Season Announcement
Explosive drama dominates 2022 season for Dallas' Classics Theatre Project
After pausing in 2020 for the pandemic, The Classics Theatre Project is back with four plays for its 2022 season. They all fit the company's mission to bring the classics to audiences in accessible and relevant ways.
The new season, curated by artistic director Joey Folsom, runs from March-November with all plays save one performed at the Margo Jones Theatre in Fair Park.
Look Back in Anger, by John Osborne and directed by Jackie Kemp, is first. Written in 1956, the unexpected hit centers on the previously undepicted 20-to-30-year-olds of England, who did not participate in World War II and who found its aftermath lacking in promise. This production will be a "no-holds-barred staging" of this intense kitchen sink drama, starring Folsom as its protagonist, Jimmy Porter. It runs Fridays and Saturdays, March 18-April 9, 2022.
Folsom is back as director and playwright of Sex, Guns, and Vodka, his adaptation of Anton Chekhov's untitled first play. In a work that remained untitled and went undiscovered until 1923, two decades after his death, Anton Chekhov turns a farcical eye to a Russian retelling of the story of Don Juan.
Although written while he was still a medical student, prior to becoming a master dramatist, the Chekhovian markings of wit, rich characterizations, and his thematic staples are aptly present in this tale of a new-to-town married schoolmaster and the bored provincial women who vie for his affection. It runs Fridays and Saturdays, May 20-June 11, 2022.
The American masterpiece Cat on a Hot Tin Roof sees the return to the stage of a patriarch of Dallas theater, Terry Martin, taking on the role of one of the most famous patriarchs in drama, Big Daddy. Tennessee Williams' Southern telling of a family in crisis unfolds on a night in the Mississippi Delta, as the Pollitt family gathers to celebrate the birthday of its aging and ailing patriarch, Big Daddy. His two sons vie for an inheritance with former football hero, Brick, also contending with his wife’s, Maggie-the-Cat’s, unbridled sexuality and the nature of his own, in a relationship burdened by repressed love.
This benchmark classic will be directed by a mainstay of classic work in the region, Susan Sargeant. It runs August 26-September 11, 2022, at the Karol Omlar Studio Theatre at The Addison Conference and Theatre Centre.
Dutchman, directed by Dennis Raveneau, closes out the season. This 1964 Obie Award winner for Best Off-Broadway Play is an explosive, allegorical, one-act drama written by poet Amiri Baraka (who was then writing under his birth name, LeRoi Jones). It uses the device of a single, highly stylized, and symbolic encounter to demonstrate the tensions present between Black and white Americans during the tumultuous 1960s and to illustrate the political, societal, and psychological conflicts facing Black men in America.
Taking place on a New York City subway car, the play is a two-character confrontation that begins playfully and flirtatiously between Clay, a young, middle-class, Black man, and Lula, a white woman, who approaches him. Their conversation builds rapidly in suspense and symbolic resonance until it becomes something else entirely, ultimately ending fatally. It runs Fridays and Saturdays, November 11-26, 2022.
Season ticket packages are now on sale at theclassicstheatreproject.com and offer up to 30 percent off when compared to single-show pricing.