1. Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company. (Mar. 1, Dallas City Performance Hall)
One of Israel’s preeminent companies, known for its stunning choreography and dancers, visits Dallas for one night only.
2. Starbright and Vine. (Feb. 27-Mar. 9, Stage West)
Stage West premieres TCU professor Richard Allen’s play about a couple of bitter comedians—one a 70-year-old comic and the other a younger writer—forced to work together to write one epic sketch for a national TV broadcast. Keeping with buddy comedy tradition, the unlikely duo finds redemption along the way.
3. Dirty Filthy Diamonds. (Feb. 26-Mar. 8, Margo Jones Theatre in Fair Park)
Modern femininity can be hard to navigate and harder still to understand, but Danielle Georgiou is giving it her best shot. Her nonverbal dance show, Dirty Filthy Diamonds, explores contemporary womanhood and the dichotomy of thought and instinct through a series of vignettes performed by her performance dance group, DGDG.
4. The Mountaintop. (Through Mar. 2, Jubilee Theatre)
On April 3, 1968—a stormy, rainy night—Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis. It was called “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” and it is chilling. Its impetus was the city’s unfair treatment of its sanitation workers, but King expands the topic to consider the essential question of helping a man in need without concern for anything but what would happen to the man if someone did not stop to help. He also talks about his life and the threats against it, both natural and unnatural. He’s been to the mountaintop, he says, and all he wants is to do God’s will in the dark days ahead. Once the speech was over, Dr. King retired alone to his motel room. That is where Katori Hall’s play, The Mountaintop, begins, an extrapolation of the man’s last night on Earth. Jubilee Theatre gives it its North Texas premiere, with actor Bryan Pitts in the lead role.
5. Oedipus el Rey. (Through Mar. 1)
Aristotle called Sophocles’ drama about a royal child, born in Thebes and fated to kill his father and marry his mother, the perfect tragedy. It inspires pity and fear, and ends in such a way that we are swept clean. The playwright Luis Alfaro takes the ancient story and transplants it from Greece to South Central Los Angeles, where Oedipus is a gang leader rather than a king.
