The Provocateur

THEATER CENTER HISTORY

Dallas Theater Center's birth did not take place in a theater-poor city. The greatest actors and actresses of the times had toured through Dallas as soon as there were railroads to bring them. There were "opera" houses, then real theaters with orchestra pits and production facilities for vaudeville which, when vaudeville was replaced by motion pictures, were available to resident or touring theater companies. It is probably impossible to list accurately the number of theater groups and organizations of all degrees of professionalism, which have lived—and died—in this city. It is certainly impossible to over-estimate their value to the life of Dallas, Texas.

The Dallas Little Theater, founded in 1920, rode the crest of the vogue for community theater, built its own facility, and before its final curtain in 1943, twice captured the nation's major annual award for the Best Little Theater in the United States. Margo Jones arrived in 1946 to open her innovative theater-in-the-round and it was in full bloom in 1954.

That was the year Beatrice Handel moved to Dallas from Cleveland, determined to organize a civically supported theater oriented to presenting fine drama and teaching people how to do it. Margo Jones chose to concentrate solely on production; no other active Dallas theater group would buy Mrs. Handel's concept.

But John Rosenfield did. He was the powerful amusements editor for The Dallas Morning News and he was just as interested in making art happen in his native city as he was in covering it. He called a meeting of ten people on Mrs. Handel's porch on August 19, 1954. Less than a week later a second meeting took place. The Dallas Theater Center, as it later became known, was conceived.

That its gestation took five years became only a footnote in history. Its importance lies in the fact that after the long and tortuous years of securing the land, negotiating and working with the architect and actually getting the building built, support for the theater was even stronger than it had been in the beginning. Timing was its blessing. The business and personal leadership for this theater was at hand, ready to be called. Robert Stecker demonstrated that leadership shortly after he was elected president of the board. Retired from his executive position with Sanger Brothers (the great department store and another Dallas pillar), he came to devote all his time to the Dallas Theater Center. Variations of this same kind of passion have illuminated every Theater Center board since.

The services of the architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, were not difficult to procure. If Dallas had the money, he said, he would design the theater. He was delighted with the site and for him the project would mean the triumphant realization of a plan he had first conceived in 1915, but for which two cities had not had produced in funding.

The building, which came to be known as the Kalita Humphreys Theater, was a tour de force for Wright and a coup for the city. It was well worth the money and the effort. The stunning building, set in among the trees on a steep slope above Turtle Creek, was full of elegant spaces and filled with intricate Wrightian detail. Wright said proudly that there was not a right angle in it. It brought renown to the city and satisfaction to the populace. It was not a particularly efficient building for theater production.

Finding a new director was, surprisingly, the easiest part. The presumption was that this name, too, would be a celebrated import. But theater experts in the East, who the search committee members consulted, sent them home saying the best bet was in their own backyard.

Beatrice Handel's idea had been to create a civically-supported theater, to present fine performances and to train people to do it. As head of the drama department at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, Paul Baker was building a growing reputation doing almost exactly that.

Paul Baker was brilliant, stubborn and an educator to the core. The principle of an educational/professional theater in which everyone did everything was his article of faith and he never abandoned it. It served the theater well for many years. Baker never favored union affiliation, feeling it would threaten this kind of freedom. But new winds blowing through regional theaters everywhere in the 1980s compelled some accommodation. He signed, without enthusiasm, a League of Regional Theaters contract which allowed guest appearances by Equity actors although it would put limits on backstage activities. Another unwelcome development nationwide was the new collegial status between artistic and managing directors, dividing the business and artistic pursuits of the theater which, in the Baker concept, remained as a single element. Paul Baker left the Dallas Theater Center in the spring of 1982.

Longtime DTC company member Mary Sue Jones served as interim artistic director during the year-long search for Baker’s replacement. An actress and director, Jones was a colleague of Paul Baker’s at Baylor, migrating with him to DTC. She became his associate artistic director in 1980, and co-artistic director in 1981. When a new artistic director was identified in 1983, Mary Sue left DTC. She was the only female artistic director in the theater’s history.

The catholicity of programming, a hallmark of the Baker era, would be continued by his successors. Dallas audiences may well have seen, over the past 50 years, as broad a range of new and old, conventional and innovative theater in uninterrupted seasons by one organization as any city—certainly any of comparable size—in the country.

Baker’s successors have built on what he achieved but moved in a direction that reflected the newcomer from the outside. Adrian Hall, the first, was hardly that—he was a native of Van, Texas, and had worked at the Alley Theatre in Houston and with Margo Jones. But his national reputation rested principally on his work with the Trinity Square Repertory Theatre, which he had founded in Providence, Rhode Island, 21 years before—a position he retained when he came to Dallas.

With his managing director, Peter Donnelly, fresh from the Seattle Repertory Theater, Hall first addressed the most pressing physical needs of the theater: a renovation of the original Wright building to improve the backstage area, the basement floor facilities and the traffic flow; to find or build a second playing house with wide open space to accommodate innovative productions; to develop broader audiences and to keep more actors working with simultaneous or overlapping play runs.

The Arts District Theater, designed by Hall’s associate, the distinguished stage designer Eugene Lee, opened in 1984 and turned out to be an engaging metal barn which adapts to virtually any staging a director may devise. It was the most flexible performance facility in the country at the time. The space was closed in the spring of 2005.

The idea of a permanent company was another major priority and Hall assembled DTC’s company by bringing some people from Trinity Repertory, using some local actors and importing others. He opened with a brilliant production of Brecht’s Galileo in the Kalita Humphreys Theater and, as soon as he could, staged his own adaptation of the Robert Penn Warren novel All The King’s Men, which inaugurated most of the facilities the new Arts District house could provide.

By the time Hall left in 1989, he had established a new philosophy of professionalism and a stable company. He had produced a strong range of highly accomplished seasons. He also promoted a bright, ambitious and able young director to be his artistic associate. Ken Bryant was the unanimous choice of the board to be the Center's fourth artistic director.

Bryant was electric. He had a solid relationship with the acting company. He had a warm way with people and sensed the importance of making himself a presence in the Dallas community. Ken was always interested in learning and was already very good at what he did. A tragic mishap ended his life less than a year after he took the job.

Everyone soldiered ahead, led by managing director Jeff West and interim artistic consultant Gregory Poggi, but the situation required a season of guest directors. The Hall company dispersed and the previous sense of union and continuity began to unravel.

When Richard Hamburger, not much older than Bryant and with a solid set of directing credits from all over the country, was named artistic director in 1992, he faced some of the same problems Hall had met, as well as a few new ones. Hamburger had served for five years as artistic director of the Portland Stage Company in Maine but he knew he would need time to lay out his seasons and assemble a profile of the Theater to match the times. He also knew what he wanted when he came to Dallas–-to work in a big, multicultural city where unselfconscious inclusion of the talents of diverse people would be a given in a theater where both writers and actors could be developed.

Joined by managing director Robert Yesselman, Hamburger soon introduced Dallas audiences to a broad range of new works such as Santos & Santos and Angels in America, and launched the very successful Big D Festival of the Unexpected. This informal and exciting assemblage of new (sometimes very new) works––presented not only on stage but in every corner of the Kalita Humphreys Theater––gave local writers, actors and performers an arena to present their work. One of Hamburger's greatest audience successes at the Theater Center was his innovative production of South Pacific. This conclusion to the 1998-1999 season broke all previous box office records and was enthusiastically received by Dallas citizens and critics alike.

Richard Hamburger renewed the Theater Center's commitment to reinterpreting the classics for modern audiences, and to discovering and developing thought-provoking new plays. Edith H. Love joined the Dallas Theater Center as managing director in 1997. She had long been recognized as one of the best theater managers in the country. Ms. Love and Mr. Hamburger worked together closely to ensure the continued financial and artistic success of the Dallas Theater Center, until her departure in 2002. In 2003, Mark Hadley, former General Manager of DTC, was appointed Managing Director.

During Hamburger's tenure as the Theater Center's fifth artistic leader the company saw some of its most provocative and important productions to date. Throughout this period many distinct and compelling programs were introduced such as The Big D Festival of the Unexpected and the new works series FRESH INK/Forward Motion. Notable in the list of his artistic achievements was the creation of the DTC Internship Program, a nationally recognized forum for training young theater artists. Under Hamburger’s leadership, DTC’s educational outreach flagship program Project Discovery celebrated its 20th consecutive season in 2006-2007. More than 200,000 middle and high school students from across North Texas have attended mainstage productions at Dallas Theater Center through this outstanding program. In 2007 after 15 years, Richard Hamburger left DTC and was named artistic director emeritus.

In September 2007, Kevin Moriarty became DTC’s sixth artistic director, and he will lead Dallas Theater Center into its bright future in the Rem Koolhaus-designed Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre in the new Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, set to open in 2009. Moriarty brought with him an extensive resume of artistic achievement at such prestigious institutions as the Tony Award-winning Trinity Repertory Company in Providence Rhode Island, where he was an Associate Director; Brown University, where he was the founding head of the MFA Directing Program; and the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, New York, where he was the Artistic Director for seven years. His artistic excellence, his commitment to education, his strong vision for the future of Dallas Theater Center, and his enthusiasm for building community connections make Kevin Moriarty the ideal person to lead DTC for many years.

The Dallas Theater Center, with its roots deeply implanted in the community, continues to grow in stature as one of the most exciting regional theaters in the country today. The Theater Center remains fully responsive to the time and place in which we live; to the issues that shape our lives and thoughts; and to the rhythms, images and contradictions of contemporary American life.

For assistance in the production and research of Our Story, Dallas Theater Center would like to thank Patsy Swank, Preston Lane and Richard Franco.