World Premiere of FEEDING ON LIGHT & More Announced for Undermain Theatre's 2022/2023 Season
This season will also include the regional premiere of The Way She Spoke, and more.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz May. 04, 2022
For its 39th season Undermain Theatre is returning to a full season of professional live performances with a diverse array of exciting productions to inspire and enrich the live theater experience in Dallas. They will begin the season with a regional premiere of a Pulitzer Prize-winning play in a co-production with the revered Bishop Arts Theatre Center. Next is a world premiere inspired and commissioned by Undermain founding Artistic Director Katherine Owens, followed by the long awaited workshop production of a new play by an icon of the American Theater. They close with a regional premiere of a play of searing passion and timely urgency concerning a crisis of humanity in Juárez, Mexico. This season will offer a stunning feast of drama, comedy and everything in between. After all, you only turn 39 once!
As we keep an eye on the Covid-19 pandemic and the fluctuating infection rate, it is our hope to offer live performances with masks optional for our audiences. We will continue to evaluate live performances based on the status of the pandemic. The health and safety of our audience, cast, crew and staff is our top priority. We've made upgrades to our HVAC systems and environment to provide the healthiest atmosphere possible. Together we can stay safe, enjoy cutting edge performance and find our way back to the art of live theater.
~Bruce DuBose
Producing Artistic Director
FAIRVIEW
A coproduction with Bishop Arts Theatre Center, presented on the BATC stage
Directed by Jiles King
A Regional Premiere
Preview Performances October 20-21, 2022
Opening Night Saturday, October 22, 2022
In Performance October 20 - November 6, 2022
At the Frasier household, preparations for Grandma's birthday party are underway. Beverly is holding on to her sanity by a thread to make sure this party is perfect, but her sister is drinking, her husband can't seem to listen, her brother is MIA, her daughter is a teenager and maybe nothing is what it seems in the first place...Fairview begins as an easygoing comedy about a middle-class black family gathering for a birthday dinner and ends somewhere else entirely. A play about race, though not only about race, it ultimately brings the audience into the actors' community to face the deep-seated prejudices of societal perceptions.
Jackie Sibblies Drury
Jackie Sibblies Drury is a Brooklyn Based playwright. Her play Fairview won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Other plays include Really and Social Creatures. Jackie's plays have been presented by New York City Players and Abrons Arts Center, Soho Rep, Victory Gardens, Trinity Rep, Matrix Theatre, Woolly Mammoth, Undermain Theatre, InterAct Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Available Light, Company One, and The Bush Theatre in London, among others. Her work has been developed at Sundance, The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, Manhattan Theatre Club, Arts Nova, A.C.T., The Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, New York Theatre Workshop, PRELUDE. 11 & 14, The Civilians, The Bushwick Starr, The LARK, The Magic Theatre, The Bay Area Playwrights Festival and The MacDowell Colony. Jackie was a dramaturg for Futurity by Cesar Alvarez and The Lisps, Zero Cost House by Pig Iron Theatre Company & Toshiki Okada and The Garden by Nichole Canuso Dance Company. She received a 2015 Windham-Campbell Literary Prize in Drama, a 2012-2013 Van Lier Fellowship at New Dramatists, and was the inaugural recipient of the 2012 -2013 Jerome Fellowship at The LARK. Jackie is a NYTW Usual Suspect and a 2015 United States Artists Gracie Fellow.
FEEDING ON LIGHT
Directed by Bruce DuBose
A world premiere
Preview Performances November 10-11, 2022
Opening Night Saturday, November 12, 2022
In Performance November 10-27, 2022
*There will be no performance on Thursday, November 24 (Thanksgiving)
Nora is a curious writer who seeks to understand her friend and collaborator Katherine's obsession with 20th-century French philosopher and activist Simone Weil. As their discussion deepens, Nora and Katherine embody scenes from Simone's life in an attempt to communicate with her across time and space. Feeding on Light is based on playwright Lenora Champagne's personal relationship and discussions with Undermain Theatre's late Founding Artistic Director Katherine Owens, to whom the play is dedicated.
Lenora Champagne
Lenora Champagne came to New York from Louisiana to be a painter, but found her voice in performance. She collaborates with sculptors and designers, composers and media artists on large-scale work, and also makes solo performances. An alumna of New Dramatists, she has been working as a performance and theatre artist since 1981. Her multiple awards include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts in playwriting and solo performance, support and grant awards from the N.E.A. and NYSCA, and residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, and Bogliasco. She lived in Japan on a Fulbright in 2012-13. Champagne's publications include New World Plays, Out from Under: Texts by Women Performance Artists, The Singing: a cyberspace opera in Epic Plays II, TRACES/fades in Plays and Playwrights 2009, Dusk in PAJ and performance texts and essays in Performance Research, Women and Performance, PAJ, Chain and The Iowa Review. She has a Ph.D. from NYU and is Professor of Theatre and Performance at Purchase College, SUNY.
HE'S BORN, HE'S BORNE
By David Rabe
Directed by Kara-Lynn Vaeni
A workshop
Preview Performances April 12-14, 2023
Opening Night Saturday, April 15, 2023
In Performance April 12 - 30, 2023
HE'S BORN, HE'S BORNE is a workshop production of a new play by David Rabe that explores a primitive, medieval world that exists outside of actual human history. The inhabitants of the world of the play are agrarian in nature and all too human in their battles against suffering and death. The characters are agrarian peasants who work the land. When a young child falls from a tree, the angel of death comes to claim him for the underworld. They embark on a quest to hide the child with help from two angels who are overseers of the stars and planets of the night sky to help protect the child and challenge death's supremacy. They seek to create a world where children may be born into life everlasting.
David Rabe
David Rabe is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist whose work has had a powerful influence on American theater and is known for its use of dark humor, satire, and surreal fantasy. Rabe has won almost every important award in the American theater including a Tony award for his play Sticks and Bones as well as three other Tony nominations for Hurly Burly, Streamers and In the Boom Boom Room, an Obie Award for The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, multiple New York Drama Critics' Circle awards, a PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for his body of work and most recently the Legend of Off Broadway Award presented by the Off Broadway Alliance. David Rabe was educated at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa and completed his graduate studies in theater at Villanova University in Pennsylvania after serving in the army as a draftee assigned to a hospital-support unit in Vietnam, where his experiences provided a key influence on his early career as a playwright. Rabe's numerous other plays include Goose and Tomtom (1983) a surreal gangster-themed play steeped in gnostic mysticism which was a groundbreaking production for Undermain Theatre, Hurlyburly (1985; film 1998) and Those the River Keeps (1991), A Question of Mercy (1998); The Dog Problem (2002), The Black Monk (2004) based on a Chekhov short story and An Early History of Fire (first performed 2012). Good for Otto was developed by the Gift Theater in Chicago and premiered by The New Group in New York in 2018. In addition to screenplays for his plays he has written screenplays for the films such as I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can (1983), Casualties of War (1989), John Grisham's The Firm (1993) and the upcoming film We're Just Married, starring his daughter, actress Lily Rabe. His novels include Recital of the Dog (1993), Dinosaurs on the Roof (2008), and Girl by the Side of the Road (2010). Undermain produced Rabe's Suffocation Theory in 2021, based on his short story in The New Yorker.
THE WAY SHE SPOKE
Isaac Gómez
By Isaac Gómez
Directed by Blake Hackler
A Regional Premiere
Preview Performances: June 1 - 2, 2023
Opening Night: Saturday, June 3, 2023
In Performance: June 1 - June 17, 2023
The Way She Spoke is a haunting and theatrical one-woman play, which travels from the stage to the treacherous streets of Juárez, Mexico, where thousands of women have been murdered for decades in an epidemic of violence that has yet to stop. Written by Isaac Gómez based on his intimate interviews, the play is a raw and riveting exploration of responsibility: one playwright's journey to give voice to a city of women silenced by violence, fear and a world that has turned a deaf ear to their stories.
Isaac Gómez
Isaac Gómez is an award-winning Chicago-based playwright originally from El Paso, Texas/Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. His adaptation of Erika L. Sánchez's award-winning novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter had its world premiere with a Steppenwolf for Young Adults production in February 2020, and his play La Ruta received its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theater Company in December of 2018. The Way She Spoke received its Off-Broadway premiere at the Minetta Lane Theatre (produced by Audible) in Summer 2019. He is currently under commission from South Coast Repertory, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, and Steep Theatre. His plays have been supported by Steppenwolf Theater Company, Denver Center, Primary Stages, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Goodman Theatre, and others. He is the recipient of the 2018 Dramatists Guild Lanford Wilson Award, the 2017 Jeffry Melnick New Playwright Award at Primary Stages, an inaugural 3Arts "Make A Wave" grantee, and holds various affiliations with artistic organizations nationally and locally. His television credits include the Netflix Original Series Narcos: Mexico, the first writers room for Kings of America on Netflix, and most recently the upcoming Apple TV+ Limited Series The Last Thing He Told Me starring Julia Roberts. He currently has a series in development with Stacey Sher and FX. On the feature side, he is currently under development with a full-length feature at Focus Features. He enjoys good bowls of menudo on Sundays (con bolillos not tortillas, porfis) and can slay a game of millennial loteria. He is represented by The Gersh Agency, ReDefine Entertainment and Granderson Des Rochers, LLP.
Undermain Theatre's 39th Season Summary - 2022/2023
FAIRVIEW
A coproduction with Bishop Arts Theatre Center
A regional premiere
In Performance 10/20/22 - 11/6/22, Thur. through Sat. at 7:30pm. Matinees to be determined.
Preview Performances 10/20 and 10/21/22
Opening Night Saturday 10/22/22
FEEDING ON LIGHT
A world premiere
In Performance 11/10/22 - 11/27/22, Thurs. through Sat. at 7:30pm, Sunday matinees at 2:00.
Preview Performances 11/10/22 and 11/11/22
Opening Night Saturday 11/12/22
*There will be no performance on Thursday, November 24 (Thanksgiving)
HE'S BORN, HE'S BORNE
By David Rabe
A workshop
In Performance 4/12/23 - 4/30/23, Wed. through Sat. at 7:30pm, Sunday matinees at 2:00pm.
Preview Performances 4/12/23 -4/14/23
Opening Night Saturday 4/15/23
THE WAY SHE SPOKE
By Isaac Gómez
A regional premiere
In Performance 6/1/23 - 6/17/23, Thurs. through Sat. at 7:30pm, Sunday matinees at 2:00pm.
One Wednesday evening performance at 7:30, 6/14/23
Preview Performances 6/1/23 - 6/2/23
Opening Night Saturday 6/3/23
Ticket prices are:
Preview performances are $15
Wednesdays and Thursdays $20
Fridays $25
Saturdays $30
All matinee performances are $20
Subscriptions Available on www.undermain.org
UNDERGROUND FLEXIBLE SEASON PASS
Bronze Level: $65
4 tickets to any live performance
1 Drink Voucher
$5 off any extra ticket
Silver Level: $99
6 tickets to any live performance
2 Drink Vouchers
$5 off any extra ticket
Gold Level: $125
8 tickets to any live performance
3 Drink Vouchers
$5 off any extra ticket
Visit www.undermain.org to purchase subscriptions online or call the box office at 214-747-5515.
Discounts are available for seniors, students, KERA members, and groups for in person performances. You must call 214-747-5515 for your discount. Undermain is located at 3200 Main Street at the corner of Murray Street in Deep Ellum. The closest paid lot is on the corner of Main and Hall streets.
About Undermain
Now in its 39th season, Undermain Theatre is a company of artists that celebrates language and poetics. Undermain's work stretches beyond its home state of Texas and has reached audiences in New York, Los Angeles, Canada, Greece, Macedonia and Serbia. The San Diego Union Tribune called Undermain "one of the best small theaters in America." The theatre collaborates with playwrights, supports a theatre archive and operates a theatre under 3200 Main Street in Dallas' legendary Deep Ellum.
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