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Publications

THEATER

UNDERGROUND - AND OVERWHELMING!
By JUDY KELLY |

all it the “fringe,” the “alternative,” the “underground,” whatever, but if the upcoming theater season is anything like the last one, that’s where it’s happening in Dallas theater. In May, when the Dallas Theater Critics Forum named the Outstanding Productions of the 1988-89 season, all four of the shows cited appeared not on the city’s mainstay stages, but in the basements, garages, warehouses, storefronts, and office buildings where these “emerging” theater groups perform.

Even at the Dallas Theater Center, our oldest and most established professional theater, the best work last season was found not on Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated stage, but “In the Basement” just under it. Ken Bryant’s award-winning production of Aunt Dan and Lemon brought us Nazi sympathizers, sexual deviants, and ritual murderers all wrapped up in a young girl’s valediction to childhood. The play, by Wallace Shawn, wasn’t for the fainthearted, but it was for folks who seek the fiercest and finest in theater fare. The Basement Series will open in December with three as-yet-unnamed performances.

But the basement to end all basements is the one under the warehouse at 3200 Main Street where the Undermain Theatre performs. David Rabe’s “underworld” comedy Goose and Tom Torn was so at home here in June that it will be back again this season. The play takes place in the basement hideout of a couple of jewel thieves named Goose and Tom Tom and their gun moll, Lorraine. Under the direction of Katherine Owens, Goose and Tom Tom is a raucous, ribald, fun-house ride through Rabe’s familiar land, the dark territory of the modern myth.

Coming up from the lower depths, you may find a lot of laughs just down the street in a former metal-working shop, the Pegasus Theatre. Here the fifth season opener is Heart of a Dog, a “biting” satire of Russian society by Mikhail Bulgakov.

The city’s faithful camp followers will surely flip out when they learn that Harry Hunsacker will be back on New Year’s Eve. Yes, the bumbling, bun-faced detective created and portrayed by Pegasus artistic director Kurt Kleinmann will return for a fourth Art Deco comedy-mystery entitled Death: Take One. And as was the tradition for the previous three shows, it will be presented in the style of Thirties movies; even the actors’ makeup captures the gleaming silver-skin tones of Hollywood’s most glamorous era.

Drive just a few streets closer to Fair Park, to the corner of Second Avenue and Hickory Street, and pull into the cracked cement and grass parking lot of the new Deep Ellum Theatre Garage. This has the most European feel of all the alternative venues: its lofty overarching steel girders span an airy air-conditioned rectangle that calls to mind the hangars and factories where fringe theater groups perform just outside Paris and London. This season the Deep Ellum Theatre Garage will offer a series of what artistic director Matthew Posey calls “Cut-Ups,” scripts stitched together from multiple sources to form a new fabric entirely. In September, Beauty and the Beast will get the cut-up treatment by Posey.

The Moving Target Theatre Company’s Forum Award-winning musical Six Women with Brain Death or… Expiring Minds Want to Know will travel to Houston, while the folks back home will open the new season with another quasi-feminist play, Three Postcards, by Craig Lucas. This latest Lucas look at relationships adds lightweight Sond-heimesque tunes to the scene of three thoroughly modem yuppettes having lunch and discussing the men in their lives.

A premiere to watch for at Theatre Three is Nothing Sacred, an adaptation of Turgenev’s 19th-century Russian novel Fathers and Sons by George F. Walker, but their most popular premiere package comes in the spring with the Voices Unsilenced minority playwrights festival and the Master Storytellers weekends.

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