Do Dallas playwrights write about Dallas? I didn’t think so. In the past couple of years, Lee Trull has had two plays produced by Classical Acting Company (The Gift of the Magi and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn) and one, Puppet Boy, for Stage West. None of them mentions Dallas. Steven Walters, whose off-the-leash imagination gave Second Thought Theatre the wonderful King Ubu last summer and the considerably less wonderful History of the World in the spring, has yet to mention Dallas. Kurt Kleinmann has been around a while. He has written enough plays about his dim detective, Harry Hunsacker, that Hunsacker (but not Kleinmann) has earned a Wikipedia entry. But Kleinmann doesn’t write about Dallas either.
So where are the Dallas plays? With a little digging, they start to turn up. Angela Wilson’s all came along before I started reviewing Dallas theater (The Ladies Room, Heart, and George and Scheherazade Sad, Sad, Sad). Ditto Vicki Cheatwood’s 10:10 and Manicures & Monuments. John Fullenwider has set a play or two here. Willie Holmes writes Dallas plays for Blacken Blues, and critic-turned-playwright Tom Sime has written one about Dallas, as yet unproduced.
But if I didn’t know about them, who else doesn’t? Outside the theater community itself, their reflections on the city have gone largely unremarked. Then there’s Tracy Letts’ Killer Joe. He sets it in a Dallas trailer park, and it’s full of nasty doings. Need a setting for a certain kind of unhinged meanness, maybe with a Biblical charge? Dallas. I’m not forgetting Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical. I just don’t know what to say.
Anybody wanting to write a Dallas play has to fight off its international image as the city of arrogant ambition, surgically enhanced looks, and big shopping—a place where, if the Muse smiles eternally, it’s only because she can’t help it after her facelift. The TV series (and why is it that we want the movie?) so effectively bound the city to Sue Ellen, J.R., and the Machiavellian dealings at Southfork that my wife’s Sicilian relatives in Agrigento, without another three words of English between them, knew enough to offer “Who shot J.R.?” as the summary of our city.
 Bright Idea How to build a theater set using projectors. Staging the musical Into the Woods presents some tricky problems. Characters travel deep into the forest, a giant’s head gets chopped off and rolls across the stage, birds fly into Cinderella’s fireplace and collect magic beans from the ashes. In the past, the answer to these quandaries has always been the same: build what you can and “pretend” the rest. But WaterTower Theatre is proposing something new. Projected scenery. Here’s how it works. Images are created—either drawn, painted, photographed, copied, or collaged—and then scanned into the computer. They’re then manipulated to be or to do whatever the script requires. The result is projected from two tightly stacked projectors (to give off one brighter image) from high up at a 45-degree angle onto a 24-by-17-foot screen. The actors perform and the props are placed in front of the screen at distances based on their height to avoid disturbing the image. Don’t expect any Roger Rabbit-type of interaction between the projected images and the real people or objects. The point isn’t to present something that looks “real” but instead to tell a story in a unique way. “When you do a revival, you want to add in something special,” says James Lemons, the show’s director. A dark fairy tale told with light? That ought to do it. |
Dallas needs more plays not just set here, but about the city in deep ways, revealing and using its symbolic meanings the way Vicki Cheatwood does in Manicures & Monuments. “One of the characters, a young woman [from Oklahoma], idolizes JFK,” she told me, “and is eagerly anticipating a visit here to the Kennedy memorial. She’s bitterly disappointed.”
Small a town as this is, you know if President Kennedy had been shot here, we’d have built him a monument, but NO, big-shot Dallas, Texas, just slaps “John Fitzgerald Kennedy” on a chunk of rock and calls it a done deal. … Looks like they ran out of money before the statue got built.
That’s not very complimentary, but it obviously couldn’t be set anywhere else in the world. It makes us look at ourselves, for better or for worse.
My colleague at the Dallas Institute, Gail Thomas, used to say that “imagining Dallas” helps bring the city not just into focus, but also more fully into being. It’s like emerging from the dressing room and stepping before the mirror. Here. What about this? Presenting the city to the imagination of its own citizens and letting them judge it makes seeing a play into a matter of deciding what the city is going to be.
If you ask what this city is, imaginatively speaking, you want to understand its distinctive movements of spirit—what people want to be in Dallas, who the truly emblematic characters are, how they shape their actions toward their ends, and what the inevitable conflicts are. What is this place when the best imaginations in the city consider it dramatically? For example, can Dallas be the locale of tragedy—not just low violence or political assassination, but actual tragedy with its high, elevating starkness? It’s possible to imagine a play about Oswald, or something set more in the background—the ambitions of the men building the city in the early ’60s. The last scene (and this actually happened, according to Louise Cowan): someone comes to the podium, interrupts the speaker, and whispers to him. He has to turn and announce the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Should playwrights make Dallas a noir city, as novelist Harry Hunsicker is doing in his mysteries? Is it a city more attuned to satirical comedy? What about the religious presence? Dallas isn’t just Highland Park and Strait Lane wealth, not just South Oak Cliff crime and trailer park meanness, but also the home of major national religious leaders like First Baptist’s W.A. Criswell, who was accused of racism the rest of his life because of a speech he gave to the South Carolina legislature in the early ’50s. What about the phenomenal worldwide ministry of T.D. Jakes? Is the city of divine comedy? Biblical tragedy? What about the presence of Dallas Theological Seminary and dispensationalist theology in the city?
There have to be truer Dallas plots than the broad caricatures in the popular imagination. But what are they now?
For example, can there be a real estate play, something on the order of House of Sand and Fog? Suppose a Realtor has the listing for a house on Strait Lane where a famous businessman got away—everyone believes—with gruesomely killing his wife. Now the murderer wants to sell the house. Nobody but very rich people can afford it, and nobody wants it. Then a former NBA star, a black man in the general manager mold, moves into town looking for a house. And his wife, an art historian just named one of the new curators at the DMA, loves the place.
At first, the Realtor downplays the house. He interprets her attitude as evidence of pressure to keep them out, because they would be the first black couple in the neighborhood. Then, as if to underscore his suspicion, the murderer wants to pull it off the market once he finds out who’s interested. The star’s wife says to let it go, but instead the star hires a lawyer and sues. Somebody posts the rumor on a local blog.
So what happens? What’s the way the story plays out in Dallas? Tragedy or comedy?
Or take an Oak Cliff story. An earnest young Christian couple with three young daughters gets a house on Windomere a few blocks off Colorado. Out walking one day with her girls, the wife runs across her old college roommate, who lives close by on Stewart. They’re delighted to see each other. She asks the roommate over to dinner and tells her to bring a date, but when she arrives, the old roommate brings her lesbian partner. Major awkwardness.
The next day, the wife calls her old roommate to tell her that she really regrets it, but she and her husband don’t want her around their daughters. She wishes her well. Years go by. Then one of her daughters, now in her teens, gets a call from a woman asking for a babysitter. The child turns out to be the son of the wife’s old roommate, who had a brief, bitter marriage and died in a car crash. The woman’s former partner, who holds the wife responsible, is raising the little boy. So what happens next? How is it a Dallas story?
What about a Dallas play festival, some kind of contest, more or less like the Festival of Independent Theatres this month at the Bath House, but with every play set in Dallas, about Dallas? The audience gets to judge the winner.
Say there’s one about a DISD board meeting. There’s a new rule that all the teachers have to be bilingual, and the issue is whether a state Teacher of the Year who teaches English but can’t speak Spanish will be allowed to stay. Led by one grandstanding board member, the board votes to make her take a Spanish test. If she can’t pass it, she’ll be fired.
But then this teacher stands up in the audience and demands that the board member asking for the test take it, too. The flustered board member objects. The teacher issues a public challenge. She says that all the board members should have to take the TAKS test and pass it or be fired. What happens?
Get that smile off your face.
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| Escape From Stalag 18. Photo courtesy of Pocket Sandwich Theater |
Save the Dates
Through August 5
Inside the Loop, the Festival of Independent Theatres is the best chance to see what the theaters in Dallas without a permanent home can do. Look for the offerings by Bootstraps, Second Thought, Theater Fusion, and WingSpan, among others. Bath House Cultural Center, 521 E. Lawther Dr. 214-670-8749. www.bathhousecultural.com.
Through August 19
When just about everybody else in the theater world is at home by the air conditioner, the actors at Pocket Sandwich are outwitting Nazis in Escape From Stalag 18—The Melodrama. And you get to pelt them with popcorn. 5400 E. Mockingbird Ln., Ste. 119. 214-821-1860. www.pocketsandwich.com.
Through August 20
Theatre Three’s The Full Monty is the American musical version of the 1997 British movie, this time about unemployed guys in the Northeast who strip to “win back their world.” It makes the term “rust belt” sound kinda funny (speaking of chastity). Quadrangle, 2800 Routh St., Ste. 168. 214-871-3300. www.theatre3dallas.com.
