out on the road—like most actors do,

“We had the finest designers in the country working here.

but I’d never had to before. Richard was a very capable

ere must be a hundred Tonys among them.”

director, but it was obvious there wasn’t going to be a resident

And

sometimes

the

mix

of high design and heightened theatricality could feel a little 70

in

STAGED RIGHT

company again.”

After three decades in Dallas, Moore and his actress wife,

s

Richard Hamburger’s production of South Pacific was one of the last big musicals to take advantage of the Arts District Theater’s vast space. 1998–1999 season.

A tableau from Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Anna in the Tropics, a family drama about the cigar business, directed

by Richard Hamburger. 2004-2005 season.

STAGED RIGHT 71

Norma, relocated to Colorado, where he joined Denver Center eatre Company.

Jerome Weeks confirms a common Dallas actors’ complaint: “Richard was hiring people from New York that frequently weren’t all that great. You would look at the actor and say, ‘Why did they bring this person in? You could have gotten someone in Dallas to do that.’ It was something that dogged him through his tenure here. Adrian drove the board and the theater administration crazy, but the actors loved him. It was sort of the reverse for Richard.”

Hamburger waves the accusation off. “For every role you cast, there are fifty people who don’t get that role,” he says. “You’re never going to win popularity contests. at comes with being an artistic director.”

“Richard was and is a real artist—a genius,” says Lisa Lawrence Holland, DTC director of education and community

Actor Steven Eng in Chay Yew’s Porcelain, directed by Richard Hamburger as part of the first Big D Festival of the Unexpected.

1992–1993 season.

programs. “Does that mean every play was brilliant? No, it doesn’t. But the man is an artist, and that is pretty rare.”

Into the Starry Night

“

The plays I remember the most are the ones that we did at the Arts District Theater, and what Richard Hamburger did with those plays. “With A Doll’s House, there was a huge overhead door at the back. And he changed the seating arrangement. All three acts had a different stage configuration. It couldn’t have been more complicated.

“But what he did at the end—it still gives me chills—he lifted up that overhead door at the back, and Nora walked out into the darkness and into the starry night. And you

s As boisterous and untamed as passion itself, Richard Hamburger’s production of

Charles L. Mee’s Big Love was designed by Rem Koolhaas and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture. 2002–2003 season.

were seeing the real starry night out there. It was so dra-

”

matic, and it gave the play new meaning to me.

—Life trustee Deedie Rose 72

STAGED RIGHT

Leaving behind a legacy of indelible stage images and a broadened cultural agenda, Hamburger was the eater Center’s second-longest-running artistic director, steering the institution for fifteen years to Paul Baker’s twenty-three. He announced his resignation in August 2006. His final production as director was e Taming of the Shrew in April 2007, before he moved to his native New York to work on independent theater projects. In recognition of his service, he was named the Dallas eater Center’s first artistic director emeritus.

A Strong Spine Established before such venerable companies as the Guthrie, the Mark Taper Forum, and Lincoln Center, the Dallas eater Center has also outlasted countless younger theater institutions that have popped up and vanished over the last fifty years.

Begun by community leaders, run by artists, and sustained

s Lazaro Perez and Pamela Gray in Dark Rapture,

Sally Nystuen Vahle hovers over Todd Weeks in Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches.

1995–1996 season.

playwright Eric Overmyer’s exploration of film noir, directed by Richard Hamburger. 1993–1994 season.

STAGED RIGHT 73

Jonno Roberts and Mary Bacon in The Taming of the Shrew.

s

Jakie Cabe, Jonno Roberts, Matthew Gray (seated), and John Woodson in The Taming of the Shrew, 2006–2007 season.

74

STAGED RIGHT

Jakie Cabe, Jonno Roberts, and Chamblee Ferguson in The Taming of the Shrew. Richard Hamburger directed his final Shakespeare production with a typical emphasis on eye-popping design.

2006–2007 season.

for five decades by a sturdy spine of trustees, the eater

get taken over by the board of directors. Or, when the genius

Center has weathered hard times and wrenching changes while

dies or leaves, the board has to keep the institution alive.”

delivering theatrical triumphs. roughout, it has remained the

ere is an organic reason that most artistic directors

destination for theater in Dallas, serving a yearly audience of

remain at a theater for an average of eight to ten years. eater is

ninety thousand devotees.

a living organism that has to adapt to and reflect the changes that

“It takes strong community leaders that have the vision, drive, and financial wherewithal to keep a place like this afloat during bad times. But they have to have a deep sense of love

occur outside its walls, benefiting from its leaders’ strengths, learning from their weaknesses, and moving on.

It’s survival through conflict. “at’s what good boards

for the art form,” says Mark

do,” Charles Wyly says. “ey

Hadley, managing director of

may disagree about what to do

the Dallas eater Center.

and who should do it. But they’re passionate and care

“e people in the seventies

about the theater.”

and eighties had to push the theater forward, away from

“Some dishes get broken in the

Paul to Adrian. When they

process of change. e process is

realized that Adrian wasn’t

never fun, while you’re in it,” says

working out, they had to make another tough call,” he adds.

After fifteen years of Richard

Dallas Theater Center’s sixth artistic director, Kevin Moriarty, conducted a yearlong “listening tour” to discover the community’s opinions and expectations of his institution.

Frank Risch, who became board chair in 2008. “What has made this place successful for fifty years

Hamburger’s tenure, it was

has been a willingness to reinvent

time to choose a fresh jolt of

itself. e fact that this organiza-

energy with the naming of Kevin Moriarty as the eater Cen-

tion has a board that’s willing to confront major change has cre-

ter’s sixth artistic director. “You’ve got to be willing to do things

ated continuity.”

like that and stand by your decisions.” e balance between artists and trustees, between dreams and realities, has been a tricky one to navigate throughout history.

“e continuity is in the good decisions,” Linda Custard agrees. “ough the characters might change, the continuity remains. It’s always a struggle.”

Dallas eater Center’s history of taking bold chances started

“is is a story that’s played out in every city in the

in its very first days, with the naming of Paul Baker as its leader.

country,” Jeremy Gerard says. Artistic visionaries often deliver

“He was considered a wild, experimental, creative,

the drive a theater initially needs. “But some of them can be

innovative director,” Randy Moore says. “at was a really risky

egomaniacs, build a cult around them, and ultimately have to

choice! e eater Center has consistently made risky,

STAGED RIGHT 75

creative choices, so my hat’s off to them. ere has al-

tury, such a thing seemed attainable only in cities like

ways been a core group on the board that has kept the

New York. “But those of us who came along after peo-

theater going.”

ple like Margo Jones and Gilmore Brown [founder

e past fifty years represents a history of a com-

of California’s Pasadena Playhouse] saw that the

munity coming together, answering the call to build a

commercial world would never offer us a kind of

theater that could serve as a soul of the city, the heart-

home that we wanted.”

beat of community.

“Dallas is the city I’m closest to,” Adrian Hall says. “ere has always been an extraordinary kind of longing to have some kind of cultural identity in this part

So the idea became clear: “If we don’t create our own, we’re not going to have it,” says Hall. “Dallas absolutely should be a world leader in the theater.

New York should be going there, to even out the score.”

s

of the country.” In the first half of the twentieth cen-

76

STAGED RIGHT

Art and Synthia Rogers with Waldo Stewart during construction of the Heldt Building. Art Rogers was the architect for the theater’s administrative office space. His wife, Synthia, was a longtime company member under Paul Baker, who became the theater’s director of education.

The Genesis of Theater is the root of who we are as a civilization, who we “ Theater are as a species. Any basic Theater 101 class teaches you that a tribe’s morality, its ethics, its social code, their family interaction all started with depictions of stories of things that happened throughout the tribe—which is the genesis of theater.

“Theater tells a story of where we came from, where we are, and where we hope to go.

”

—General manager Hillary J Hart

A bird’s-eye view of the Kalita Humphreys Theater in 1973, prior to the expansion of the lobby.

STAGED RIGHT 77

78

STAGED RIGHT

Act Two

Transitions A

fter five decades, the Dallas eater Center bids goodbye to Turtle Creek and

heads to the Arts District and a new home with the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts. ough there’s much to be said for the Kalita Humphreys’ eater sylvan, waterside setting, the Dallas eater Center has sometimes been perceived as being too far removed—literally— from the rest of Dallas.

A 1973 Texas Monthly profile of the theater noted that an “illusion of inaccessibility persists. Two streets away from Oak Lawn’s . . . bustle, the theater remains secluded, remote, a gazebo in One Turtle Creek’s backyard.”

STAGED RIGHT 79

“We’re sort of cloistered in this park,” says general manager Hillary J Hart. “You can’t really see the theater from the street, and we’re up on this little hill. I think that’s how some people have viewed us, that we are this closed-off community, and we just imported the people that we needed.”

In other words, the perception was more than geographical.

Managing director Mark Hadley recalls that, in the 1980s, “e Theater Center was always seen as this big professional theater that brought in people from out of town, and it wasn’t really available to local folks.” at reputation still existed when he returned in the 1990s after working four years at California’s South s Mark Hadley, managing director.

Coast Repertory. “It was a strong sentiment,

certainly around the local acting company.” at has changed. New artistic director Kevin Moriarty was aware, when he moved to Dallas in 2007, of perceptions of the eater Center as “a cement bunker, surrounded by trees, disconnected from the community.”

80

STAGED RIGHT

Betsy Wolfe gets ready for her role as Mrs. Walker, mother of the lead character in The Who’s Tommy.

2008–2009 season.

Guest director Liesl Tommy walks her actors through rehearsals of the worldpremiere civil rights drama The Good Negro.

2008–2009 season.

Formerly artistic director of the

Moriarty explains, “at is where

Hangar eatre in Ithaca, New York,

we are today, saying, ‘Tear down the

and an artistic associate at Trinity

cement walls!’”

future as a vital artistic and civic force.

“We have to be relevant,” Moriarty says. “We have to choose plays and

Repertory Company, Moriarty spent his

at won’t be literally necessary, as

produce them in a manner that sparks

first season conducting a listening tour,

DTC relocates to the Arts District. But

conversation and engagement, rather than

discovering these preconceptions about

the move represents more than a physical

passive acceptance.

the theater and working to reconnect

relocation. It’s a distinct cultural shift as

“Relevance is what will pull people

DTC with the Dallas community.

Moriarty leads the theater into the heart

forward—and the feeling that they’re a

of the Dallas community and into its

necessary part of the process.”

Continued on page 88

STAGED RIGHT 81

Relevant Theater

“

At the moment when the play ended, the lights went out and the actors left the stage.

“Seconds later when they came back onstage, someone must have told them what was happening, because I remember [actress] Joniece Abbott-Pratt jumping up and down, feeling some extraordinary excitement on stage, and as they left, Billy Eugene Jones throwing his arms up in the air and shouting.

“Then people in the front of the auditorium starting shouting, and it began to dawn on the rest of us what must have just occurred.

“I stayed for the post-performance discussion, and I don’t believe anyone there will ever forget participating in a discussion that simply could have never happened forty-five years ago when the events in this play took place. We understood in new ways the complexities in the characters—and in ourselves—the many layers, as one participant in the discussion said.

“I can’t imagine the Dallas Theater Center ever being

”

more relevant than it is in this very moment.

—Life trustee Deedie Rose, on attending The Good Negro on November 4, 2008, the night Barack Obama was elected president of the United States.

The world premiere of Tracey Scott Wilson’s The Good Negro.

Top: Billy Eugene Jones, J. Bernard Calloway, and Steven Walters.

Middle: Steven Walters, Joe Nemmers, and Brian Wallace.

Bottom: Francois Battiste, Leroy McClain, and Billy Eugene Jones.

2008–2009 season.

82

STAGED RIGHT

Abbey Siegworth as Eve in the 2009 production of In the Beginning, Kevin Moriarty’s stage adaptation of the book of Genesis. 2008–2009 season.

s Dennis Staroselsky and Juan Javier Cardenas in

Back Back Back. 2008–2009 season.

STAGED RIGHT 83

Dallas Theater Center’s New Home

D

esigned by REX/OMA, Joshua

“I think he’s giving us a theater that

Prince-Ramus (partner in

rethinks what theaters do,” Rose says of

Brierley Esplanade—invites pedestrians

charge), and Pritzker Prize–

the architect.

strolling the ten-acre Elaine D. and Charles

winning architect Rem Koolhaas, the

While the Kalita Humphreys Theater

A. Sammons Park. The building’s design is

Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre—at the

architecture mirrors curved, organic forms

intended to demystify theater, literally, for

Dallas Center for the Performing Arts—

from nature, the Wyly Theatre is very much

passersby.

is a dream long in the making for the Dallas

a man-made, monolithic, industrial cube—a

Theater Center.

theater machine.

Beneath its eleven stories, a sub-level lobby—entered via a gentle scoop in the

A model of the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre demonstrates the translucence of the ground-level performance space.

s Former theater chairman Charles Wyly and his wife, Dee,

during the 1978–1979 season. Their names grace the Theater Center’s new home with Dallas Center for the Performing Arts.

“We currently produce in the only existing Frank Lloyd Wright theater in the world,” says life trustee Deedie Rose. “At the time, he was one of the—if not the— architectural geniuses of the century. And we’re building a theater by one of the—if not the—architectural geniuses of the first half of the twenty-first century.”

A member of the Theater Center’s building committee, Rose and her group traveled with the Dutch-born Koolhaas to examine theaters in Chicago, New York, and London to distill (and sometimes subvert) traditional theatrical floor plans.

84

landscaping called the Diane and Hal

STAGED RIGHT

In a traditionally designed theater, the stage and auditorium are typically cocooned within other chambers, such as the lobby and administrative offices. In the

Detail from the model for the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre.

Wyly Theatre, the performance space is

“That was built to last five years, but

worth of technology to move the floor,

visible from outside through wrap-around

instead of five years it was fifteen or

windows, at least when a performance

twenty,” Rose says. “One reason it was

is not under way.

so uncomfortable was that it had not been

this breathtaking, twenty-first-century

built to last that long. But what was great

Pritzker Prize architect who is using the

the man on the street—I love that idea. It’s

about the Arts District Theater is that it

functional ideas of what the theater should

very cool,” Rose says.

was flexible. That raw space—you could

do, based on a relatively radical idea

do anything.”

from Adrian Hall and Eugene Lee,” artistic

“Uncovering the art of the theater to

While the theater’s exterior is striking, its most important features are inside. The

The stage reconfigurations that

walls, and seats in the audience chamber.

“What’s so amazing is that we have

director Kevin Moriarty says.

theater space is infinitely flexible, in the

required expensive manpower hours back

mode of Adrian Hall and Eugene Lee’s old

in the 1980s and 1990s will be achieved in

Hall and Lee. The Dallas Theater Center’s

Arts District Theater.

the Wyly Theatre through $7.5 million

founding director, Paul Baker, wanted the

To be fair, the idea didn’t originate with

STAGED RIGHT 85

Construction Interior View Construction under way of the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre in February 2009.

Luxigon

Rehearsal Hall

Luxigon

Exterior View

86

STAGED RIGHT

happened to run up against an immovable object

Dee and Charles Wyly at the topping-out ceremony at the new home of the Dallas Theater Center, which was named in their honor.

named Frank Lloyd Wright.

If the Kalita Humphreys Theater has its problems, one of its greatest strengths—the intimate proximity between actors and audience—will continue in the Wyly Theatre. As in the Humphreys auditorium, none of the approximately 550 seats in the Wyly Theatre will be any farther than sixty-four feet from the stage.

Moriarty says this is one of the theater’s key goals, sustained through fifty years: “How can the audience be part of the play, be closer to the play, be intimately connected?” he asks. “That line goes through Adrian and Eugene’s tin shed into what we hope is a new building that will permanently endow that idea in future years.”

“We want the theater to be new and young and bold and innovative—and of the time,” life trustee Bess Enloe says. “This building is extremely of the twenty-first century.”

In its plum position in the new, flourishing Arts District, the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre is likely to attract the eye of people who have never before visited the Dallas Theater Center. It should also generate crossover interest from patrons of nearby venues, including the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House, Annette Strauss Artist Square, and City Performance Hall.

“From day one, when the Arts District was proposed, I agreed that it was important for the Dallas Theater Center to be right in the heart of it,” life trustee and former board chair Charles Wyly says. “People will come from all over Texas and all over the world to enjoy this.”

But no matter how striking the design of the new venue may be, it’s the art inside that will carry the Dallas Theater Center into its next half century.

“The most important thing is going to be when the show starts,” Wyly says. “Every show.”

Luxigon

Luxigon

staging flexibility the Wyly Theatre offers. He just

STAGED RIGHT 87

Continued from page 81

e eater Center has a history of community outreach and ethnic inclusion, such as its 1970s group the Janus Players, which offered an outlet for African American and Hispanic artists. Artistic director Richard Hamburger focused on diversity in his fifteen years of programming.

And the 2008 production of the civil rights drama e Good Negro coincided, as Moriarty hoped, with Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, underscoring how timely and socially acute theater can be.

Still there is more to be done to open the door for people of all racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. “e barriers to the theater involve class and involve income,” Moriarty says. Ticket prices can be seen as prohibitive, and logistical issues such as transportation and child care also deter potential theatergoers. ese are issues Moriarty is committed to addressing.

Cedric Neal beseeches a higher power as the deaf, dumb, and blind, self-styled messiah of The Who’s Tommy.

88

STAGED RIGHT

The members of the Denton-based band Oso Closo surround the young pinball wizard, played by Heath L. Williams II, in Kevin Moriarty’s dynamic production of The Who’s Tommy. 2008–2009 season.

Live Theater . . . There’s Nothing Like It

“

There’s nothing like being in a relatively intimate auditorium for good live theater. Theater can be a great experience, such a difference from watching TV. Theater is important in the same sense that I think it’s important to preserve symphony music and opera. . . . Live theater, with several hundred people not too far away [from each other] tak-

”

ing in a play, is a great experience.

—Life trustee and former chair Charles Wyly

STAGED RIGHT 89

“We need to be the non-elitist people,” he says. “If we do that, we’re going to be the gateway . . . for the entire Arts District. We have the possibility of being the most accessible lure to get people down there. And I am determined that that happen.”

Even before the move to its new home, the eater Center has shown signs of new vitality. Moriarty’s loud, lively, rock ’n’ roll production of e Who’s Tommy attracted the pink- and the blue-haired, the bejeweled and the tattooed alike, filling the Kalita Humphreys’ seats and lobby with a notably eclectic crowd. “I went twice,” says trustee and past board president Sarah Warnecke. “e first time was opening night, and then I went again later with my husband, Don. After the performances, I was drawn to talk to other audience members in the lobby when the actors came to join us. It’s this engagement of the audience with one another that I find so exciting. We’re having conversations.”

Board chair Frank Risch received an e-mail from a good friend, a man like himself in his sixties, the morning after the friend and his wife saw e Who’s Tommy. e couple loved the show, Risch says. “And you know what the most amazing thing was? After attending many performances in the Dallas eater Center, for the first time they didn’t know anybody else in the audience.”

In the theater, strangers can become friends, united by the experience of watching a performance together, then by discussing it in the twenty-minute postshow audience conversations that follow.

90

STAGED RIGHT

It’s standing-room-only for the final performance of The Who’s Tommy, with artistic director Kevin Moriarty (standing in center) watching from the back.

In Rehearsal

B

lack-and-white photos of 1960s’ civil rights clashes cover the Bryant Rehearsal Hall’s walls, intermixed with vividly colored costume sketches.

It’s a September morning rehearsal for Tracey Scott Wil-

son’s The Good Negro. The floor of the room is marked with a circle of yellow and orange masking tape, delineating the circumference of the Kalita Humphreys stage.

Outside that circle, it’s Dallas, 2008. A stage manager clicks the keys of her sleek Apple laptop, and actors have dumped the relics of their here-and-now lives: lunches packed in plastic bags, white athletic shoes, baseball caps, backpacks, and cooling Starbucks cups.

But inside that taped circle, it’s Birmingham, 1963. s

The Dallas Theater Center acting company, 2009.

Front row: Matthew Gray, Christian Vela.

Middle row: Sean Hennigan, Hassan El-Amin, Sally Nystuen Vahle, Cedric Neal.

Back row: Liz Mikel, Lee Trull, Chamblee Ferguson.

e Dallas eater Center moves into its future with modifications of crucial

A sharply suited preacher (actor Billy Eugene Jones, in a role based on Martin Luther King Jr.) lays his hand on a congregant’s forehead and sings, “We Shall Not Be Moved.”

Then he pauses and breaks character. “Uh, Liesl,” he says, “is it OK if I have a Bible up here?”

elements from its first half century. Education continues to be a core value, with the

Watching her actors intently from a folding table outside

theater nurturing an ongoing academic and practical relationship with students at

the taped circle, Liesl Tommy, the director, says, “Absolutely.”

Southern Methodist University. And Moriarty has named a company of nine resident, Dallas-based actors. “at, of course, ties directly into the Paul Baker and Adrian Hall

Seated on a folding chair that represents a church pew, join in with the song?”

“Nine people in a resident

“Let’s see what happens,” the director says.

company is a big step in the

The actors run the scene once again. The three congregants tentatively join in on the spiritual, and even shout out a few

right direction, as far as the

spontaneous “amens.”

theater community here is

A few minutes later, another scene starts.

concerned,” says Linda Blase.

When New York–based actor Francois Battiste picks up a prop rifle, one of his colleagues quips, “You’ve been in Texas too

“ey’re very tired of seeing

long already.” A second later, Battiste stalks the border of orange

some of their best actors being

masking tape, muttering, “Come out, you wascally wabbit.”

spear carriers.”

So goes the day. It’s a time for experimentation and discovery among the actors and their director and for eruptions

Longtime Dallas resident

of silliness that cut the tension of sustained creative focus. Oh,

Liz Mikel is one of the actors

Continued on page 96

her laptop. actress Joniece Abbott-Pratt swivels around to ask, “Do we

eras,” he says.

selected for the company.

The stage manager types a props note to that effect into

and for the record? The director decides she does like it when s J. Bernard Calloway, Joniece Abbott-Pratt, Francois Battiste, and Billy Eugene Jones in rehearsal for The Good Negro, which proved to be a powerful stage performance.

2008–2009 season.

the other actors join in on the hymn singing.

STAGED RIGHT 91

Acting company member Liz Mikel takes a walk down the striking staircase in A Streetcar Named Desire, Richard Hamburger’s first production as artistic director.

92

STAGED RIGHT

Theater As Education

Scenes from SpeakOut. The one-night event in May of 2007 celebrated the best work from teen poets featured in two years of Dallas Theater Center’s popular open-mic series DaVerse Lounge.

B

efore the spade first broke ground

on the building site alongside Turtle

Creek, even before the first season

of plays was chosen, education and outreach were as crucial to the Dallas Theater Center as its stage productions.

Founding director Paul Baker, after all, was a professor at Baylor University. It was with Baylor—through 1963, then for two more decades at Trinity University—that the Theater Center administered a graduate theater program.

In 1976, Baker founded and shaped the curriculum at the Booker T. Washington Arts Magnet High School.

“It was quite some struggle,” Baker recalls, “but by working every day with the Students connect with the mainstage in a one-day workshop led by cast members from The Who’s Tommy.

faculty and the assistant principals, we

SMU’s partnership guarantees that all MFA

succeeded in developing one of the best

acting students enrolled at the university will

schools of its kind in the United States,

be cast in at least one (and potentially more)

built upon a unified philosophy toward

speaking roles in DTC productions during

creative work.”

the course of their graduate studies.

The theater’s partnership with the

Possibly the Theater Center’s most

high school continues today. Artistic director

pervasive and successful program is Project

Kevin Moriarty teaches a series of master

Discovery, an outreach and education

classes throughout the school year. A

program with the North Texas school system.

group of senior directing students

For the Project Discovery program,

receive complimentary tickets to all of

DTC sets aside eighty seats for the

DTC’s shows. Moriarty and guest artists

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night

teach a class keyed to each production

performances of all its shows. These are

before the students see it, give the students

reserved, free-of-charge, for area students,

related assignments, and then conduct a

primarily from high schools. Through the

follow-up class.

program, some five thousand school kids

In higher education, the Theater Center

see productions at the theater every year,

has a developing relationship with Southern

attending workshops prior to each

Methodist University. Starting with the

performance to gain deeper insights into

2009–2010 season, the Theater Center and

the play.

STAGED RIGHT 93

The Dallas Theater Center teens smiling in voice class.

“Their buses are paid for, their

shepherd them through this artistic

King, who administered the education

tickets are paid for, and so are the study

encounter, and to make it more relevant to

program from 1999 to 2001 under Richard

guides that we write,” says Lisa Lawrence

them. The program is designed to break

Hamburger.

Holland, the Theater Center’s director of

down the notion that theater is an

education and community programs. The

unapproachable, elitist art form.

students’ teachers also receive a two-hour

the Dallas Theater Center receives from

workshop about each production, to

reasons A Streetcar Named Desire should be

teachers and, more importantly, from

prepare them for classroom discussions

relevant to you,’ the students don’t care,”

students—some with gang backgrounds,

about the plays.

Holland says. “We have to meet them where

thrilled to discover this thing called “theater”

they are, and get with their program.”

even existed.

“In essence, the program targets lowerincome and at-risk students. The point is for them to have a visceral experience, to help

94

“Just because we say, ‘Here are the

It seems to be working, at least according to the stacks of grateful letters

STAGED RIGHT

“Our goal was for them to become lifelong lovers of theater,” says Jennifer

“What’s really cool is that, now, we’re dealing with generations,” Holland says.

Luke Longacre, a cast member from The Who’s Tommy, teaches the choreography from “Pinball Wizard” to a musical theater workshop for teens.

“We have two teachers who are twins,

they learned. “I came here as a student

teaching at separate high schools. They came

working with people who had done this as

to the Theater Center originally as Project

long as I had been alive, and who fed me,”

Discovery students, and now they’re bringing

says actress Liz Mikel.

their own students to the theater.”

Giving young adults a place to congregate

“Now, to be on the other end with these SMU kids and these other kids, and to be the

isn’t simply an altruistic notion. Holland points

one that’s feeding them—it has been such

out a crucial reality: “None of us are going to

a learning experience. It has helped me

have jobs if we don’t get young people into

tremendously as an artist in this community,

the theater.”

and it’s a beautiful thing to be able to exchange

Some of those young people have a funny

that love with the community.”

habit of growing up—and passing along what

A scene from May 2007’s SpeakOut.

STAGED RIGHT 95

Continued from page 91

“We chose to live and work in this

“Imagine a theater company that’s

community as artists,” she says. “We

come through fifty years—fifty years of

could live in any community in the

stories, fifty years of great plays, fifty

And nobody should leave a production

world, you know, but we chose this

years of tremendous artistic value, fifty

at the Dallas eater Center yawning or

community to live and raise our children

years of tremendous artistic talent,”

simply thinking, Oh well, that was a

and be a part of this artistic community.

board chair Frank Risch says. “en add

perfectly pleasant, sort of interesting evening.

at is very important.”

to that the bringing in of a new artistic

“If that happens, we have failed,” Moriarty

Robyn Flatt, daughter of DTC

director to take us in a new direction.

says. “e audience hasn’t failed us. We

founding director Paul Baker, says,

This is not a single continuum. It’s fifty

have failed them.”

“Regional theater is a part of the

years, yes, but it’s really a series of

And he will know about it, firsthand.

community it grows out of. Those

opportunities to change the rules of

e likeliest place you’ll find this artistic

resources are part of its strength.”

our game, to reinvent ourselves. And

director isn’t in his office or in the

we are doing it again.”

rehearsal hall. Look for him at the back

Moriarty is determined to eliminate

96

in anticipation of the what-comes-next that drives good drama.

the barriers between the Dallas eater

e beating heart of the institution’s

of the theater at the end of a performance,

Center and the city it serves, as signified

history and its future remains, as always,

greeting subscribers he knows at a glance,

by the year he spent talking (and listening)

that elusive, ephemeral, but blood-stirring

introducing himself to new faces, and

to people in the community.

art of theater.

getting direct feedback from the most

“e decision to take a year to do that

“eater is a place of confrontation,”

important people in the entire history of

really changed the public perception of the

Moriarty says. “It’s an event; it’s a place

the Dallas eater Center: the audience

Dallas eater Center,” general manager

where something happens. e goal is to

members.

Hillary J Hart says. “Suddenly, they saw

get the audience to respond.”

“is,” Moriarty says with a smile—

the door open, and they could see the top

It’s what he calls “lean-forward

saying good-bye to one theatergoer, then

of the Kalita through the trees. It’s a

theater,” the sort of performance that

turning to shake the hand of another—

hopeful time. It really is.”

incites the audience to tilt toward the stage

“this is the real work.”

STAGED RIGHT

Stewards of a Vision

W

hile many theaters are

decided the theater needed a successor to

founded by an artistic director

Paul Baker, and a bold new direction.

who then selects the board

The pain of that decision was followed

Though Hall’s tenure didn’t last a full decade, “It opened up another level of growth in our theater,” Custard says.

of directors, the Dallas Theater Center was

by the risk—financial and artistic—of

born the opposite way. The board began

committing to a brash leader like Adrian

raisers, liaisons between theater artists and

to assemble in the early days, when the

Hall, with his notion of a new theater

businesspeople, and cheerleaders who

institution was still just an idea and no

situated in the urban wasteland called the

spread word of the theater throughout

director had been named.

Arts District.

the city. Overall, the board provides the

Board members wear many hats: fund

sort of checks-and-balances system that a government body erects to guarantee responsibility to the community it serves, and to the original vision of the theater.

“Look at what the board and Paul Baker created initially, and fifty years later we’re still in business,” Custard says.

“There have been some fine theater institutions that have come and gone in that time, while we are on the verge of doing new and better things right now. It’s really a very exciting time.”

He’s quick to point out that, no matter how vital the board is, its members are The first couple of the Dallas Theater Center, Linda and Bill Custard.

simply part of a much larger company— designers, directors, actors, technical staff, and employees (“some of them

For more than fifty years, DTC’s fate

“We went out with nothing more than

sorely underpaid, no doubt”)—whose

has been in the hands of its board—the

a little model of the theater, built by Eugene

hard work and love keep DTC thriving.

city’s leading business and civic leaders who

Lee,” Custard recalls. “We had no money

And while love for the Dallas Theater

have made hard decisions to ensure the

and no plans to raise the money. But we

Center can sometimes verge on a sense

theater’s survival and growth.

built that thing in record time on land we

of possessiveness, one thing must always

didn’t own. Now that’s fun!”

be remembered: “The theater is owned

Life trustee Bill Custard and his nowwife, Linda, were on their first date when

Fun, scary, and a good example of

they attended the grand opening of the

the balance a theater board has to strike

Kalita Humphreys Theater. Twenty years

between playing things safe and taking

later, Custard was president of the board that

leaps of faith.

by the citizens of Dallas,” Custard says.

“Not you or me or anyone else.”

STAGED RIGHT 97

In 1991, incoming president Sarah Warnecke changed the name of the Women’s Committee to the Guild, and welcomed men into the group.

Passion for Service

T

he Dallas Theater Center’s Guild

“Frank Lloyd Wright’s design and

may not be as publicly visible as its

eccentricities are great fun to show off and

board of trustees, but it has been

stumble through,” says Warnecke, who adds

part of the institution’s history since before the theater opened its doors.

Primarily a volunteer service organization and fund-raising body, the Guild

that the Guild has given tours to professional architects. “That says something about our knowledge.”

For much of DTC’s history, the Guild has been known for hosting social meetings with

first came to life

an educational twist, featuring

as the Women’s

actors and others speaking

Committee in

about the current main-

November 1959,

stage production. But its

comprising three

importance has grown

hundred Dallas women.

In 1991, under

beyond the social.

Bringing a personal touch to such tasks

significant funds for the theater.

“While we are a service, fund-raising, and advocacy auxiliary of DTC, the

then-incoming Women’s

as manning phones

management has left us to our programming

Committee president Sarah

for season-ticket

independence, and we appreciate it,”

Warnecke, the group changed its name to the Guild,

campaigns, the Guild has helped fill seats and raise revenue for the theater

Warnecke says.

The Guild contributes most of its funds

broadening membership to

throughout its history. Also, for more than

to Project Discovery, DTC’s umbrella

include both genders. Besides ramping up

twenty years, the Guild has produced the

education and community outreach

member numbers, having men on board has

annual Dickens Gala, a Victorian-themed

programs. The Guild has created a named

its practical side.

holiday extravaganza. Charles Dickens’s

fund within the DTC endowment, which it

great-grandson even showed up one year.

supports each year.

“Right now, we’re painting actors’ apartments,” Warnecke says. “If we weren’t

The members have also indulged their

coed, I don’t think that would happen.”

own thespian tendencies, via the Guild

Home improvement isn’t the Guild’s

Players. On a strictly extramural basis

main goal, by any means—but it’s a good

(no advertising, no ticket cost), the Guild

example of the organization’s practical side.

has staged its own productions, such as

Members prepare dinners for actors and

scenes from A. R. Gurney’s The Dining Room.

crew during the tedious period of tech

“We performed for our own members,”

rehearsals, “adopt” visiting artists (say,

Warnecke says with a laugh. “And we were

by leaving, gift bags at their apartments),

tolerated by the artistic directors.”

and give backstage tours of the Kalita

Warnecke notes that 2008–2009

Humphreys Theater.

president Michelle Mew continues to build s Women’s Committee president Eva Hawley and her

98

It has been the Guild’s biggest event, raising

STAGED RIGHT

granddaughter in the Kalita Humphreys Theater lobby during a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

1978–1979 season.

on the passion of service to the Dallas Theater Center as it enters its next era.

Method and Madness in Julius Caesar

“

One of the actors playing a senatorial conspirator in Shakespeare’s play was very, very tall, and very, very Method in his approach to acting.”

At the start of the assassination scene, when that actor realized he’d left his prop knife offstage, “He thought, What would he do to Caesar instead? He would tear out his guts with his bare hands!

“So this giant, six-foot-six-inch guy goes, ‘Grrrrr,’ and goes down and starts pulling at the guy’s stomach.

The actor playing Caesar was absolutely terrified!”

That wasn’t the only crazy moment in a DTC production of this play. In a scene following Caesar’s murder, the corpse was laid out onstage—actually a mannequin covered with a sheet.

When the actor playing

A company favorite, Julius Caesar was produced six times at the Dallas Theater Center between 1962 and 1971.

Marc Antony whipped the sheet back to expose the body’s wounds, “He hit the bier . . . and the head of Caesar goes rolling down the stage.

The 2008–2009 season marks the final countdown to Dallas Theater Center’s fiftieth anniversary in a new home.

”

—Actor Randy Moore

STAGED RIGHT 99

Sewing It Up “ Costume shop manager Jennifer Ables takes the measure of things.

W

hen you have blood onstage, that’s always a unique challenge,” says former costume shop manager

Barbara Hicks.

Blood isn’t something you think about in the quiet cocoon of the shop, where cuffs are endlessly hemmed and corsets stitched. But all those

costumes wind up under the spotlights, where their seams are tested by prowling, sweaty actors—and, in the case of a show like The Who’s Tommy, by the occasional fake-blood stain, and by floods of water underfoot and rainfall from the fly space above.

“In the costume department, we are responsible for producing everything onstage that the actors wear,” Hicks says, “from their wigs all the way down to the tops of their toes, from their undergarments on out.”

The department includes four full-time staffers who create the clothes. Once a show has opened, the costumes’ cleaning and maintenance fall to the backstage wardrobe team.

“We make ’em, they use ’em,” Hicks says, in short. Part of the job is determining not only a costume’s durability but how easily actors can get in and out of it.

“The Who’s Tommy is a perfect example,” she says. “When you have quick changes, and a cast of twenty-two pretty much simultaneously changing clothes, that provides unique challenges.”

True enough. While audience members watch an actor in The Who’s Tommy shed his Santa costume onstage, revealing a grape-purple preacher robe underneath, they miss the drama backstage: half a dozen other actors hurling their Currierand-Ives dresses and jackets to the floor, then wheeling around within seconds to reemerge onstage as a church choir.

100

STAGED RIGHT

Draper Amanda Hendrickson stitches it together in the costume shop.

Hicks says one of her job’s challenges, and joys, is trying to fulfill the costume designer’s vision within the limits of time, available hands, and budget. “Every project brings something new,” she says, “something I’ve never dealt with before.”

Every now and then, she and her colleagues can look up from their needles and enjoy their work. She singles out the newest version of A Christmas Carol, which premiered in 2005 and required her staff to make more than one hundred new costumes.

“We worked our tails off,” she says. “We pushed our parameters—money, time, labor—to the extremes. We were really pushing everything in that show. And at some point during tech, before we opened, I looked onstage and thought, This is beautiful. This is exactly what this is supposed to look like.

“That was joyful. Even though we’d worked on it and felt really good about it, it was that feeling of This is why we do this! Look what we did! It was kind of magical. And, quite honestly, rare.”

STAGED RIGHT 101

Dallas Theater Center will continue the quest for new heights in artistic achievement when it moves to the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre at the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts in October 2009.

102

STAGED RIGHT

STAGED RIGHT 103

Dallas Theater Center Board Chairs and Presidents Term

Chair

President

1959–1962 1962–1964 1964–1965 1965–1968 1968–1969 1969–1971 1971–1972 1972–1977 1977–1978 1978–1983 1983–1985 1985–1989 1989–1994 1994–1995 1995–1996 1996–1997 1997–1998 1998–1999 1999–2000 2000–2001 2001–2004 2004–2005 2005–2008 2008–

Paul M. Raigorodsky Paul M. Raigorodsky Paul M. Raigorodsky Paul M. Raigorodsky Paul M. Raigorodsky Paul M. Raigorodsky Waldo E. Stewart Waldo E. Stewart Charles J. Wyly Jr. Richard C. Marcus William A. Custard William A. Custard Bess Enloe Arlene J. Dayton Arlene J. Dayton Richard C. Johnson Richard C. Johnson Kate Crosland Juett Kate Crosland Juett Deedie Rose Deedie Rose John E. Howell John E. Howell Frank A. Risch

Charles E. Beard Waldo E. Stewart Charles E. Beard Jay Rodney Reese Waldo E. Stewart O. Paul Corley William J. Carey Charles J. Wyly Jr. Richard C. Marcus William A. Custard Marshall J. Doke Bess Enloe Richard A. Boysen Richard A. Boysen Coley Clark Coley Clark Deborah S. Stack Deborah S. Stack Mark T. Layton Mark T. Layton Sarah L. Warnecke Sarah L. Warnecke Larry Angelilli Larry Angelilli

Bess Enloe Beatrice (Bea) Handel* Eva Hawley* Jane Heldt* Kate Crosland Juett Richard C. Marcus

Margaret McDermott Virginia Nick* Deedie Rose Dora Stecker* Waldo E. Stewart* Charles J. Wyly Jr.

Life Trustees Alan R. Bromberg Sis Carr Linda P. Custard William A. Custard Arlene J. Dayton

*deceased 104

STAGED RIGHT

2008–2009 Dallas Theater Center Board of Trustees Frank A. Risch ...................................................... Chair Larry Angelilli ................................................. President Kenneth Bernstein ............... Executive Vice President Diane M. Brierley ........................................... Secretary John E. Howell ............................................... Treasurer

Bess Enloe

Michelle Mew ■

Carol Meyer

Ronald Skillens Jr.

Elysiann Bishop

Rebecca Fletcher

Jerry Mills

Shannon Skokos

Lyndon Bittle

Craig Goodman, D.D.S.

Lisa Moore

Veronica Spencer-Austin

Beverly Bowman

Mark Hadley

Kevin Moriarty

Patty Stone

Alan R. Bromberg

Jeffrey A. Hage

Lyn Muse

Kim Strong

Barrett N. Bruce

Fanchon Hallum

Vicki Newsom

Ann Swisher

Jack F. Callahan Jr.

Eric Harmon

Brent Nicholson

Sarah L. Warnecke

David Campbell

Zoe Hart

Patrick O’Brien

Jim Washington

Sis Carr

Jennifer Houser

Jay Oppenheimer

Annette Watkins

Donald Carty

Kate Crosland Juett

Barbara Page

Jim Wiley

Kay Cattarulla

Sylvia Kidd

Kathy Parker

Donna M. Wilhelm

Coley Clark

Robert B. Krakow

Amy Ford Prestidge

Surel Williams

Jeanne Marie Clossey

Alexandra M. Lavie

J. Elliot Prieur

Michael D. Wortley

Robert Cohan

Mark T. Layton

Rod Riggins

Charles J. Wyly Jr.

Allen Custard

Maya Leibman

Ruth Robinson

Linda P. Custard

John I. Levy

Deedie Rose

William A. Custard

Brian A. Maher

David Russakov

Arlene J. Dayton

Margaret McDermott

Marie Diaz

Deborah McMurray

Al Anderson

Kenneth J. Downing

Kim J. Askew

Rusty Duvall

Tina Barry

Katy Menges

Gail Sachson ■

Brian Schultz Abigail Sinwell

■

Liaison

Larry Schoenbrun

STAGED RIGHT 105

Dallas Theater Center Guild Presidents

106

1959–1961

Eva Hawley*

1989–1991

Suzanne Shankle

1961–1963

Sis Carr

1991–1992

Sarah Warnecke

1963–1965

Tilley Austin*

1992–1993

Pat Winslett

1965–1967

Ann McInnis

1993–1994

Dorothy and Dan* Cain

1967–1968

Janet Johnston

1994–1995

Karol and Larry Omlor

1968–1969

Lou Hughes*

1995–1996

Brenda and Jim* Truitt

1969–1971

Betty Zech

1996–1997

Judy and John Mathis

1971–1973

Jean Epperson*

1997–1998

Jimmie and Bob Webb

1973–1975

Kanell Lontos

1998–1999

Beth and Don Averitt

1975–1976

Rusty Harrell

1999–2000

Joan and Wayne Flatt

1976–1978

Claire Cunningham

2000–2001

Mary Lee Cox

1978–1979

Sharon McCullough

2001–2003

Diane Brierley

1979–1981

Jane Willingham

2003–2005

Susan Falvo

1981–1983

Betty Littlejohn

2005–2006

Jill and Al Anderson

1983–1984

Linda Beach

2006–2007

Nancy Ritter

1984–1986

Barbara Washburn

2007–2008

Kathy Parker

1986–1988

Kitty Clyde*

2008–2009

Michelle Mew

1988–1989

Shirley Moseley

*deceased

STAGED RIGHT

Dallas Theater Center Production History 1959–1960 Season • • • • • • • • •

Of Time and the River by omas Wolfe, adapted by Eugene McKinney and Paul Baker. Directed by Paul Baker. e Cross-Eyed Bear by Eugene McKinney. Directed by Paul Baker. World Premiere.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Directed by Paul Baker. e Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. Directed by Mary Sue Fridge.

Our Town by ornton Wilder. Directed by Paul Baker.

Under Milk Wood by Dylan omas. Directed by Burgess Meredith.

A Solid House by Elena Garro. Directed by Juan Jose Gurrola. e Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco, translated by Donlad M. Allen. Directed by Juan Jose Gurrola.

Hay Fever by Noël Coward. Directed by Dugald MacArthur.

1960–1961 Season • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Hay Fever by Noël Coward. Directed by Dugald MacArthur. e Matchmaker by ornton Wilder. Directed by Paul Baker, in association with Ken Latimer.

A Waltz in the Afternoon by Jason Miller. Directed by Paul Baker, in association with David Martin. World Premiere. e Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. Directed by Mary Sue Fridge. e Visit by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, adapted by Maurice Valency. Directed by Paul Baker in association with Gene Lindsey.

A Phoenix Too Frequent by Christopher Fry. Directed by Mary Sue Fridge. e Chairs by Eugene Ionesco. Directed by Jan Kessler in association with Tom Hebert.

Shadow of an Eagle by Ramsey Yelvington. Directed by Dugald MacArthur. World Premiere. e Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare. Directed by Ivan Rider.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Directed by Paul Baker. e Mousetrap by Agatha Christie. Directed by Ken Latimer. e Unicorn, the Gorgon, & the Manticore by Gian-Carlo Menotti.

Romanoff and Juliet by Peter Ustinov. Directed by Stan Fedyszyn, in association with Paul Baker.

1961–1962 Season • Little Mary Sunshine. Book, lyrics, and music by Rick Besoyan. Directed by Ivan Rider.

• Let the Dogs Bark by Sergio Vodanovic, translated by Lysander Kemp. Directed by Padro Mortheiro. American Premiere.

• Joshua Beene and God by Clifford M. Sage and Hal Lewis. Based on the novel by Jewel Gibson, starring Burl Ives.

Directed by Paul Baker. World Premiere.

• e Snow Queen. Book and lyrics by Emily Jefferson, music by Beatrice Gaspar. Based on the story by Hans Christian Andersen.

Directed by Ruth Byers. World Premiere.

• e Madwoman of Chaillot by Jean Giraudoux. Directed by Angna Enters.

• e Crossing by Howard Fast. Directed by Paul Baker. World Premiere.

• e Mousetrap by Agatha Christie. Directed by Ken Latimer.

• Naked to Mine Enemies by Charles W. Ferguson. Directed by Warren Hammack, in association with Paul Baker. World Premiere.

• e Women by Claire Booth Luce. Directed by David Pursley.

• e Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Directed by Robin Lovejoy.

• Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett. Directed by Stan Fedyszyn.

• e Man with a Flower in His Mouth by Luigi Pirandello. Directed by Stan Fedyszyn.

STAGED RIGHT 107

• Village Wooing by George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Stan Fedyszyn.

• Mirror Under the Eagle by Phillip C. Lewis. Directed by Don Howell.

1962–1963 Season • • • • • • • • • • • •

Sister by Glenn Allen Smith. Directed by Ivan Rider.

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. Directed by David Martin. e Women by Claire Booth Luce. Directed by David Pursley. e Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, adapted by Frank Gabrielson, music and lyrics by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg.

Directed by Ruth Byers.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, adapted by Robert L. Flynn. Directed by Paul Baker. e Maids by Jean Gênet. Directed by Paul Baker. e Sandbox by Edward Albee. Directed by Paul Baker. e Chairs by Eugene Ionesco, translated by Donald M. Allen. Directed by Paul Baker.

Auntie Mame by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, based on the novel by Patrick Dennis. Directed by Paul Baker. ree Sisters by Anton Chekhov. Directed by Warren Hammack.

Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated by James Graham Lujan and Richard O’Connell.

Directed by Mary Bozeman Raines.

Under the Yum-Yum Tree by Lawrence Roman. Directed by Preston Jones.

1963–1964 Season • • • • • • • • • • • •

e Firebugs by Max Frisch, translated by Mordecai Gorelik. Directed by Ken Latimer, in association with Paul Baker.

Can-Can. Music and lyrics by Cole Porter, book by Abe Burrows. Directed by Tom Hughes.

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. Directed by I. Sheldon Aptekar.

Hip-Hop-A-Hare by Beatrice and Lester Gaspar, music by Beatrice Gaspar. Directed by Ruth Byers. World Premiere.

Medea by Robinson Jeffers, freely adapted from the Medea of Euripides. Directed by Paul Baker.

A Different Drummer by Eugene McKinney. Directed by Ryland Merkey. e Tragedy of omas Andros by Ronald Wilcox. Directed by Ronald Wilcox, in association with Paul Baker. World Premiere. e Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare. Directed by Paul Baker. ree Sisters by Anton Chekhov, translated by Stark Young. Directed by Warren Hammack.

Journey to Jefferson (formerly As I Lay Dying) by William Faulkner, adapted by Robert L. Flynn. Directed by Paul Baker.

Night Must Fall by Emlyn Williams. Directed by Paul Baker and Kaki Dowling.

Come Blow Your Horn by Neil Simon. Directed by Ruth Byers, in association with Rita Barnes.

1964–1965 Season • Of ee I Sing. Book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, music and lyrics by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin.

Directed by David Pursley.

• Harvey by Mary Chase. Directed by Ken Latimer.

• Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. Directed by Randy Moore.

• e Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare. Directed by Paul Baker.

• Peter Pan by Sir James M. Barrie. Directed by Ruth Byers.

• A Different Drummer by Eugene McKinney. Directed by Ryland Merkey.

• Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill. Directed by Paul Baker.

• What Price Glory? by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings. Directed by Don Davlin, in association with Paul Baker.

• Wheels A-Rollin’ by Sally Netzel. Directed by Robyn Flatt. World Premiere.

• e Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Directed by Robin Lovejoy.

108

STAGED RIGHT

• e Days Between by Robert Anderson. Directed by Paul Baker. World Premiere.

• Mary, Mary by Jean Kerr. Directed by Warren Hammack.

• e Marriage-Go-Round by Leslie Stevens. Directed by Lynn Trammell.

DOWN CENTER STAGE • Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling so Sad by Arthur Kopit. Directed by Ryland Merkey.

• e Typist by Murray Schisgal.

• e Tiger by Murray Schisgal.

• e Great God Brown by Eugene O’Neill.

• Rain by John Colton and Clement Randolph, adapted from the story by Somerset Maugham.

• Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen by Tennessee Williams.

• Something Unspoken by Tennessee Williams.

• is Property Is Condemned by Tennessee Williams.

• Epitaph by Randy Ford. World Premiere.

• Never Mind Tomorrow by Dale Blair. World Premiere.

• Telephones by Ronald Wilcox. World Premiere.

• Riverwind. Book, music, and lyrics by John Jennings.

1965–1966 Season • e Tempest by William Shakespeare. Sets and costumes designed by Bjørn Wiinblad. Directed by Paul Baker in association with Ken Latimer.

• e Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Directed by Robin Lovejoy.

• Peter Pan by Sir James M. Barrie. Directed by Ruth Byers.

• Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling so Sad by Arthur Kopit. Directed by Ryland Merkey.

• Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. Directed by Warren Hammack.

• e Physicists by Friedrich Duerrenmatt, adapted by James Kirkup. Directed by Paul Baker.

• You Can’t Take It With You by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. Directed by Ken Latimer.

• Creep Past the Mountain Lion by Clifford M. Sage and Hal Lewis. Directed by Preston Jones. World Premiere.

• Rashomon by Fay and Michael Kanin, based on the stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Directed by Buddy Smith and Duk Hyung Yoo. • e Golden Warriors by Jay Dratler. Directed by Ryland Merkey, in association with Paul Baker. World Premiere.

• Who’s Got the Pot?! by Plautus. Directed by Robyn Flatt.

• Little Mary Sunshine. Book, lyrics, and music by Rick Besoyan. Directed by Ivan Rider.

• e Absence of a Cello by Ira Wallach. Directed by John Figlmiller.

DOWN CENTER STAGE • A Mime Show by the Mime Group. World Premiere.

• La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzier.

• e Birthday Party by Harold Pinter. Directed by Ryland Merkey.

• Sense and Nonsense by the Mime Group. World Premiere.

• e House of Bernard Alba by Frederico Garcia Lorca.

• e Amorous Flea. Book by Jerry Devine, based on Molière’s School for Wives. Music and lyrics by Bruce Montgomery.

• e Dance by Claudette Gardner. World Premiere.

• My Brother’s Keeper by John Logan. World Premiere.

• One Dead Indian by Randy Ford. World Premiere.

• e Subject Was Roses by Frank D. Gilroy.

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1966–1967 Season • A Bug in Her Ear by Georges Feydeau, translated by Barnett Shaw. Directed by Jean-Pierre Granval, in association with eatre de France. American Premiere.

• Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward. Directed by Paul Baker.

• Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, adapted by Sally Netzel, lyrics by Sally Netzel and Beatrice Gaspar, music by Beatrice Gaspar.

Directed by Louise Mosley. World Premiere.

• Journey to Jefferson (formerly As I Lay Dying) by William Faulkner. Directed by Paul Baker.

• You Never Can Tell by George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Anna Paul Rogers, in association with Sally Netzel.

• e Tempest by William Shakespeare. Sets and costumes designed by Bjørn Wiinblad. Directed by Paul Baker in association with Ken Latimer.

• Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. Directed by Randy Moore.

• Luv by Murray Schisgal. Directed by Ryland Merkey.

• e Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht, English version by Eric Bentley. Directed by Harry Buckwitz.

• Barefoot in the Park by Neil Simon. Directed by Preston Jones.

• Ben Bagley’s e Decline and Fall of the Entire World as Seen rough the Eyes of Cole Porter. Lyrics and music by Cole Porter, based on the revue by Ben Bagley. Directed by Paul Baker, in association with Raymond Allen.

DOWN CENTER STAGE • Tiny Alice by Edward Albee.

• e Amorous Flea. Book by Jerry Devine, based on Molière’s School for Wives. Music and lyrics by Bruce Montgomery.

• e World of Carl Sandburg, adapted by Norman Corwin.

• A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney.

• Fantoccini by Sally Netzel. World Premiere.

• R.U. Hungry by Randy Ford. World Premiere.

• Look Back in Anger by John Osborne.

1967–1968 Season • • • •

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. Directed by Norman Ayrton. e Odd Couple by Neil Simon. Directed by James Nelson Harrell.

A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee. Directed by George Webby.

Pinocchio by Brian Way, with the collaboration of Warren Jenkins, adapted from the story by Carlo Collodi.

Directed by Louise Mosley.

• A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Ryland Merkey.

• Vasco by Georges Schehade, English version by Bernard Noble. Directed by Kosta Spaic. American Premiere.

• e Latent Heterosexual by Paddy Chayefsky. Directed by Burgess Meredith. World Premiere.

• Charley’s Aunt by Brandon omas. Directed by Anna Paul Marsh-Neame.

• Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, adapted and arranged by Charles Aidman. Directed by Mike Dendy.

• e Girl of the Golden West by David Belasco. Directed by Ken Latimer and Carleton Tanner.

• Under the Yum-Yum Tree by Lawrence Roman. Directed by Preston Jones and Bob Baca.

DOWN CENTER STAGE • A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee.

• Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. Conceived, adapted, and arranged by Charles Aidman. Directed by Mike Dendy.

• e Private Ear by Peter Shaffer.

• e Public Eye by Peter Shaffer.

• e Knack by Ann Jellicoe.

• Chamber Music by Arthur Kopit.

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• e Day It Rained Forever by Ray Bradbury.

• e Finger Tomb by Ronald Wilcox. World Premiere.

• Crime on Goat Island by Ugo Betti, translated by Henry Reed.

1968–1969 Season • Macbeth by William Shakespeare. Directed by Paul Baker.

• Hippolytus by Euripides, performed by the Piraikon eatron. Directed by Dimitrios Rondiris.

• Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides, performed by the Piraikon eatron. Directed by Dimitrios Rondiris.

• H.M.S. Pinafore by W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Directed by Glenn Allen Smith. Musical directed by Raymond Allen.

• Journey to Jefferson (formerly As I Lay Dying) by William Faulkner. Directed by Paul Baker.

• e Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare. Directed by Mike Dendy.

• Rags to Riches by Aurand Harris, suggested by two Horatio Alger stories. Directed by Frank Schaefer.

• e Star-Spangled Girl by Neil Simon. Directed by Anna Marsh-Neame.

• A Gown for His Mistress by Georges Feydeau, translated by Barnett Shaw. Directed by Preston Jones. American Premiere.

• You Can’t Take It With You by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. Directed by Ken Latimer.

• Cactus Flower by Abe Burrows, based on a play by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy. Directed by Sally Netzel.

DOWN CENTER STAGE • e Killing of Sister George by Frank Marcus.

• War by Jean-Claude van Itallie.

• Muzeeka by John Guare.

• A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney.

• Summertree by Ron Cowen.

• Black Reflections in a White Eye by Sally Netzel, music by Raymond Allen. World Premiere.

• e Process is the Product. Script by the performers. World Premiere.

• Entertaining Mr. Sloane by Joe Orton.

1969–1970 Season • • • • •

e Homecoming by Harold Pinter. Directed by Paul Baker.

Project III: Is Law in Order? by e Resident Company. Directed by Paul Baker and Mary Sue Jones. World Premiere.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by John Figlmiller, lyrics by Sally Netzel. Directed by John Figlmiller.

She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith. Directed by Kaki Dowling. e Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of e Marquis De Sade by Peter Weiss, English version by Geoffrey Skelton, verse adaptation by Adrian Mitchell.

Directed by Harry Buckwitz.

• Black Comedy by Peter Shaffer. Directed by Ken Latimer.

• Greenski and the Hummingbird by James Nelson Harrell. Directed by James Nelson Harrell.

• On e Harmfulness of Tobacco by Anton Chekhov. Directed by Michael Dendy.

• e Top Loading Lover libretto by Glenn Allen Smith, music by Raymond Allen. Directed by Glenn Allen Smith. World Premiere.

• Little Murders by Jules Feiffer. Directed by eodore Mann.

• e Boys from Syracuse. Book by George Abbott, lyrics by Lorenz Hart, music by Richard Rodgers.

Directed by David Pursley.

• Macbeth by William Shakespeare. Directed by Paul Baker.

DOWN CENTER STAGE • e Promise by Aleksei Arbuzov, translated by Ariadne Nicolaeff.

• Halfway Up the Tree by Peter Ustinov.

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• e Field by Michael Parriott. World Premiere.

• Dear Liar adapted from the correspondence of Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell by Jerome Kitty.

• Lovers by Brain Friel.

• e Nightwatchmen by Stratis Karris, translated by Evangelos Voutsinas. American Premiere.

• A Day in the Death of Joe Egg by Peter Nichols.

MAGIC TURTLE • Rumplestiltskin by Sally Netzel. World Premiere.

• Pecos Bill by Deanna Dunagan. World Premiere.

• umbelina written and arranged by Jerry Blatt.

THE JANUS PLAYERS • e Blacks by Jean Genet.

• Happy Ending by Douglas Turner Wars.

• Big Mama, Big Man by Donna Medcalf. World Premiere.

1970–1971 Season • • • • • • •

Farce ’‘N Flick by B. M. Svoboda, music by Raymond Allen. Directed by B. M. Svoboda. World Premiere.

Fantoccini by Sally Netzel. Directed by Frank Schaefer.

Hamlet ESP by William Shakespeare, adapted by Paul Baker. Directed by Paul Baker.

Peter Pan by Sir James M. Barrie. Directed by Ruth Byers. e Seagull by Anton Chekhov, translated by David Magarshak. Directed by Paul Baker.

Harvey by Mary Chase. Directed by Ken Latimer. e Night oreau Spent in Jail by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Directed by Paul Baker, in association with Kaki Dowling and David Ayers.

• e Apple Tree by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, based on stories by Mark Twain, Frank R. Stockton, and Jules Feiffer.

Directed by Lee eodore.

• Private Lives by Noël Coward. Directed by Rocco Bufano.

• Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. Directed by Randy Moore.

DOWN CENTER STAGE • e Late Christopher Bean by Sidney Howard.

• Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett.

• Anna Christie by Eugene O’Neill.

• Dear Liar. Adapted from the correspondence of Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell by Jerome Kitty.

• e Attendant by Stratis Karras, translated by Evangelos Voutsinas.

• e Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol, adapted by Don Eitner and Tom Troupe from an original translation by Rodney Patterson.

American Premiere.

MAGIC TURTLE • Cinderella by Sally Netzel. World Premiere.

• Beauty and the Beast by Sally Netzel. World Premiere.

• e Pied Piper of Hamlin. Book and lyrics by Evan ompson and Joan Shepard, music by Joe Bousard.

THE JANUS PLAYERS • Antigone by Jean Anouilh, adapted by Lewis Galantiere.

• Day of Absence by Douglas Turner Ward.

1971–1972 Season • e Night oreau Spent in Jail by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Directed by Paul Baker, in association with Kaki Dowling and David Ayers.

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• e Lion in Winter by James Goldman. Directed by Don Eitner.

• e School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheriden. Directed by Campbell omas.

• Snow White and Famous Fables. Script arranged by Stephanie Rich. Directed by Stephanie Rich, in association with Robyn Flatt.

World Premiere.

• J.B. by Archibald MacLeish. Directed by C. Bernard Jackson.

• Lysistrata by Aristophanes, translated by Patric Dickinson. Directed by Takis Muzenidis.

• Our Town by ornton Wilder. Directed by Ken Latimer.

• e House of Blue Leaves by John Guare. Directed by Sally Netzel.

• Wind in the Branches of the Sassafras by Rene de Obaldia, translated by Joseph Foster. Directed by Ryland Merkey. American Premiere.

DOWN CENTER STAGE • e Price by Arthur Miller.

• Exit the King by Eugene Ionesco.

• Dear Love by Jerome Kitty.

• I’m Read, You’re Black by Lewis Cleckler. World Premiere.

• Feathers by Kerry Newcomb. World Premiere.

• Saloon by Sally Netzel. World Premiere.

MAGIC TURTLE • Sleeping Beauty by Brian Way. • Jack and the Beanstalk by Sally Netzel. World Premiere.

• Little Red Riding Hood, a Fable eater production. World Premiere.

• e ree Bears, a Fable eater production. World Premiere.

• e Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. Book, lyrics, and music by Sam L. Rosen.

• Goose on the Loose, a Fable eater production. World Premiere.

• Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, a Fable eater production. World Premiere.

THE JANUS PLAYERS • Dracula by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, adapted from the novel by Bram Stoker.

• Shades of Black and Brown, an original musical by e Janus Players. World Premiere.

• Ceremonies in Dark Old Men by Lonne Elder III. • Frankenstein’s Monster by Sally Netzel, adapted from the novel by Mary Shelley. World Premiere.

• La Conquista de Mexico by El Teatro Campesino.

1972–1973 Season • e Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-e-Moon Marigolds by Paul Zindel. Directed by Michael Dendy.

• e Happy Hunter by Georges Feydeau, translated by Barnett Shaw. Directed by John Reich.

• Life with Father by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Directed by David Pursley.

• Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Mary Sue Jones.

• Jabberwock by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Directed by Jerome Lawrence. World Premiere.

• How the Other Half Loves by Alan Ayckbourn. Directed by Sally Netzel.

• Mary Stuart by Friedrich von Schiller, translated by Stephen Spender. Directed by Ken Latimer.

• Night Watch by Lucille Fletcher. Directed by John Figlmiller.

DOWN CENTER STAGE • e Anniversary by Anton Chekhov, in English and Spanish (Spanish version adapted by Leo Lavandero).

• e Marriage Proposal by Anton Chekhov, in English and Spanish (Spanish version adapted by Leo Lavandero).

• Endgame by Samuel Beckett.

• To Be Young, Gifted and Black. A portrait of Lorraine Hansberry in her own words, adapted by Robert Nemiroff.

STAGED RIGHT 113

• Old Times by Harold Pinter.

• Moon on a Rainbow Shawl by Errol John.

• If You See Any Ladies by James Crump. World Premiere.

• e Novitiates by Denise Chavez. World Premiere.

• Quincunx by Celia Karston. World Premiere.

MAGIC TURTLE • Heidi by Johanna Spyri, adapted by Lucille Miller.

• Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne, adapted by Kristin Sergel.

• e Red Shoes by Robin Short, based on the fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson.

• e Adventures of Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy by Johnny Gruell, adapted by Kevin Kelley. A Fable eater production.

World Premiere.

• Tell Me a Story, a Fable eater production. World Premiere.

THE JANUS PLAYERS • Day of Absence by Douglas Turner (tour).

• e Marriage Proposal by Anton Chekhov, in English and Spanish (Spanish version adapted by Leo Lavandero).

• e People Speak a collection of Black and Chicano poetry (tour). World Premiere.

1973–1974 Season • John Brown’s Body by Stephen Vincent Benét. Directed by Judith Davis.

• Hadrian VII by Peter Luke, based on Hadrian the Seventh by Fr. Rolfe (Baron Corvo). Directed by Ken Latimer.

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, music and lyrics by Randolph Tallman and Steven Mackenroth.

Directed by Randolph Tallman and Steven Mackenroth. World Premiere.

• e Crucible by Arthur Miller. Directed by Michael Dendy.

• Jacques Brel is Alive and Well Living in Paris by Eric Blau and Mort Shuman, based on Brel’s lyrics and commentary, music by Jacques Brel. Directed by Joe Bousard.

• Jack Ruby, All-American Boy by John Logan, in association with Paul Baker. Directed by Paul Baker. World Premiere.

• Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring. Directed by Randolph Tallman.

• Tobacco Road by Jack Kirkland, based on the novel by Erskine Caldwell. Directed by Ken Latimer.

DOWN CENTER STAGE • Getting to Know the Natives by Daniel Turner. World Premiere.

• e Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia by Preston Jones. World Premiere.

• Dear Luger by Kerry Newcomb. World Premiere.

• Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander by Preston Jones. World Premiere.

• Curious in L.A. by Glenn Allen Smith. World Premiere.

• Fuse by Sally Netzel. World Premiere.

• Enchanted Night by Slawomir Mrozek.

• Charlie by Slawomir Mrozek.

MAGIC TURTLE • Pinocchio by Brian Way, with the collaboration of Warren Jenkins, adapted from the story by Carlo Collodi.

• e Christmas Nightingale by Phyllis Newman Groff.

• Aesop’s Falables. Book by Ed Graczyk, lyrics by Marty Conine and Ed Graczyk, music by Shirley Hansen.

• Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp, a Fable eater production. World Premiere.

THE JANUS PLAYERS • Enchanted Night by Slawomir Mrozek.

• Charlie by Slawomir Mrozek.

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1974–1975 Season • Jack Ruby, All-American Boy by John Logan, in association with Paul Baker. Directed by Paul Baker.

• Chemin de Fer by Georges Feydeau, translated by Barnett Shaw, adapted by Suzanne Grossman and Paxton Whitehead.

Directed by David Pursley.

• e Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia by Preston Jones. Directed by Paul Baker.

• e Oldest Living Graduate by Preston Jones. Directed by Paul Baker. World Premiere.

• Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander by Preston Jones. Directed by Paul Baker.

• Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Directed by Jerome Lawrence.

• Misalliance by George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Linda Daugherty.

• Journey to Jefferson (formerly As I Lay Dying) by William Faulkner. Directed by Paul Baker.

• e Amorous Flea. Book by Jerry Devine, based on Molière’s School for Wives. Music and lyrics by Bruce Montgomery.

Directed by Ken Latimer.

• Promenade, All! By David V. Robison. Directed by Randy Moore and Judith Davis.

DOWN CENTER STAGE • My Drinking Cousin by Frank Jarrett.

• Why Don’t ey Ever Talk About the First Mrs. Phipps? by Sue Ann Gunn. World Premiere.

• Puppy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore by Iris Rosofsky. World Premiere.

• Sourwood Honey by T. Alan Doss. World Premiere.

• La Turista by Sam Shepard.

MAGIC TURTLE • Chi-Chin-Pui-Pui, adapted from Japanese folk tales by Kyo Ozawa, translated by Yoichi Aoki and T. Alan Doss. World Premiere.

• Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a Fable eater production. World Premiere.

• Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates by Charlotte B. Chorpenning.

• King Midas and the Golden Touch by Louise Mosley. World Premiere.

1975–1976 Season • Count Dracula by Ted Tiller, based on the novel by Bram Stoker. Directed by Judith Davis.

• Saturday, Sunday, Monday by Eduardo de Filippo, English adaptation by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall.

Directed by David Healy.

• Manny. Music by Randolph Tallman and Steven Mackenroth, lyrics by Glenn Allen Smith. Directed by Dolores Ferraro.

World Premiere.

• A Place on the Magdalena Flats by Preston Jones. Directed by Ken Latimer. World Premiere.

• Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare. Directed by Robin Lovejoy.

• Stillsong by Sallie Laurie. Directed by Paul Baker. World Premiere.

• Sherlock Holmes & the Curse of the Sign of Four by Dennis Rosa, based on the novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Directed by Ken Latimer.

• Sam by Sally Netzel. Directed by Bryan J. Reynolds. World Premiere.

DOWN CENTER STAGE • A Marvelous War by Charles Beachley III. World Premiere.

• Standoff at Beaver and Pine by Sally Netzel. World Premiere.

• Canzada and the Boys by Sam Havens. World Premiere.

• Faces of U.S. by the Mime Troupe. World Premiere.

• Mirror Under the Eagle by Phillip C. Lewis.

MAGIC TURTLE • Lady Liberty, Celebration ’76 by the Mime Troupe. World Premiere.

• Pocahantas by Aurand Harris.

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• e Adventures of Brer Rabbit. Book and lyrics by Pat Hale, music by Paul Spong, based on the stories by Joel Chandler.

• Road to Yonder: e Boyhood Adventures of Abe Lincoln by Pamela Jensen, songs by Caroline Pines. World Premiere.

1976–1977 Season • Sherlock Holmes & the Curse of the Sign of Four by Dennis Rosa, based on the novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Directed by Ken Latimer.

• Once in a Lifetime by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. Directed by Ryland Merkey.

• Scapino! by Frank Dunlop and Jim Dale from Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin. Directed by Robyn Flatt.

• ree Sisters by Anton Chekhov, translated by Robert W. Corrigan. Directed by Ken Latimer.

• Something’s Afoot. Book by James McDonald, David Vos, and Robert Gerlach. Directed by John Henson.

Music directed by Pam Nagle.

• Santa Fe Sunshine by Preston Jones. Directed by John Logan. World Premiere.

• Equus by Peter Shaffer. Directed by Ryland Merkey.

• Absurd Person Singular by Alan Ayckbourn. Directed by Ken Latimer.

DOWN CENTER STAGE • Ladyhouse Blues by Kevin O’Morrison. World Premiere.

• Kennedy’s Children by Robert Patrick.

• Get Happy! by John Heson, John Logan, Randolph Tallman, and Steven Mackenroth. World Premiere.

• War Zone by Paul R. Bassett. World Premiere.

• Hermit’s Homage by Lewis Cleckler. World Premiere.

MAGIC TURTLE • Marco Polo by Jonathan Levy.

• Cinderella by the Mime Troupe. World Premiere.

• Hansel and Gretel by the Mime Troupe. World Premiere.

• e Tale of the Mouse by Anita Gustafson.

• Sleeping Beauty by Brian Way.

1977–1978 Season • Equus by Peter Shaffer. Directed by Ryland Merkey.

• e Imaginary Invalid by Molière, translated by Alec Stockwell, music by Berthold Carriere. Directed by Albert Millaire.

• Vanities by Jack Heifner. Directed by Ryland Merkey.

• e Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Judith Davis.

• ree Men on a Horse by John Cecil Holm and George Abbott. Directed by Ken Latimer.

• Firekeeper by Mark Medoff. Directed by Paul Baker. World Premiere.

• e Royal Family by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber. Directed by Ryland Merkey.

DOWN CENTER STAGE • Door Play by Sallie Laurie. World Premiere.

• Cigarette Man by David Blomquist. World Premiere.

• e Night Visit by Roy Hudson. World Premiere.

• Lady Bug, Lady Bug, Fly Away Home by Mary Rohde. Directed by Chris Hendrie. World Premiere.

• Inside the White Room by Paul R. Bassett. World Premiere.

• Interweave developed by the Mime Act from a scenario by Robyn Flatt. World Premiere.

MAGIC TURTLE • Equepoise. Book and lyrics by Phil Penningroth, music by Howard Quilling.

• Snow White by the Mime Troupe.

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• e Tiger in Traction. Book and lyrics by Gifford Wingate, music by Robert R. Smith Jr. • e Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. Book, lyrics, and music by Sam L. Rosen.

1978–1979 Season • Remember by Preston Jones. Directed by Judith Davis.

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. Directed by Randolph Tallman.

• A Texas Trilogy by Preston Jones. Directed by Paul Baker.

• e Devil’s General by Carl Zuckmayer, translated by Ingrid Komar. Directed by Harry Buckwitz.

• As You Like It by William Shakespeare. Directed by Ken Latimer.

• Blood Money by M. G. Johnston, music composed by Jim Abbott. Directed by John Logan. World Premiere.

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Directed by Robyn Flatt.

DOWN CENTER STAGE • Attic Aphrodite by Sally Netzel. Directed by Robert A. Smith.

• Years in the Making by Glenn Allen Smith. Directed by Ken Latimer.

1979–1980 Season • A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt. Directed by Mary Sue Jones.

• e Illusion: A Musical eater of Marvels by Randolph Tallman, Steven Mackenroth, John Henson, and John Logan.

Directed by John Henson. World Premiere.

• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Directed by Bryant J. Reynolds.

• Sly Fox by Larry Gelbart. Directed by Ryland Merkey.

• Holiday by Phillip Barry. Directed by John Logan.

• Da by Hugh Leonard. Directed by Judith Kelly Davis.

• Evocations. Performed by Princess Grace of Monaco and John Westbrook.

DOWN CENTER STAGE • Village Wooing by George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Campbell omas.

THE EUGENE MCKINNEY NEW PLAY READING SERIES • Death and the Maiden by John Gardner. Directed by Judith Davis.

1980–1981 Season • • • • • • • • • • •

Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmond Rostand. Directed by Anton Rodgers.

On Golden Pond by Ernest ompson. Directed by Joan Vail orne.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by John Figlmiller and Sally Netzel. Directed by Bryant J. Reynolds. e Incredible Murder of Cardinal Tosca by Alden Nowlan and Walter Learning. Directed by Judith Davis.

Children of a Lesser God by Mark Medoff. Directed by Mark Medoff.

Deathtrap by Ira Levin. Directed by Christopher Pennywitt.

Goya by Henry Beissel. Directed by Peter Lynch.

Grandma Duck Is Dead by Larry Shue. Directed by Paul Munger.

A Kurt Weill Cabaret by Martha Schlamme and Alvin Epstein. Music by Kurt Weill.

Stagg and Stella by Fred Getchell. e French Have a Word For It by Georges Feydeau, translated by Barnett Shaw. Directed by Derek Goldby.

1981–1982 Season • War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Directed by Joan Vail orne.

• Tintypes by Mary Kyte with Mel Marvin and Gary Pearle. Directed by David Pursley, musical direction by Raymond Allen.

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• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by John Figlmiller and Sally Netzel. Directed by Judith Davis.

• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. Directed by Anton Rodgers.

• Tartuffe by Molière. Directed by Paul Baker in association with Russell Henderson and Barnett Shaw.

• Black Coffee by Agatha Christie. Directed by Walter Learning.

• e Gin Game by D. L. Coburn. Directed by Karl Guttman.

DOWN CENTER STAGE • Under Distant Skies by Jeffery Kinghorn. Directed by Randy Bonifay.

• e Wisteria Bush by Jo Vander Voort. Directed by Michael Scuddy.

THE EUGENE MCKINNEY NEW PLAY READING SERIES • High Cockalorum by Joan Vail orne. Directed by Mary Lou Hoyle.

1982–1983 Season • • • • • •

e ree Musketeers by Peter Raby, based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas. Directed by David Pursley.

A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie, adapted by Leslie Darbon. Directed by Robyn Flatt.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by John Figlmiller and Sally Netzel. Directed by Candy Buckley.

A Lesson from Aloes by Athol Fugard. Directed by Judith Davis.

Cotton Patch Gospel by Tom Key and Russell Treyz, music and lyrics by Harry Chapin. Directed by Russell Treyz. e reepenny Opera. Book and lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, music by Kurt Weill, English adaptation by Marc Blitzstein.

Directed by Ivan Rider, musical direction by Raymond Allen.

• e Dresser by Ronald Harwood. Directed by Mary Sue Jones.

• Amadeus by Peter Shaffer. Directed by Robert Williams.

• Talley’s Folly by Lanford Wilson. Directed by Robyn Flatt.

DOWN CENTER STAGE • Topeka Scuffle by Paul Munger. Directed by Dennis Vincent.

1983–1984 Season • • • • • • • •

Billy Bishop Goes to War by John Gray with Eric Peterson. Directed by Richard Jenkins.

Galileo by Bertolt Brecht. Directed by Adrian Hall. e Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen. Directed by Adrian Hall.

Fool for Love by Sam Shepard. Directed by David Wheeler.

Seven Keys to Baldpate by George M. Cohan. Directed by Peter Gerety.

Lady Audley’s Secret by Douglas Seale, based on the 1860 novel by Elizabeth Braddon. Directed by Word Baker.

Cloud 9 by Caryl Churchill. Directed by Word Baker.

Tom Jones by Larry Arrick, based on the novel by Henry Fielding. Directed by Larry Arrick.

1984–1985 Season • • • • • • •

118

Misalliance by George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Phillip Minor.

Amadeus by Peter Shaffer. Directed by Patrick Hines.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Directed by Adrian Hall.

Passion Play by Peter Nichols. Directed by Adrian Hall.

Good by C. P. Taylor. Directed by Adrian Hall. ree Sisters by Anton Chekhov. Directed by Suzanne Shepherd.

You Can’t Take It with You by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Directed by Peter Gerety.

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1985–1986 Season • • • • • • •

e Ups and Downs of eophilus Maitland by Vinette Carroll and Miki Grant. Directed by Vinette Carroll. e Skin of Our Teeth by ornton Wilder. Directed by Peter Gerety.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Directed by Ken Bryant. e Marriage of Bette and Boo by Christopher Durang. Directed by Adrian Hall.

Kith and Kin by Oliver Hailey. Directed by Adrian Hall. World Premiere. e Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. Directed by omas Hill. e Tavern by George M. Cohan. Directed by Tony Giordano.

1986–1987 Season • • • • • • • •

Noises Off by Michael Frayn. Directed by Ken Bryant.

All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren. Directed by Adrian Hall.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Directed by Martin Rayner. e Real ing by Tom Stoppard. Directed by Philip Minor.

An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen. Directed by Ken Bryant.

Step on a Crack by Susan Zeder. e Miser by Molière. Directed by Stephen Porter.

A Lie of the Mind by Sam Shepard. Directed by Adrian Hall.

1987–1988 Season • • • • • • • •

e Tempest by William Shakespeare. Directed by Adrian Hall. rough the Leaves by Franz Xavier Kroetz. Directed by Ken Bryant.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Ken Bryant.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Directed by Ken Bryant.

Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet. Directed by Larry Arrick.

Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov. Directed by Fred Curchack. e House of Blue Leaves by John Guare. Directed by Larry Arrick.

Diary of a Scoundrel by Alexander Ostrovsky, adapted by Erik Brogger. Directed by Ken Bryant.

1988–1989 Season • • • • • • • • • •

Laughing Wild by Christopher Durang. Directed by Michael Greif.

Ah, Wilderness! by Eugene O’Neill. Directed by Ken Bryant.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Christopher Hampton, based on the novel by Laclos. Directed by Adrian Hall.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Directed by Jack Willis.

Aunt Dan and Lemon by Wallace Shawn. Directed by Ken Bryant. e Boys Next Door by Tom Griffin. Directed by Neal Baron. e Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Directed by Jonas Jurasas. e Birthday Party by Harold Pinter. Directed by Tony Giordano.

Red Noses by Peter Barnes. Directed by Adrian Hall.

In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Henry Abbott. Directed by Ken Bryant.

1989–1990 Season • Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. Directed by Ken Bryant.

• Once in a Lifetime by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. Directed by Larry Sloan.

• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Directed by Adrian Hall.

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• • • • • •

Prologue to All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren. Directed by Adrian Hall.

Temptation by Vaclav Havel. Directed by Ljubisa Georgievski.

Buried Child by Sam Shepard. Directed by Ken Bryant.

Zero Positive by Harry Kondoleon. Directed by Chris Coleman. e Secret Rapture by David Hare. Directed by Ken Bryant.

A Flea in Her Ear by Georges Feydeau. Directed by Itamar Kubovy.

1990–1991 Season • • • • • • •

e Inspector-General by Nickolai Gogol. Directed by Ken Bryant and Matthew Posey.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Directed by Allen McCalla.

All My Sons by Arthur Miller. Directed by Lou “Luigi” Salerni.

As You Like It by William Shakespeare. Directed by David McClendon.

My Children! My Africa! by Athol Fugard. Directed by Clinton T. Davis.

Abundance by Beth Henley. Directed by John H. Davis.

Other People’s Money by Jerry Sterner. Directed by Charles Towers.

1991–1992 Season • • • • • • •

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. Directed by David Petrarca. e Substance of Fire by Jon Robin Baitz. Directed by Richard Hamburger. Regional Premiere.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by Adrian Hall and Richard Cumming. Directed by Randy Moore. e Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. Directed by Malcolm Morrison.

I Hate Hamlet by Paul Rudnick. Directed by Lou “Luigi” Salerni.

Miss Evers’ Boys by David Feldshuh. Directed by Claude Purdy.

Taking Steps by Alan Ayckbourn. Directed by Lou “Luigi” Salerni.

1992–1993 Season • A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by Laird Williamson and Dennis Powers. Directed by Lonny Price.

• Another Time by Ronald Harwood. Directed by Vivian Matalon.

• e Misanthrope by Molière, adapted by Neil Bartlett. Directed by Jackson Phippen.

• Spunk by Zora Neale Hurston, adapted by George C. Wolfe. Directed by Reggie Montgomery.

• Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill by Laine Robertson. Directed by Victoria Bussert.

• A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

THE BIG D FESTIVAL OF THE UNEXPECTED • Alki by Eric Overmyer. Directed by Melissa Cooper.

• e America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks. Directed by Liz Diamond.

• Dostoevsky Goes to the Beach by Marco Antonio de la Parra, translated and directed by Melia Bensussen.

• Porcelain by Chay Yew. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

• Otrabanda Company’s Simpatico written and directed by Roger Babb.

1993–1994 Season • • • •

120

Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare. Directed by Stephen Wadsworth.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by omas Cabaniss and Evan Yionoulis. Directed by Evan Yionoulis.

Dark Rapture by Eric Overmyer. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

Das Barbecü. Book and lyrics by Jim Luigs, music by Scott Warrender. Directed by Lisa Peterson.

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• Real Women Have Curves by Josefina Lopez. Directed by Evan Yionoulis.

• e Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

• Loot by Joe Orton. Directed by Jonathan Moscone.

THE BIG D FESTIVAL OF THE UNEXPECTED • Mump & Smoot in Something. Directed by Karen Hines.

• e Beledi Ensemble in Concert.

• Enter the Night. Written and directed by Maria Irene Fornes.

• Lost in Utopia by Katherine Griffith. Directed by Michael Andrew Walton.

• Dark Pocket by Jim Neu. Directed by Rocky Bornstein.

• Random Acts of Kindness by Brenda Wong Aoki. Directed by Jael Weisman.

• e Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, adapted by Erik Ehn. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

1994–1995 Season • Room Service by Allen Boretz and John Murray. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

• Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel. Directed by Jonathan Moscone.

• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Directed by Victoria Bussert.

• Avenue X. Book and lyrics by John Jiler, music and lyrics by Ray Leslee.

• A Family Affair by Alexander Ostrovsky, adapted by Nick Dear. Directed by Stan Wojewodski Jr. • Santos & Santos by Octavio Solis. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

THE BIG D FESTIVAL OF THE UNEXPECTED • Dirty Work by Larry Brown and Richard Corley. Directed by Richard Corley.

• Skin by Naomi Iizuka. Directed by Matthew Wilde.

• Pochsy’s Lips. Written and performed by Karen Hines. Directed by Sandra Balcovske.

• C. J. Critt: Smoking Lips. Written and performed by C. J. Critt.

• It’s Liz: Jazz, Blues and Gospel. Directed by Akin Babatunde.

• Words and Music: New Seed. Devised and performed by Ramona Austin.

• Mump and Smoot in Ferno and Caged. Directed by Karen Hines.

1995–1996 Season • • • •

e Invisible Circus, created and performed by Victoria Chaplin and Jean Baptiste ierrée.

Ohio Tip-Off by James Yoshimura. Directed by Kenny Leon.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by Gerald Freedman. Directed by Jonathan Moscone. e Sternheim Project: e Unmentionables and e Snob by Carl Sternheim, translated by Paul Lampert and Kate Sullivan, adapted by Melissa Cooper, Paul Lampert, and Kate Sullivan. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

• Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Jonathan Moscone.

• Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

THE BIG D FESTIVAL OF THE UNEXPECTED • Little Mahagonny. Music by Kurt Weill, text by Bertolt Brecht. Directed by Jean Randich.

• Entrevista 187 by Gil Kofman. Directed by Jonathan Moscone.

• e Bible Belt and Other Accessories, written and performed by Paul Bonin-Rodriguez. Directed by Steve Bailey.

• Nostalgia Maldita: 1-900-MEXICO, written and performed by Yareli Arizmendi, Directed by Luis Torner.

• I Used to Be One Hot Number, written and performed by Rhonda Blair.

• Like I Say by Len Jenkin. Directed by Len Jenkin.

• e Flaming Idiots.

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1996–1997 Season • ree Tall Women by Edward Albee. Directed by Lawrence Sacharow.

• Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika by Tony Kushner. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by Gerald Freedman. Directed by Jonathan Moscone.

• Indiscretions (Les Parents Terribles) by Jean Cocteau. Directed by Jonathan Moscone.

• under Knocking on the Door by Keith Glover. Directed by Marion McClinton.

• All’s Well at Ends Well by William Shakespeare. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

THE BIG D FESTIVAL OF THE UNEXPECTED • Culture Clash • Sueños Sueños Son by Octavio Solis. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

• Broken Morning by Chiori Miyagawa. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

• e Waters of March: An Eclectic Evening of Song.

• e Beledi Ensemble • Texas Tenors: Two Generations of Jazz Saxophone.

• Grassroots Willie • A Capitol Idea: A Tribute to the Artists of Capitol Records.

• A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. Edited by Constance McCord. Directed by Constance McCord.

• Ranting, Raving & Just Plain Talking: An Informal Evening of Voices & Drums.

1997–1998 Season • • • • • •

Intimate Exchanges by Alan Ayckbourn. Directed by Jonathan Moscone. e Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by Gerald Freedman. Directed by Raphael Parry.

An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde. Directed by Jonathan Moscone.

Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

Having Our Say: e Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years by Emily Mann, adapted from the book by Sarah L. Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany with Amy Hill Hearth. Directed by Shirley Basfield Dunlap.

1998–1999 Season • • • • •

Tartuffe by Molière, translated by Christopher Hampton. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel. Directed by Jonathan Moscone.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by Gerald Freedman. Directed by Preston Lane.

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. Directed by L. Kenneth Richardson.

Alice: Tales of a Curious Girl by Karen Hartman, adapted from the books of Lewis Carroll. Directed by Jonathan Moscone.

World Premiere.

• South Pacific. Music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, book by Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan.

Directed by Richard Hamburger.

1999–2000 Season • • • • • • 122

Dinah Was: e Dinah Washington Musical by Oliver Goldstick. Directed by David Petrarca. e Seagull by Anton Chekhov. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by Preston Lane and Jonathan Moscone. Directed by Jonathan Moscone. e Mystery of Irma Vep by Charles Ludlam. Directed by Jonathan Moscone.

Inexpressible Island by David Young. Directed by Preston Lane.

Guys and Dolls. Music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

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THE BIG D FESTIVAL OF THE UNEXPECTED • Dreamlandia by Octavio Solis. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

• Quake by Melanie Marnich. Directed by Katherine Owens.

• Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett. Directed by Matthew Wilder.

• e Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler. Directed by Pam Myers Morgan.

• e Chinese Art of Placement by Stanley Rutherford. Directed by Tina Parker.

• Rockaby by Samuel Beckett. Directed by Rene Moreno.

• Suicide at 8. Written and performed by C. J. Critt. Directed by Lisa Lawrence Holland.

• BL Lacerta Presents Live Film Scores • Buddy Mohmed & American Bedouin • Paul Slavens & e Texclectic Unsemble • Plato’s Kave • Nick Brisco • little d: e Write Stuff • little d: BL Lacerta Kid Film Scores • little d: Legends Alive!

2000–2001 Season • • • • • •

Crumbs from the Table of Joy by Lynn Nottage. Directed by Reggie Montgomery.

An Experiment with an Air Pump by Shelagh Stephenson. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by Preston Lane and Jonathan Moscone. Directed by John Moscone. e Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Preston Lane.

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

Wit by Margaret Edson. Directed by K. Elizabeth Stevens.

2001–2002 Season • • • • • •

Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, translated by Christopher Hampton. Directed by Ron Daniels. e Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by Preston Lane and Jonathan Moscone. Directed by Jonathan Moscone.

Blur by Melanie Marnich. Directed by Claudia Zelevansky.

Blues in the Night, a musical conceived by Sheldon Epps. Directed by Kenny Leon.

Our Town by ornton Wilder. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

2002–2003 Season • • • • • • •

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

Be Aggressive by Annie Weisman. Directed by Claudia Zelevansky.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by Preston Lane and Jonathan Moscone. Directed by Jenny Lord. e Real ing by Tom Stoppard. Directed by Stan Wojewodski Jr. Big Love by Charles L. Mee. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

Fully Committed by Becky Mode. Directed by Daniel Goldstein.

Cotton Patch Gospel. Book by Tom Key and Russell Treyz, music and lyrics by Harry Chapin. Based on the book e Cotton Patch Version of Matthew and John by Clarence Jordan. Directed by Joel Ferrell.

2003–2004 Season • Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

• e Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Claudia Zelevansky.

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• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by Preston Lane and Jonathan Moscone. Directed by Jonathan Moscone.

• Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

• Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks. Directed by Amy Morton, associate directed by Ann C. James.

• Ain’t Misbehavin’. Conceived and originally directed by Richard Maltby Jr. Directed by Greg Ganakas.

FRESH INK: New Plays at the Dallas eater Center • Dark Matters by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. Directed by Greg Leaming.

• Water Stories from the Mojave Desert by Brighde Mullins. Directed by Claudia Zelevansky.

• Sonny’s Last Shot by Lawrence Wright. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

• Late: A Cowboy Song by Sarah Ruhl. Directed by Rene Moreno.

• Shot While Dancing by Hilary Bell. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

TOURING PRODUCTION • e Antigone Project by Melissa Cooper, based on Sophocles’ Antigone. Directed by Pam Myers-Morgan.

2004–2005 Season • Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

• e Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. Directed by Stan Wojewodski Jr. • A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by Preston Lane and Jonathan Moscone. Directed by Jonathan Moscone.

• Bad Dates by eresa Rebeck, starring Julie White. Directed by John Benjamin Hickey.

• e Violet Hour by Richard Greenberg. Directed by David Kennedy.

• My Fair Lady by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

FRESH INK: New Plays at the Dallas eater Center • Pro Bono Publico by Peter Morris. Directed by David Kennedy.

• Cradle of Man by Melanie Marnich. Directed by Melissa Cooper.

• . . . and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi by Marcus Gardley. Directed by David Kennedy.

TOURING PRODUCTION • e Antigone Project by Melissa Cooper, based on Sophocles’ Antigone. Directed by Pam Myers-Morgan.

2005–2006 Season • Crowns by Regina Taylor, adapted from the book by Michael Cunningham and Craig Marberry. Directed by Regina Taylor.

• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted for the stage by Richard Hellesen with original music by David de Berry.

Directed by Joel Ferrell.

• Joe Egg by Peter Nichols. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

• I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright. Directed by David Kennedy.

• Hank Williams: Lost Highway by Randal Myler and Mark Harelik. Directed by Randal Myler.

• e Illusion by Pierre Corneille, freely adapted by Tony Kushner. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

FRESH INK: New Plays at the Dallas eater Center • Girl Blog from Iraq: Baghdad Burning, adapted from the weblog by Riverbend by Kimberly I. Kefgen and Loren Ingrid Noveck.

Directed by David Kennedy.

• Psychos Never Dream by Denis Johnson. Directed by David Kennedy.

FRESH INK/FORWARD MOTION • Macbeth by William Shakespeare, directed by Melissa Cooper.

• om Pain (based on nothing) by Will Eno. Directed by David Kennedy.

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2006–2007 Season • 2 Pianos 4 Hands written by Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt.

• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted for the stage by Richard Hellesen with original music by David de Berry.

Directed by Joel Ferrell.

• Moonlight and Magnolias by Ron Hutchinson. Directed by David Kennedy.

• Fences by August Wilson. Directed by Jonathan Wilson.

• e Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

FRESH INK/FORWARD MOTION • Des Moines by Denis Johnson. Directed by David Kennedy.

2007–2008 Season • Pride and Prejudice by Catherine Sheehy, adapted from Jane Austen’s novel. Directed by Stan Wojewodski Jr. • Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet. Directed by David Kennedy.

• e Sound of Music presented by e Salzburg Marionette eatre. By Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Directed by Richard Hamburger.

• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted for the stage by Richard Hellesen with original music by David de Berry.

Directed by Joel Ferrell.

• Ella. Book by Jeffery Hatcher. Conceived by Rob Ruggiero and Dyke Garrison. Music by Danny Holgate. Directed by Rob Ruggiero.

• e Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead by Robert Hewett. Directed by Mark Lamos.

• e Misanthrope by Molière. Directed by David Kennedy.

FRESH INK/FORWARD MOTION • 365 Days/365 Plays by Suzan-Lori Parks. Directed by Kara-Lynn Vaeni.

• Hot Georgia Sunday by Catherine Trieschmann. Directed by David Denson.

2008–2009 Season • e Who’s Tommy. Music and Lyrics by Pete Townshend. Book by Pete Townshend and Des McAnuff. Additional music and lyrics

by John Entwistle and Keith Moon. Directed by Kevin Moriarty.

• e Good Negro by Tracey Scott Wilson. Directed by Liesl Tommy. World Premiere.

• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted for the stage by Richard Hellesen with original music by David de Berry.

Directed by Joel Ferrell.

• In the Beginning by Kevin Moriarty and the DTC acting company. Directed by Kevin Moriarty.

• Back Back Back by Itamar Moses. Directed by Hal Brooks.

• Sarah, Plain and Tall by Julia Jordan, music by Laurence O’Keefe, lyrics by Nell Benjamin. Based on the novel by Patricia MacLachlan.

Directed by Joe Calarco. World Premiere.

While the contents of this book are correct to the best of our knowledge, please note that research is a continual process. We encourage anyone who has relevant artifacts to contribute to our archive that might aid in said research to contact the Dallas eater Center.

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Photo Credits Jack Beers/e Dallas Morning News: 77 Linda Blase: Front cover, 6, 7, 12, 13, 14, 16, 25, 32, 39, 48, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 68, 71, 72, 74, 96, back cover Kristina Bowman: 5, 87 Jeffrey Buehner: Front cover, 86 Dana Driensky: 76 Windy Drum: 7, 10, back cover Elle Studio: Front cover Tom Fox/e Dallas Morning News: 86, 102–103 Clint Grant/e Dallas Morning News: 17 Andy Hanson: 16, 19, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55 Bob Johnson: 24 Susan Kandell: 56 Loli Kantor: Front cover Joe Laird: 17, 42 Luxigon: 86 Mario Morgado: 2–3, 4, 8, 14, 15, 18, 20–21, 22–23, 25, 33, 37, 43, 45, 46–47, 49, 57, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 98, 99, 100–101, back cover Tadd Myers: 13 Courtney Perry: 70 Darnell Renee: 93, 95 REX: 84, 85 J. Christian Smith: 40 Brandon ibodeaux: 82, 83, 91, 96 All other photographs are the property of the Dallas eater Center.

Productions Pictured on the Cover Front: Lorca Simons and Rick Stear in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Richard Hamburger. 2006–2007 season.

Back, top left: Of Time and the River, directed by Paul Baker. 1959–1960 season.

Back, second on left: John Morrison and Allen McCalla in e Tempest, directed by Adrian Hall. 1987–1988 season.

Back, third on left: Jenny Pichanek and Bill Bolender in rough the Leaves, directed by Ken Bryant. 1987–1988 season.

Back right: Chamblee Ferguson in e Illusion, directed by Richard Hamburger. 2005–2006 season. e Dallas eater Center 50th anniversary logo courtesy of Jim Huppenthal/Brierley+Partners

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Dallas Theater Center 2008–2009 Staff Mark Hadley Managing Director

Kevin Moriarty Artistic Director

ADMINISTRATION General Manager ............................................................................................................................................ Hillary J Hart Associate General Manager .......................................................................................................... Christopher LaBove Management Assistant .............................................................................................................. Bonnie McCrea ARTISTIC, EDUCATION and COMMUNITY PROGRAMS Director of Education and Community Programs .................................................................. Lisa Lawrence Holland Associate Artist ........................................................................................................................................ Lee Trull Project Discovery Manager ................................................................................................................ Rachel Hull Manager of Community Enrichment ............................................................................................ Jessamyn Berger DEVELOPMENT Director of Development .............................................................................................................. Cynthia Calabrese Manager of Corporate Giving .......................................................................................................... Mandy Aguilar Manager of Institutional Giving ........................................................................................................ Jocelyn Wiebe Development Associate .............................................................................................................. Lauren Zugaro Development Coordinator .................................................................................................................... Rashida Moore FACILITIES Facilities Associate ...................................................................................................................... Emanuel Jackson Facilities Assistant ................................................................................................................ Shannon Williams FINANCE and ACCOUNTING Director of Finance ...................................................................................................................... Bethany Cassity Accounts Manager .................................................................................................................... Lindsay Walling

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MARKETING and COMMUNICATIONS Director of Marketing and Communications ................................................................................ Melinda B. Nelson Associate Director of Marketing and Communications ...................................................................... Brad Pritchett Public Relations Manager...................................................................................................................... Jacob Cigainero Marketing and Education Coordinator .......................................................................................................... Rebecca Reid Box Office Manager................................................................................................................................Tommy Looney Assistant Box Office Managers .................................................................................. R. Scott Cantrell, LaTracie Craig Box Office Supervisors .......................................................................................................... Eric Ryan, Roberta Sigel Box Office Staff .......................................................................................... Adam King, Lacey Valle, Nicole Woodell House Manager............................................................................................................................................ Joe Ortega PRODUCTION Production Manager...................................................................................................................................... Jeff Gifford Technical Director .......................................................................................................................... Fred Schoening Assistant Technical Director .......................................................................................................... Squeak Henderson Master Carpenter .......................................................................................................................... Marielle Boneau Scenic Carpenters.......................................................................................................... Conn Larson, Beck Schlabach Stage Operations Manager ............................................................................................................................Travis Ross Stage Operations Apprentice .................................................................................................... Sean-Michael Galgano Production Stage Manager...................................................................................................................... Melissa Daroff Assistant Stage Manager .......................................................................................................... Chris “Waffles” Wathen Costume Shop Manager .......................................................................................................................... Jennifer Ables Assistant Costume Shop Manager .......................................................................................................... Chris Spencer Draper .......................................................................................................................................... Amanda Hendrickson Wardrobe Supervisor .............................................................................................................................. Mattie O’Neal Wardrobe Apprentice ................................................................................................................................ Jackie Barrett Properties Master .......................................................................................................................................... Rich Gilles Properties Assistant/Buyer ................................................................................................................ Brooks Aubrey Properties Carpenter ......................................................................................................................Tim Weathersby Properties Apprentice ................................................................................................................................ Maggie Boos Paint Charge ................................................................................................................................................ James Frazer Master Electrician ........................................................................................................................................ Alicia Prado Assistant Master Electrician ................................................................................................................ Aaron Johansen Electrics Apprentice ...................................................................................................................................... Penny Dew Sound Supervisor ............................................................................................................................................ BC Keller Assistant Sound Supervisor ...................................................................................................................... Ryan Agrella

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Index Italics indicate photographs.

Abbott-Pratt, Joniece, 82, 91 Ables, Jennifer, 100 Actors Equity, 36–37, 38 Agnew, Spiro, 30 Alki, 69 All the King’s Men, 6–7, 51, 52, 53, 57 Alley Theatre (Houston), 17 Allison, Jan, 58 America Play, The, 68, 69 Angels in America, 69, 73 Anna in the Tropics, 71 Annette Strauss Artist Square, 87 Apple Tree, The, 35 Arts District Theater, front cover, 50, 51, 52–57, 71, 72, 85 converted into sandbox for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 31 last performance in, 68 reconfigured for each act of A Doll’s House, 66 As I Lay Dying, 30–31 Aunt Dan and Lemon, 61 Babb, Roger, 69 Back Back Back, 83 Bacon, Mary, 69, 74 Baer, Sylvan T., 16 Baker, Kitty, 17 Baker, Paul, 11, 16, 20 during building of Kalita Humphreys Theater, 21–22 co-writing and directing Jack Ruby, All-American Boy, 31 dedicated to education, 34–35 desiring staging flexibility, 85–87 developing Booker T. Washington Arts Magnet High School, 93 developing Janus Players, 68 developing new scripts, 33 DTC replacing, 38–42 fondness for literary adaptations, 67 hired as first artistic director, 19, 24, 75 interested in adapting literary works, 30 interested in European theatrical innovations, 32 naming Jones as associate artistic director, 44

not wanting Equity actors, 36–37 opposed to star system, 27 on presenting Hamlet, 34 photographs of, 12, 16, 17, 19, 22, 24, 26, 40, 44 programming of, 32–33 riskiness of hiring, 75 signing agreement with Actors Equity, 38 using ensemble company, 70 work at Baylor University, 24, 26–27 work philosophy of, 28–30 Battiste, Francois, 82, 91 Baylor University, 24, 26 Beard, Charles, 24 Bentley, Eric, 38 Big D Festival of the Unexpected, 65, 68, 69, 72 Big Love, 72 Birkhead, Mary Sue. See Jones, Mary Sue Birkhead, Trey, 43 Black, Robert, 49 Blase, Linda, 33, 35, 37, 38 on reemergence of resident company, 91 on shared language among Theater Center employees, 29 Bolender, Bill, back cover, 49, 62 Booker T. Washington Arts Magnet High School, 34, 35, 93 Boone, Sherry, 68 Boos, Maggie, 47 Brierley Esplanade. See Diane and Hal Brierley Esplanade Brown, Gilmore, 17, 76 Bryant, Ken, 11, 13, 56–63 death of, 60–61 as Hall’s protégé, 59 Bryant Rehearsal Hall, 91 Buckley, Candy, 25 Buckwitz, Harry, 32 Bug in Her Ear, A, cast of, 28 Buried Child, 62 Cabe, Jakie, 74 Calloway, J. Bernard, 82, 91 Cardenas, Juan Javier, 83 carpenters, 46 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, front cover Caucasian Chalk Circle, The, 32, 38

Chayefsky, Paddy, 19 Christmas Carol, A, 25, 53, 59, 101 City Performance Hall, 87 Clark, Joan, 29 Cleveland Playhouse, 15 Coburn, D. L., 37 Collected Works of Billy the Kid, The, 47 Cooper, Melissa, 69 costume department, 45, 100–101 Cruz, Nilo, 71 Custard, Allen, 5 Custard, Bill, 5, 11, 24, 44, 97 Custard, Laura, 5 Custard, Linda P., 5, 11, 52, 97 on Baker, 24 on Bryant and Gehringer, 59 on Bryant’s death, 60 on continuity, 75 Custard, Marla, 5 Dallas Arts District, 79, 81, 87 desiring to be a world leader in theater, 76 as movie-production hub, 48 theater scene in, 15–19, 38 Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, 52, 79 Dallas Little Theatre, 17 Dallas Theater Center (DTC) acting company (2009), 91 board chairs and presidents, 104 Board of Trustees (2008–2009), 105 board’s involvement with, 97 changing academic affiliation to Trinity University, 26 as community theater, 36–37 constant activity of, 25 deciding to replace Baker, 38–42 departure of acting company members after Bryant’s death, 63 developing relationship with Southern Methodist University, 91, 93 dividing leadership responsibilities, 38 education as core value of, 8, 91–95 founding of, 15–19 gala opening, 18 Guild, the, 98

STAGED RIGHT 129

Guild presidents, 106 hiring guest directors, 58 hiring permanent acting company, 55–57 history of community outreach, 88–90 loss of resident acting company, 70 moving to Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, 79, 81 original core of, from Baylor University, 26 perceived as not being part of community, 80 producing risqué plays, 31–32 production history, 107–125 reemergence of resident company under Moriarty, 91 split focus on performance and education, 19 staff (2008–2009), 127–128 staying power of, 73–75 willingness to take risks, 75 Women’s Committee, 98 Dark Rapture, 73 Daroff, Melissa, 41 DaVerse Lounge, 93 Davis, Judith, 38 Day of Absence, 68 Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre, front cover, 5, 84–87, 102–103 Diane and Hal Brierley Esplanade, 84 Dickens Gala, 98 Dollar, Paul, 16 Doll’s House, A, 66, 70, 72 Donnelly, Peter, 52, 58 Dowling, Kaki, 38 Down Center Stage, 33 Dreamlandia, 65 Durang, Christopher, 62 Eason, Robert, 34 Elaine D. and Charles A. Sammons Park, 84 El-Amin, Hassan, 91 Enemy of the People, An, 59, 60 Eng, Steven, 72 Enloe, Bess, 37, 52 on Bryant, 60 on Hamburger’s work with designers, 70 on replacing Baker, 42 on risk in theatre, 65 on the Wyly Theatre, 87 ensemble system, 27 Equus, 58, 69 Ferguson, Chamblee, back cover, 74, 91 Fields, James, 49 Figlmiller, John, 29, 36 Flatt, Robyn, 16, 36, 39 on appearing in Three Sisters, 27

130

STAGED RIGHT

on appearing in You Can Never Tell, 27 on Baker’s work philosophy, 29 on regional theatre, 96 on replacing Baker, 38–40 Fogelson, Buddy, 34 Fool for Love, 50–52 Frayn, Michael, 59 Fridge, Roy, 43 Gabarino, Bill, 26 Galileo, 50, 54, 55, 57, 67 Garson, Greer, 34 Gehringer, Linda, 56–57, 58–59, 61, 63 on Bryant’s death, 61, 67 on The Marriage of Bette and Boo, 25 on playing Blanche in Streetcar, 67–68 Gerard, Jeremy, 17, 22–23, 37, 38, 45 on Hall and Lee’s tenure at DTC, 58 on hiring of Hall, 48, 50 on keeping theaters alive, 75 on productions at the Arts District Theater, 53 Gibney, Susan, 66 Gilles, Rich, 46–47 Gilstrap, Barbara, 27 Gin Game, The, 37 Godinez, Dolores, 62 Good Negro, The, 81, 82, 88, 91 Gray, Matthew, 74, 91 Gray, Pamela, 73 Greenfield, Joshua, 8 Guild, the, 98 Guild Players, 98 Hadley, Mark, 11, 48, 75, 80 Hailey, Oliver, 49 Hall, Adrian, 11, 12, 16 on Baker, 50 committed to local companies and actors, 48 on Dallas’s desire to be a theater city, 76 design concepts of, used for Wyly Theatre, 85 European tastes of, 67 on first exposure to Kalita Humphreys Theater, 22–23 first season of, 50–52 having Bryant direct A Christmas Carol, 59 hiring of, 45, 48–50, 97 hiring permanent acting company, 55–56 nonrenewal of contract, 58 on The Marriage of Bette and Boo, 62 opening up new level of DTC growth, 97 rearranging All the King’s Men, 57 redesigning Kalita Humphreys Theater, 52 relationship with actors, 57, 72 on response to the Arts District Theater, 55

tension with Donnelly, 58 on the theater experience, 55 on theatre life in the 1940s and 1950s, 17 using ensemble company, 70 Hamburger, Richard, 11, 13, 64–75 on choosing Streetcar for first play, 67 directorial style of, 69 diversifying DTC programming, 68–69 enjoying working with designers, 69–70 focus on diversity, 88 hiring New York actors, 70–72 relationship with actors, 72 resigning from DTC, 72–73 Hamlet, 19, 34 Hamlet ESP, 34 Handel, Bea, 15, 17, 19 Hansberry, Lorraine, 68 Hare, David, 63 Harrell, James Nelson, 44 Hart, Hillary J, 77, 80, 96 Hawley, Eva, 98 Heldt, Jane, 16 Heldt, Jim, 16 Heldt Building, 76 Henderson, Squeak, 4 Hendrickson, Amanda, 45, 101 Hennigan, Dee, 63, 64 Hennigan, Sean, 63, 91 Henson, John, 33, 39 Hermann, Edward, 26, 27, 38 Hetzke, Steven, 16 Hicks, Barbara, 45, 100 Hindy, Joseph, 56 Hines, Patrick, 54 Holland, Lisa Lawrence, 72, 94–95 Humphreys, Kalita, 41 Hunt, Caroline Rose, 52 Hurston, Zora Neale, 68 Illusion, The, back cover In the Beginning, 83 In the Belly of the Beast, 63 Inexpressible Island, 47 Inherit the Wind, 17 Inspector-General, The, 60 Ives, Burl, 17, 27, 42 Jack Ruby, All-American Boy, 16, 30, 31, 32 Jackson, Chequita, 31 Janus Players, 68, 88 John William Potter Production Studio, 46 Jones, Billy Eugene, 82, 91 Jones, Margo, 16, 17, 76 Jones, Mary Sue, 11, 12, 29, 42–45

Jones, Preston, 33, 38, 39, 44 Joshua Beene and God, 17, 27, 42 Journey to Jefferson, 30, 36 Julius Caesar, 33, 99 Kalita Humphreys Theater, front cover, back cover, 84 as Dallas landmark, 20 building of, 20–23 donated to city of Dallas, 22 Down Center Stage, 33 inaccessibility of, 79–80 intimacy of, 87 Lay Studio, 22 photographs of, 15, 18, 20–25, 33, 37, 43, 77 Wyly Wing, 22 Kalstrup, Stephen, 64, 67 Kildare, Martin, 68 King, Jennifer, 94 Kith and Kin, 49 Koolhaas, Rem, 72, 84 Kushner, Tony, 69 Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, 68 Lane, Preston, 47 Langham, Michael, 49 Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia, The, 32, 33, 34–35, 39 Latent Heterosexual, The, 26, 27, 39 Latimer, Ken, 16, 36 Laughton, Charles, 17, 19, 24, 26 Lay Studio, 22 Le Loka, Tsidii, 1 Lee, Eugene, 22, 52 design concepts of, used for Wyly Theatre, 85 designing Arts District Theater, 97 Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 56 Levin, Norma, 31 Logan, John, 16 Long Day’s Journey into Night, 26, 43 Longacre, Luke, 95 Lysistrata, 30, 32 Lysistrata Glendi, 30 MacNicol, Peter, 6, 51 makeup, 42 Marat/Sade, 32 Marcus, Stanley, 30–31 Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House, 87 Marriage of Bette and Boo, The, 25, 62 Marvin, Jim, 58 Mathis, Judy, 20, 21, 22 May, Beverly, 62 McCalla, Allen, back cover McClain, Leroy, 82

Medea, 43 Mee, Charles L., 72 Meredith, Burgess, 17, 19, 24, 27 Merkey, Ryland, 29 Metropulos, Penny, 27 Mew, Michelle, 98 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 31 Mikel, Liz, 31, 53, 91, 92, 95, 96 Milano, Al, 38 Misanthrope, The, 46 Montgomery, Reginald, 34 Moore, Norma, 70 Moore, Randy, 24, 33, 36, 39, 54, 60 on Baker as educator, 34 on Baker’s work philosophy, 28–29 on Burl Ives in Joshua Beene and God, 42 on DTC hiring permanent acting company, 56 on a DTC production of Julius Caesar, 99 on DTC’s willingness to take risks, 75 on Hall’s first season, 50–52 on Hall’s rearranging All the King’s Men, 57 on Hall as theater evangelist, 57 on Hamburger working with designers, 69 relocating to Denver Center Theatre Company, 70 on replacing Baker, 40 on response to Jones’s Knights, 39 on tension between Hall and Donnelly, 58 Morfogen, George, 64 Moriarty, Kevin, 11, 13, 80–81 on DTC reaching out to the community, 88–90, 96 involvement with Booker T. Washington Arts Magnet High School, 93 hiring of, 75 on theater as an event, 96 timing of The Good Negro production, 88 on Wyly Theatre design, 85 Morrison, John, back cover Moscone, Jonathan, 70 Mostel, Zero, 26, 27, 39 Muzanidis, Takis, 32 My Fair Lady, 68 Mystery of Irma Vep, The, 46 Neal, Cedric, 88, 91 Nemmers, Joe, 82 New Play Market, 33 Noises Off, 59 Obama, Barack, 82, 88 Office of Metropolitan Architecture, 72 Of Time and the River, back cover, 10, 11, 28–29, 30, 67 Oldest Living Graduate, The, 39

Onassis, Aristotle, 30 On Golden Pond, 29 Oso Closo, 88–89 Othello, 19 Overmyer, Eric, 69 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 68, 69 Pasadena Playhouse, 17 Perez, Lazaro, 73 Peter Pan, 31, 33 Peters, William Wesley, 21 Pichanek, Jenny, back cover Porcelain, 68, 69, 72 Porter, Bob, 36 Porter, Paul, 36 Potter Production Studio. See John William Potter Production Studio Prince-Ramus, Joshua, 84 Project Discovery, 93–95, 98 props, 46–47 Pursley, Mona, 27, 39 Raigorodsky, Paul, 17, 22 Rainey, Ford, 62 Rasmussen, Kjehl, 38 Rayner, Martin, 60 Renensla, Howard, 34 REX/OMA, 84 Rhoads, Kurt, 63 Richard, Chris, 26 Risch, Frank A., 57, 75, 90, 96 Roberts, Jonno, 74 Rogers, Art, 76 Rogers, Synthia, 76 Romeo and Juliet, 62 Rose, Deedie on All the King’s Men, 53 on the Arts District Theater, 85 on attending The Good Negro on election night 2008, 82 on building the Wyly Theatre, 84 on Hamburger’s production of A Doll’s House, 72 on the Kalita Humphreys Theater, 23 on productions at the Arts District Theater, 54 on theater as storytelling, 16 Rosenfield, John, 16, 17, 19 Sammons Park. See Elaine D. and Charles A. Sammons Park Santos & Santos, 68 Schoening, Fred, 49 Secret Rapture, The, 63 Seevers, Robert, 58

STAGED RIGHT 131

Shawn, Wallace, 61 Shepard, Sam, 50, 62 Siegworth, Abbey, 83 Simons, Lorca, front cover Simpatico, 69 Solis, Octavio, 65, 68 on Baker leaving DTC, 40 Baker’s work philosophy, 29–30 on Hamburger’s work with designers, 70 on loss of Preston Jones, 38 Southern Methodist University, 91, 93 South Pacific, 1, 69, 71 SpeakOut, 93 stage management, 41 Staroselsky, Dennis, 83 Stear, Rick, front cover Stecker, Dora, 17, 44 Stecker, Robert, 16, 17, 21 Stewart, Waldo E., 5, 17, 20, 22, 24, 76 Strauss, Annette, 26 Streetcar Named Desire, A, 43, 67, 69, 92 Substance of Fire, The, 64 Swerdfager, Bruce, 38 Taliesin West, 22 Tallman, Randolph (Randy), 27, 34 Taming of the Shrew, The, 73, 74 technical director, work of, 46, 49 Tempest, The, back cover, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54 Texas Trilogy, A, 38 The Who’s Tommy, 2–3, 4, 25, 41, 49, 79, 88, 89, 90, 100

132

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theater as education, 93–95 as living organism, 25, 75 Theatre ’47, 17 Theatre de France, 28 Theus, B. J., 16 Thomas, Campbell, 27 Three Sisters, 27 Through the Leaves, back cover To Be Young, Gifted and Black, 68 Tommy. See The Who’s Tommy Tommy, Liesl, 81, 91 Trinity Repertory Company (Providence, RI), 48–50 Trinity University, 26 Trull, Lee, 91 Twelfth Night, 69 Vahle, Sally Nystuen, 73, 91 Vance, Nina, 17 Vela, Christian, 91 Wallace, Brian, 82 Waltz, Mark, 69 Walters, Steven, 82 wardrobe staff, 100 Warnecke, Sarah, 90, 98 Weeks, Jerome, 48, 52 on actors’ relationship with Hall, 57 on Bryant as Hall’s protégé, 59 on Bryant’s death, 61 on creation of permanent acting company, 56 on departure of acting company members, 63

on DTC’s hiring of guest directors, 58 on Hamburger’s directing style, 70 on Hamburger’s hiring New York actors, 70–72 Weeks, Todd, 73 West, Jeff, 58 Wild Duck, The, 50–52 Williams, Heath L., II, 89 Williamson, Nance, 25 Williams, Tennessee, 17 Williamson, Nance, 63 Willis, Jack, 6, 51, 63 Wilson, Tracey Scott, 82 Wolfe, Betsy, 80 Women’s Committee, 98 Wood, John H., 68 Woodson, John, 74 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 20–23, 87 Wright, Olgivanna, 21 Wyly, Charles, 20, 22, 75, 84, 87 on Baker, 26 on Baker’s dedication to education, 34 on Jack Ruby, All-American Boy, 31 on live theater, 89 Wyly, Dee, 84, 87 Wyly Theatre. See Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre Yew, Chay, 68, 69 You Can Never Tell, 26, 27 Young, Rudy, 6