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Surprise, DFW has a new theater company and its first show is this weekend

What do Guiding Light, Bye Bye Birdie, and Oleanna all have in common? Arlington-raised actor, director, and producer Ryan Brown, who is one-half of Sweet Apple Productions with Jennifer Bangs.

Brown and Bangs first met at Shackelford Junior High School, where Bangs played Kim and Brown played Hugo in the school musical about an Elvis-type singer who visits a small town — that's where the name Sweet Apple comes from. Coincidentally, Brown is also the son of best-selling romance and thriller author Sandra Brown, who still resides in Arlington.

"I had such a crush on him in school, but we were never really that close," confesses Bangs.

Ryan Brown went on to book featured roles in two soap operas, Guiding Light and The Young and The Restless, while Bangs wrote, produced, and performed in two successful solo shows and still hosts a podcast.

The pair reconnected in New York City during the pandemic, thanks to a Facebook friend suggestion, and began a production company producing music videos and filmed podcasts. In the last 18 months, both found themselves back in Dallas-Fort Worth and ready for a new challenge.

"We thought, 'why not continue this partnership and expand into theater?'" says Brown.

Their first production is David Mamet's Oleanna, which runs March 30-April 2 in Stage West's performance space in Fort Worth.

The 1992 two-character play is a power struggle between a college professor and one of his female students, who accuses him of sexual harassment. Brown plays the professor, and Bangs directs.

"I studied film and drama at OU in the early ‘90s, and OU did the show while he was there," says Brown. "It was a new play at the time and its script really spoke to me. But what impressed me almost as much as the show was the talkback after — I had never seen an audience have such a visceral reaction, or be so split down the middle about whose 'side' to take. I thought how I’d love to do this play, but it’s an old guy and college-age girl — 30 years later, I guess I've aged into the role."

At the time of Oleanna's debut, America was glued to the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings. Now, the #MeToo movement has gathered steam, Harvey Weinstein is in jail for sexual abuse, and former President Donald Trump is supposedly about to be indicted for his illegal payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

"It struck me as odd that Mamet, who just last year wrote a short story objecting to social media moderation of right-wing politicians like Donald Trump, decided to tackle a subject like this," says Brown. "And even more interesting, he didn't take a stance with this play. The ending doesn't declare who is right or wrong."

Bangs points out that Mamet has now banned talkbacks from his plays. To help audience members who may want their opinions to still be heard, the Sweet Apple website has a section titled "Which Side Did You Take?" that leads to a poll. (Interesting side note: A popular tagline for the play is "Whatever side you take, you're wrong.")

"On one hand he’s an artist creating something, and on the other hand he's censoring it," Bangs reflects. "We're all watching the same thing play out in real time, but it's fascinating how differently everyone sees it."

There are no immediate plans to announce a full season, but Brown and Bangs say they are already eyeing their next possible production.

"We're considering doing Children of a Lesser God, and would be really excited to work with the local deaf community and actors who sign," says Bangs.

"It's another play that's on my bucket list," says Brown. "What really pushed us to explore it was receiving a self-tape from a deaf actor who signed her audition for Oleanna. We've already been speaking to her about the possibility of working with us, and it's really something we want to explore."

Another reason to hold off on an official season is that the duo don't want Sweet Apple Productions to be limited to theater.

"We're presenting ourselves as an alternative production company," says Bangs. "When COVID hit, everything shut down but we did not. We want to continue making art no matter what."

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Tickets for Oleanna range from $25-$35 and can be purchased here.

Photo courtesy of Sweet Apple Productions

Jennifer Bangs and Ryan Brown.

Me Too Movement Oleanna Sandra Brown theater

Season Announcement

'Come find your people' in Echo Theatre Dallas' 2025 season

Photo by Joan Marcus

A scene from the Off-Broadway production of Catch As Catch Can.

The theme for Echo Theatre's 2025 season is family, with the tagline "Come find your people." Echo, if you need a reminder, is the Dallas-based company that solely produces plays written by women-plus.

"We recognize the limiting nature of the binary use of the word 'woman,'" the company explains on its website. "We use the term 'women-plus' to include an expansive and diverse array of people, including those born female, those who identify as women, and those who are gender non-conforming."

“This season, my thoughts have turned to family in all its forms,” says artistic director Kateri Cale. “Every person experiences generations of family expectations, judgements, competitions, celebrations, and disappointments, over and over again. If we're lucky, we experience the fierce love of family too.”

First up is the regional premiere of Catch as Catch Can by Mia Chung.

Double-cast across gender, generation, and race and set in a blue-collar New England town, the drama follows two families — the Irish-American Phelans and the Italian-American Lavecchias — as the prodigal son returns home for a holiday gathering. Two off-stage characters, who are Korean and Korean-American, impact the families as they face the weight of generational expectations.

“With Catch as Catch Can, I wanted the audience’s experience of what they’re watching to mirror that felt by the characters; the character doubling articulates and enhances the propulsion of the play," says Chung in a release about the play's Off-Broadway debut in 2022. "I believe in performance, I believe in the actor’s capacity to inhabit a character to the extent that an audience may stop seeing that the actor is a man, or is Asian, or is 30 years younger than the role they’re playing. The cognitive dissonance is by design.”

It runs February 3-March 8, 2025, at the Bath House Cultural Center.

Next is OPEN by Crystal Skillman, a queer love story told by an amateur magician, presented during Pride Month.

A woman called the Magician presents myriad tricks for our entertainment, yet her performance seems to be attempting the impossible: to save the life of her partner, Jenny. But is our faith in her illusions enough to rewrite the past? The clock is ticking, the show must go on, and, as impossible as it may seem, this Magician’s act may be our last hope against a world filled with intolerance and hate.

It runs June 6-21, 2025, at the Bath House Cultural Center.

Last is El Rey del Pollo, a world-premiere "nuevo comedy" by Anna Skidis Vargas that the playwright describes as "a Shakespearean telenovela that’s loosely based on King Lear, but it’s a lot shorter and a lot sillier."

Reymundo Lear is about to retire from his fried chicken empire, and he is leaving everything to his three daughters. But things aren’t as easy as they seem. Cordelia gets disinherited, and Gisela and Raquel hike the prices. El Rey del Pollo features a hungry old man, essential oils, a giant chicken suit, and all the family drama you can eat.

It runs September 11-27, 2025, at the Bath House Cultural Center.

The Echo Reads free play readings will continue next year, and are scheduled for the months of March, April, May and September, October, November.

Season tickets are on sale now at echotheatre.org. Single tickets will be available at a later date.

A fun fact about Echo Theatre productions: Up to 10 free tickets are set aside for every performance and given out on a first-come, first-served basis. Patrons must email the box office directly at reservations@echotheatre.org to participate.

echo theatre theater