Friday, August 29, 2008

Dallas Theater Center director out to prove himself with new season

By Arnold Wayne Jones of Dallas Voice

Arnold Wayne Jones/Dallas Voice

CURTAIN UP: Dallas Theater Center’s gay artistic director, Kevin Moriarty, promises that under his stewardship, plays will reflect the entirety of the community — including diverse races and sexual orientations.

Kevin Moriarty has enjoyed one of the longest overtures ever witnessed in the North Texas arts scene. Since his appointment as the new artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center 15 months ago, he’s charmed his constituents — from benefactors to critics to actors — with his impressive knowledge of theater and enthusiasm for its many manifestations. All without ever directing a show.

He did it by spending a lot of his first year getting to know people. Unlike Richard Hamburger, the DTC’s previous artistic director, Moriarty quickly became a fixture at show openings around town — meeting actors and company managers, designers and fellow directors. But aside from the curtain speeches on opening nights, he had little hands-on involvement with the productions that made up the 2007–08 season.

Which is not to say he wasn’t tremendously busy. His time spent trolling the lobbies and aisles of smaller theaters was calculated to absorb what Dallas had to offer — and to introduce Moriarty to the most ardent of arts supporters. And he liked what he saw.

“The community has been more diverse and expansive than I imagined before I moved here,” he says during a break from a blocking rehearsal. “There’s a range of literature being performed — Sarah Ruhl, Martin McDonagh, Tracy Letts. I originally thought, ‘Those are the playwrights I will bring to Dallas,’ but you were already doing them. Uptown Players doing History Boys and Zanna, Don't! in the same year? Wow! Good for them. There’s a scope to that vision.”

And he knew that such vision must be reflected by the region’s largest professional theater.

Moriarty quickly became a recognizable figure: Shortish and slight, with dark, darting eyes, a sly grin and always clad (even at the dressiest fetes) in his signature sneakers. He sometimes seemed like a live electrical wire flapping against the sidewalk, so infectious was his energy, so delightful was his enthusiasm for the arts. His name is “Moriarty;” there is always the chance he’s actually a leprechaun.

But his pixie shtick belied an intense devotion to making great theater. Eight months after arriving in town, when he announced his plans for the upcoming season, it was clear that Dallas had spoken and Moriarty has listened. The slate was plump with world premieres and edgy, invigorating plays. And to kick it all off, Moriarty assigned himself the task of directing the season opener: The Who’s Tommy, which began previews this week and officially opens on Tuesday.

But there’s planning a season, and then there’s executing it. The most painstaking preparation pales next to the practicalities of mounting a musical. Although he estimates fully a third of his portfolio over the years has been directing musicals, the challenges are always new. It is week before the first preview performance — the first tech rehearsal — and Moriarty is being pulled in every direction.

“Directing a musical is 10 percent creativity and 90 percent organizing the troops,” he says — not quite mopey about it, but not dismissive, either. Just because it’s called a play doesn’t mean it isn’t work.

As part of Moriarty’s colorblind casting policy, Tommy includes a white mother (Betsy Wolfe), and Indian father (Nehal Joshi) of an African-American son (Cedric Neal).

His challenge is compounded by the nature of show he has chosen to mount as his North Texas debut. The self-described “gay Indiana farm boy” has come a long way from the milquetoast breadbasket of the Midwest to a musical best consumed through a cloud of pot smoke, written by a British rocker 40 years ago and staged in Dallas with an industrial-looking set and racially mixed cast (Tommy’s black; his parents are white and Indian) that only adds to the confusion.

“There’s a small narrative thread — it’s all told in an abstract way,” Moriarty explains. “It’s indecipherable.”

Tommy (played as an adult by Cedric Neal) is the “deaf, dumb and blind kid” who becomes a pinball wizard, all while surviving abuse at the hands of his creepy uncle, the neglect of his corrupt mother … and plenty of drugs.

“It has an immense youthful energy. It’s loud — real rock ‘n’ roll. The idea, after 50 years, of putting a rock band on the stage of the Kalita Humphreys and blowing the roof off the place, was irresistible to me,” Moriarty says. He even jokes that he’s warned the box office to expect more requests for earplugs than for assisted-listening devices.

Which raises an important issue. Conventional wisdom says many theatergoers are older and conservative, so Moriarty’s decision to mount a rock opera as his flagship production might be a boondoggle; it might be genius. All Moriarty knows is, it was necessary.

“I take my stewardship responsibility very seriously,” he says. “Clearly, my goal is to engage a cross-section of the community to see a play, not to send people running away. But what will draw a necessarily diverse people must be dynamic, fresh, new and relevant. Safe, boring, irrelevant theater — that’s the equivalent of warm applesauce at every meal. If we do that, there’s no reason to exist as an institution.”

That existence has been called into question. Dallas civic leaders have been riding a crest of excitement over the pending Arts District reboot next autumn, which will install the DTC at its new home at the Wyly Theatre and give Dallas the largest urban arts neighborhood in the world. Simultaneously, ground troops like Moriarty must contend with the reality that theater is vying for attention from those glued to the Internet and their iPods.

“We are at a transformational point in our history, and we know that it’s happening. We have to produce plays people have to come to and see because they are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities — signature pieces you can only see here,” he says. “Love it or hate it, but you will walk saying, ‘I’ve never seen that before.’”

For Tommy, that means taking many artistic risks. His desk is stacked with picture books, histories and appreciations of The Who, all of which figure into his conception of the show.

“The Who never meant for Tommy to be performed by actors on a stage, so clearly it demands interpretation,” Moriarty says. First, he hired an actual rock band (Denton’s oso closo) rather than more familiar theater musicians to perform the score onstage. Then he turned the staid Kalita Humphreys into a dark warehouse-like cavern with four inches of water and rain effects. He embraced colorblind casting, which he defines as “great actors playing great roles. Actors need to reflect our community — not all white nor all black, not all gay nor all straight — but each of those.”

That diversity will also be reflected in upcoming shows. “It’s equally important to me that we approach the classic texts. I imagine we’ll do a Shakespeare or a Rodgers & Hammerstein — I could spend the rest of my career doing those two,” he says.

But for now, he giving himself fully to exploring something new — must-see theater, even if some people don’t know yet they must see it.

“Dallas likes an event —in our fashion, in our civic dialogue, in our arts. It’s our entrepreneurial-ness. When I first moved here, someone on the Theater Center board told me, ‘Dallas will forgive you if you make a big mistake; they will not forgive you if you dream small,’” Moriarty recalls.

There seems little chance of that. At the announcement party for the DTC’s upcoming season last spring, one theater professional who has worked frequently at the center crystallized the reason so many people have hopped on board the Moriarty train: “It’s difficult not to get excited when the announcement is made by Peter Pan.”

And across the Metroplex, if you listen carefully, you can hear a faint whisper: “We believe, Peter Pan; we believe.”

Pegasus News content partner - Dallas Voice
The community newspaper for gay & lesbian Dallas.

Related stories

• Two new hires start at Dallas Symphony Orchestra this week (Sept. 7, 2008)
• Theater review part deux: The Who’s Tommy (Sept. 5, 2008)
• Pegasus News week in view: Grow our community edition (Sept. 4, 2008)

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• Arts > Fine Arts > Theater > Musicals