| Tom Sime: Check out a plethora of one-act plays 05/16/2001 By / The Dallas Morning News
The Bath House Cultural Center has announced the lineup for its 2001
Festival of Independent Theatres, which takes place in July. Last year's
festival was a smash hit, and the new series of one-act plays promises
even more far-ranging adventures, including a play by Gertrude Stein and
the latest works from Dallas writers Vicki Caroline Cheatwood and Gretchen
Smith.
The BLT/Beardsley Living Theatre will present Stay Where You Are
by American-born, United Kingdom-based Olwen Wymark, and directed by
Michael Galgan.
Bucket Productions will stage The Proposal, a comedy by Anton
Chekhov, directed by Kelly Scott.
Cara Mia Theatre Company will produce Latinologues by Rick
Najera, directed by Marisela Barrera. It will be staged "cabaret-style
with musical interludes."
Core Performance Manufactory will present selections from Erik Ehn's
The Saint Plays, a cycle of short works loosely based on the lives
of saints.
Echo Theatre will stage Tripping The Light Fantastic by Ms. Smith
(head of SMU's playwriting department) in which two women and two men
form various relationships in four 10-minute plays.
Ground Zero Theater Company presents Breathing Room by Ms.
Cheatwood. The cast includes Cindee Mayfield, Wm. Paul Williams and the
author. Kimberlyn Crowe directs this comedy-drama about "a hippie
hedonist and loving family man."
Our Endeavors Theater Company will stage avant-garde matriarch Gertrude
Stein's What Happened: A Five Act Play, a 1913 script considered
to be the first of her many "word plays."
Theatre Quorum plans the American premiere of Scottish writer Linda
McLean's One Good Beating, about a brother and sister who lock
their abusive father in the family coal shed and plan to give him what
the title suggests.
Wickerplane Productions will produce All Stressed Up With Nowhere to
Go, a musical by Greta Ferrell, Joan Jenkins and Michael Gott about
four grown women who spend an evening in kindergarten.
WingSpan Theatre Company will stage The Great Nebula In Orion by
Lanford Wilson, directed by René Moreno and featuring Mary Anna Austin
and Sheila Landahl as childhood friends who meet by chance as adults and
confront the "emptiness beneath the elegant veneer of their lives."
The festival will run July 5-28. Festival passes cost $40, with single
tickets ranging from $10 to $20. For information, call the Bath House at
214-670-8749.
East Dallas art show
The Lakewood Library, 6121 Worth St., presents the 37th annual
Lakewood/East Dallas Art Exhibit through June 1.
The free exhibit features works by 78 local artists. Prizes were awarded
by guest jurors Charles Dee Mitchell, an art critic who writes for
Art in America and The Dallas Morning News; and artists
Philip Lamb and Silvia King.
For more information, call 214-670-1376.
Undermain to Belgrade
Undermain Theatre has landed a grant from the International Theatre
Institute, a UNESCO agency with branches all over the world. The grant
will enable Undermain to bring a version of its new play to the Dah
Theatre in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in June. The production is Judges 19:
Black Lung Exhaling, a "proletarian operetta" commissioned by the
company with music by Nick Brisco and text by Ruth Margraff.
"We will participate in workshops, begin research for a new piece and send
a log of the trip to our Web site," says artistic director Katherine
Owens. "We plan to fly into Sarajevo, where we have some U.N. contacts and
where we will start our research [on the new play]. From there we go to
Mostar [Bosnia-Herzegovina], Belgrade and Dubrovnik in Croatia, and
possibly on to Skopje, Macedonia if there is no fighting on that road."
The company presented its play Sarajevo in Macedonia in 1995.
Dallas will get to see Judges 19, which meshes stories from the
Bible with the coal-mining culture of West Virginia, when Undermain
begins previews in Dallas May 23.
Meanwhile, Undermain star Bruce DuBose has landed a role in New York, the
company's second home. He'll portray an English painter in The Inner
Circle, a new play by British writer Colin Pink, produced by the
Luminous Group, an off-Broadway company. The play will run June 7-17. For
info, e-mail . For more information on Undermain activities,
call 214-747-5515 or visit the theater's Web site (
www.undermain.com).
Mr. Brisco is also touring Texas as a musician, and will perform
Thursday at 8 p.m. and May 30 at 10 p.m. at Club Dada, 2720 Elm St. Call
214-744-3232.
Pollock grant
Dallas painter Lane Banks has landed a grant from the Pollock-Krasner
Foundation, named for painters Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner.
He'll use the grant to make works in metal. His geometric abstractions
on canvas were recently seen in the solo show "Black, White & Space" at
the McKinney Avenue Contemporary.
Griot goes dark
Griot Productions has "suspended operation indefinitely, due to financial
difficulties."
The small company was founded in 1998 by Linus L. Spiller "in direct
response to the lack of viable theater opportunities for local
African-American actors," he said in a prepared statement. The troupe
had performed regularly at The Black Academy of Arts and Letters.
"Griot was particularly proud of the fact that our audiences, even when
dealing with black issues, were able to see the universal humanity in
our pieces," said Mr. Spiller, who writes and performs under the stage
name linus-lynell. He estimated that his audience base was
"approximately 60 percent African American, 38 percent Anglo and 2
percent other."
Mr. Spiller says he is unsure what the next step for his company will
be, but that he remains "optimistic ... that a better day is around the
corner."
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