Season Announcement

New 2024 season for Dallas' Second Thought Theatre comes packed with premieres

Jose Torres (technical director), Carson McCain (artistic director), Parker Gray (executive director), Sasha Maya Ada (marketing director).

Photo by Evan Michael Woods

The year 2024 is Second Thought Theatre's 20th anniversary, and it's celebrating with a brand-new playwriting initiative and three plays making their regional/national premieres. All productions will be at Bryant Hall, 3400 Blackburn St. in Dallas.

First up is Heroes of the Fourth Turning by Texas native Will Arbery, directed by Jay Duffer and assistant directed by Alejandro Saucedo.

Heroes is “intentionally selected for a Dallas audience in an election year” says executive director Parker Gray. “When four alumnus of a conservative college reunite under the stars, they find themselves confronting theology, politics, and personal responsibility,” adds artistic director Carson McCain.

Heroes of the Fourth Turning took 2020 by storm, being a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Drama and winner of the 2020 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, the New Your Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, and Whiting Award for Drama.

Regarding the question “why this play now?” McCain offers this:

“Growing up in rural Texas, I found myself particularly enthralled by these characters. This play is uniquely able to invoke horror and foster empathy. Rarely have I encountered characters I disagree with so wholeheartedly, and yet they want what we all do: To be heard. To make a difference. I chose this play for STT not only because of Will Arbery, but because it made me uncomfortable. And this particular discomfort, I think, can be incredibly useful.”

Heroes of the Fourth Turning runs March 27-April 13, 2024.

Following Heroes is the regional premiere of Jen Silverman’s Wink directed by Jenna Burnett and starring Garret Storms as Wink the Cat.

“Few things in this world make sense to me,” says Gray. “But four things that make absolute, perfect sense to me? The combination of a Jen Silverman play, directed by Jenna Burnett, starring Garret Storms as a cat, and all on a Second Thought stage. That’s a perfect, wacky, holy, theatrical quadrinity if you ask me."

Wink follows unhappy housewife Sofie and her breadwinning husband, Gregor, who both seek weekly counseling from an unorthodox therapist, Doctor Frans. Their current topic of disagreement: the cat, Wink. When Wink goes missing, violent desires, domestic anarchy, and feline vengeance emerge, threatening the neatly ordered reality Sophie, Gregor, and Doctor Frans have constructed.

How did a play about a vengeful cat end up in the STT lineup? McCain has some answers:

“Garret Storms brought this play to me a couple of years ago. Second Thought audiences will know Garret from Martyr and Lela & Co., but also should know him as the person whose taste I trust most in the DFW area. When he told me this was a Second Thought play, I knew it would be worthwhile. This play explores our base desires, our violent urges, our need for connection, the parts of us we do and don’t like. If you’ve ever wanted to be a fly on the wall in someone else’s therapy session, this is the play for you.”

Wink runs June 26-July 13, 2024.

Completing the season is the national premiere of British playwright debbie tucker green’s hang directed by Sasha Maya Ada. The play is quite simple: His life. In her hands. green’s hang is a shattering play about one woman’s unspeakable decision. “Is punishment justice? Or is it revenge?” asks McCain. “hang asks us to take a cold, hard look at injustice and forgiveness. It asks us to consider a legacy of pain, and how systems are complicit. But it also asks us to consider individuals as complicated and nuanced.”

Gray adds:

“This play is a punch. A punch to the head, a punch to the heart, a punch to the gut. When Carson and I read this play, we knew immediately it was a Second Thought play, and that Sasha Maya Ada needed to direct it. Admirers of Second Thought's 2022 hit production of Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over can expect Sasha and Second Thought to deliver a similar, but altogether singular, experience with this American premiere that will be sure to leave you talking in the parking lot afterwards."

hang runs October 16-November 2, 2024.

And get ready for the inauguration of Thought Process: A Playwriting Cohort.

This year-long, monthly meeting of local writers provides a safe, low-stakes space for playwrights to interact with their peers; share pages from old, new, or commissioned work; and most importantly, write! This cohort seeks to give each playwright the experience they want for their work in order to serve their play, without the pressures of an institution making the work “producible."

Says Gray:

“Opportunities for theater artists in DFW are growing, and when Carson and I looked around the community for ways to continue serving and cultivating the incredible talent we have in the Metroplex, one group stood out to us: playwrights. There are so many incredible writers we know here in DFW, and many, I’m sure, we have not been introduced to yet. However, opportunities for local writers to develop and experiment with their work are few and far between. Enter Thought Process. In DFW, reading festivals exist, full productions exist, but a space for the hard work before a reading? Or the middle ground where a script is between drafts? That’s what we want to offer: A safe, supportive, and enticing space for local writers to “write around and find out."

Submissions for Thought Process are live and can be found here. The deadline to submit to this inaugural, one-of-a-kind program is January 5, 2024, at 8 pm.

Running:
Previews: March 27th and 28th
Opening Night: March 29th
Pay What You Can Mondays: April 1st and April 8th

Wink by Jen Silverman
A Regional Premiere
Directed by Jenna Burnett
Starring Garret Storms as Wink the Cat Running: June 26th - July 13th 2024 Previews: June 26th and 27th

Opening Night: June 28th
Pay What You Can Mondays: July 1st and July 8th

hang by debbie tucker green
An American Premiere
Directed by Sasha Maya Ada
Running: October 16th - November 2nd 2024 Previews: October 16th and 17th

Opening Night: October 18th
Pay What You Can Mondays: October 21st and October 28th

theater

A good listen

Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi release landmark Wagner 'Ring Cycle' set

Fabio Luisi conducting the Dallas Symphony Orchestra

Photo courtesy of Dallas Symphony Orchestra

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Fabio Luisi wanted his Ring Cycle to be heard and not seen.

Wagner’s four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, approaching the 150th anniversary of its premiere in 1876, has been reinterpreted and deconstructed by directors finding various meanings in the conflicts among gods, humans, giants and dwarfs.

While most new recordings are on video, Luisi led his Dallas Symphony Orchestra in concert performances that were released on 13 compact discs by Delos on May 22 and are available on streaming services.

“Wagner conceived this as a total immersion in visual and acoustic, but I could focus really only on the music, and this was the point actually — not to be distracted by staging and not to have to cope with maybe strange ideas of staging,” Luisi said. “I think the music tells everything.”

Luisi became DSO music director in 2020 and broached the idea while dining two years later with (the now late) Morton H. Meyerson, a longtime board member.

“Fabio came back from lunch sort of giddy but sort of sheepishly saying: `Do you think that this would ever be possible?” recalled Kim Noltemy, the Dallas CEO at the time. “So, I said, well, let’s give it a try. So, we called around to see if there were people who wanted to support it and did a budget.”

After securing a waiver from the orchestra allowing for the needed rehearsals and performance length, recordings were made during four concerts from May 1-5 and six more from Oct. 5-20. Each opera was performed two or three times.

Americans in cast fill big roles
American singers featured prominently, with Mark Delavan as Wotan, Lise Lindstrom as Brünnhilde and Sara Jakubiak as Sieglinde, part of a cast that included Christopher Ventris (Siegmund), Daniel Johansson (Siegfried), Deniz Uzun (Fricka), Tómas Tómasson (Alberich), Michael Laurenz (Mime) and Stephen Milling (Hagen).

Delavan sang Wotan at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2013 after Luisi took over from an ailing James Levine in Robert Lepage’s much-maligned production staged on a 45-ton set of 24 rotating planks.

“We’re accessible and they know that we’re hungry and we have a chip on our shoulders,” Delavan said. “What conductors like about American singers is their technique is sound. Even a European conductor would say: Well, I’m going to give up some of the communication skills, only one degree of separation with the language, but I’m going to get a solid technique, and I’m going to get pretty good acting chops.”

Lindstrom has been in Atlanta to sing in its production of “Götterdämmerung,” the concluding night of the tetralogy, leading to what is being billed as the first complete Ring Cycles in the America South in 2029.

“The wonderful thing about it is the intimacy between the orchestra and us, because we’re not separated by a chunk of stage or a chunk a scenery or a chunk of concept,” she said of the Dallas performances. “And for people like me, who have had the opportunity to perform the role before, I have all those iterations to rely on for my portrayal that I can sort of filter myself through.”

A younger Luisi listened to famous renditions
Luisi, 67, first heard a Ring recording in Georg Solti’s famous studio set with the Vienna Philharmonic from 1958-65. He also admires Karl Böhm’s live recording from the 1967 Bayreuth Festival and Marek Janowski’s 1980-83 studio version with the Staatskapelle Dresden.

He first conducted Ring when he was music director of Dresden’s Semperoper from 2007-10. Luisi’s Dallas performances include more legato and softer sound than his rendition a decade earlier at the Met. He tries to keep an arc from the first notes of “Das Rheingold” to the final strains of “Götterdämmerung.”

“I have a deeper understanding about the meaning of this piece,” he said. “I consider the ring to be a big Bruckner symphony. So we have the introduction, then we have the first movement, this is “Walküre,” which happens to be a slow movement, and then we have the scherzo, which is “Siegfried,” of course, and then the long, long, last movement. There is a unity.”

dso luisi ring wagner recording concerts music symphony