When Jeffrey Schmidt began planning his first season as artistic director of Theatre Three, he considered opening with Andorra, Max Frisch’s highly charged political play about collective bigotry.
The hot-button issue of casting has recently received a lot of ink as directors, actors, and audiences try to grapple with how to even out a traditionally imbalanced art form.
“What the heck is a Rec Room?” was the question I set out to answer almost a year ago when I interviewed the performance art space co-owners and founders, Matt Hune and Stephanie Wittels Wachs
Houston’s Horse Head Theatre company has a reputation for staging intriguing and occasional avant-garde contemporary plays in nontraditional and even bizarre venues, from the back porch of a bar to a geodesic event dome on the banks of Buffalo Bayou.
“We always felt that this was a clubhouse for a group of friends who felt like we were a little bit off,” he said. “We still feel a little off and we still want to be that clubhouse, that space for people like us who feel a little off. We have to find another way to do that now.”
At first, the schoolchildren who are filing into Dallas City Performance Hall with wide eyes and the occasional giggly outburst might seem excited simply to be out of the classroom and on a field trip.
It’s difficult to imagine a time when all professional theater in the country emanated from New York. It might be even harder to believe this centralization of theatrical production first began to change in Dallas, Texas.
With a quick glance at the synopsis, playwright Rebecca Gilman’s Luna Gale, now at Stages Repertory Theatre through May 28, would seem to possess all the serious markings of an issues play.