Season Announcement
Theatre Three makes all of Dallas its stage for nomadic 2021-22 half season
After COVID-19 put the kibosh on its 59th season, Theatre Three is striking back with a 591/2 season: four shows which will take place outside of its Quadrangle home at various venues around Dallas.
This might sound familiar if you caught T3's touring production of The Music Man earlier this year, which set up at three different outdoor performance spaces during its run.
Titled "Traveling into the Unknown," the season will include two classics and two new works, all promising to celebrate the local talent in DFW.
"While we desperately miss seeing patrons in our lobby and producing shows on our stages, the past year has shown us that Theatre Three is much more than our building,” says artistic director Jeffrey Schmidt. "We can produce great theater regardless of the challenges."
Opening the season is the hilariously frightening musical favorite Little Shop of Horrors, directed by Joel Ferrell, music directed by Cody Dry, and performed at the Samuell-Grand Amphitheatre. The meek floral assistant Seymour Krelborn stumbles across a new breed of plant he names "Audrey II," after their coworker crush. As the plant grows, Seymour begins to realize how the plant that gave them everything desires to take everything (and everyone) in return. It runs October 5-31, 2021.
Next up is Maytag Virgin, a Southern love story by Audrey Cefaly and directed by Whitney Latrice Coulter. It follows Alabama schoolteacher Lizzy Nash and her new neighbor, Jack Key, over the year following the tragic death of Lizzy’s husband. The play explores the ideas of inertia and self-enlightenment, and the bridge between the two. It runs January 27-February 20, 2022, at a location to be determined.
The world premiere of a brand-new swashbuckling musical, first developed as part of T3's Monday Night Playwright series, is written by Nicole Neeley and Clint Gilbert. Called Stede Bonnet: A F*cking Pirate Musical, it's based on the true story of the Gentleman Pirate and directed by Gloria Vivica Benavides. Stede, depressed and exhausted by his luxurious life, chooses to leave everything behind and become the best pirate in the world. One problem: He doesn’t know what he’s doing. It runs April 7-May 1, 2022, at a location TBD.
Edward Albee’s 1962 masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? closes out the season. It will be directed by Blake Hackler and star associate artistic director Christie Vela as Martha and artistic director Jeffrey Schmidt as George. This escalating, perversely erotic dance of booze, anger, and resentment remains as relevant as the day it was written. Late one evening, after an alcohol-fueled university faculty party, a middle-aged couple, Martha and George, receive an unwitting younger couple, Nick and Honey, as late-evening guests. They draw them into their bitter and frustrated marital love-hate ambivalence and pummel each other senseless in a verbal slugfest. It runs June 9-July 3, 2022, at a location TBD.
In addition to the main season, the Monday Night Playwright series will continue to showcase new works by local writers. Because Theatre Too is temporarily unavailable due to the Quadrangle's construction, locations may vary.
Theatre Three is also introducing the T3Translates project, a three-play series where commissioned writers will translate a play that doesn't have an English translation, ending with a staged reading.
And Theatre Three continues its dedication to new and local works with the first annual Festival of Bad Ideas, a collection of short pieces inspired by the worst possible ideas, perhaps leading to some of the greatest.
There's one final bonus: The crooning, cocktail-toting ne’er-do-well Bippy Bobby is back to hosts his late-night variety show, this time outdoors at the Samuell-Grand Amphitheatre. In The Bippy Bobby Boo Show: Again! Again!, the ghosts of Theater Too bring the works of Pirandello, Pinter, Albee, and Beckett into their acts, inspired by the plays they saw performed by Norma Young, Esther Ragland, Robert Dracup, and Jac Alder. This Boo Show garden party, co-produced with Danielle Georgiou Dance Group, runs October 21-30, 2021.
Subscriptions for the 2021-22 season will go on sale August 19, and single tickets will be available September 1. Tickets can be purchased online at www.theatre3dallas.com or over the phone at 214-871-3300.
