When Second Thought Theatre produced Oak Cliff-raised Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning a year ago, the play about a reunion of young conservatives at their Catholic alma mater drew an unusual amount of attention. Arbery’s family is well known locally. His parents taught at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, and his sister, Lucia Simek, is executive director of the Dallas Contemporary art museum.
“So many people were excited about Will,” says artistic director Carson McCain. “ ‘Oh, he’s from Dallas. I know his family. I know the people he has written about. I know these stories.’ It became a question for me and Parker of, if we have people who write plays that are as good as anything else you’re seeing here, and that’s what brings people in, that’s what they want to see, why aren’t we giving all of our opportunities to those people? That question became the seed.”
What sprouted was an entire season of dramas by local playwrights after McCain read Second Thought executive director Parker Davis Gray’s Incarnate and decided they should produce it. It’s scheduled for this summer, following by Jenny Ledel’s My Wife’s Dead Body in the fall. Actors first, Gray and Ledel have become fixtures on stage all over North Texas.
The season just opened with Blake Hackler‘s Healed, about a woman who goes to a mysterious, cult-like retreat in the Texas Hill Country when conventional medicine is unable to cure her illness. This is Hackler’s fourth show for Second Thought. He’s a member of the Dallas Theater Center’s resident acting troupe and heads the theater program at Southern Methodist University. McCain directs.
“When I’m not directing, I’m a therapist, and I am more and more convinced that we are grieving every life we’re not living,” she says in a Zoom interview with Gray and Ledel. “I’ve been seeing this with my clients. Then reading Parker’s play and feeling passionate about producing Incarnate led me to the season theme of grief. It’s a universal experience.”
Incarnate is about a 50-year old man who kidnaps a 25-year-old woman because he thinks she’s his father reincarnated. It received a reading at Undermain Theatre in 2022, the first of Gray’s nine scripts to make it onto a stage. None of the others have been produced.
Currently starring in Undermain’s h*llo k*tty syndrome, Gray didn’t start writing plays until after the death of his father in 2017. “Then I felt I had something to say, I had something to prosecute within myself,” he explains. “How do I deal with these feelings?”
A friend advised him to lean into the grief, he says. “Go listen to all those old voicemails. Put on a sad song in the car. Don’t let anyone tell you there’s shame in experiencing those things. That gave me a lot of freedom. I had this thought while I was driving: if I found out my dad was reincarnated into someone else’s body, I would literally do anything to talk to that person, by whatever means necessary.”
“I like these types of plays. I like to be challenged emotionally,” says Ledel, whose My Wife’s Dead Body is about a terminally ill woman who uses AI to extend her life, her personality turned into an algorithm to be placed in another body after her death. “I feel I have a lot of outlets like Hulu and Netflix to see things to distract me. It’s exciting that we’re digging into one of those topics that people shy away from. Theater is a way to bring people together to have these big, scary conversations.”
In 2019, Gray took a playwriting class at Theatre Three with widely produced comedy specialist Matt Lyle and got on a roll. He finished his first play in the early hours of 2020 and then COVID hit. He didn’t want to write about the pandemic, at least not directly, and turned to horror as his niche.
“There’s something really exciting to me about a group of people being absolutely terrified together in a room with the thing they’re terrified of,” Gray says. “You don’t get to press pause and calm yourself down.”
The phenomenon of locally written plays being produced by Dallas theater companies started decades ago but has gained steam in recent years. The most extreme example is Ochre House Theater, where the pioneering actor-writer-director Matthew Posey only puts on shows written by him and other members of his troupe. His latest, Moving Creatures, opens Wednesday.
One of the factors are workshops like the one Gray took. Back in 2013, Ledel won a spot in the first year of Dallas Theater Center’s rigorous writing program, led by then playwright-in-residence Will Power. Her classmates included the prolific Jonathan Norton, now interim artistic director of the Theater Center, along with Hackler and Janielle Kastner, whose plays Sweetpea and Anne-Tig-Ug-Knee have been produced by Second Thought.
Ledel, who has been writing since she was a child, usually works on multiple plays at a time, she says. She finds it therapeutic. Just before the Theater Center workshop, her takeoff on the Alice in Wonderland sequel Through the Looking-Glass, called Theresa Alice, received a staged reading at the Green Zone.
Readings also have been held by Kitchen Dog Theater, where Ledel is a longtime company member, of her modern retelling of Jane Austen’s Abbey Northanger, called Catherine, and her trilogy about the help in Chekhov plays at the troupe’s annual New Works Festival.
“My play is about the self and the future; AI and the future,” she says of My Wife’s Dead Body, scheduled to run in July. “How do they go together? Do they go together? I’m not an expert. I wrote primarily from instinct. Then after I completed a draft and read about the science behind AI, I found a lot of my instincts were dead-on.”
When her father had a stroke and had to relearn how to speak, “I was suddenly given another aspect of this story that I didn’t realize I was telling. I think in a weird way — I don’t want to speak for Blake — we were inspired by our parents with these plays.”
Ledel and Hackler were among the Second Thought veterans — Ledel was one of the stars of Hackler’s What We Were in 2019 — McCain reached out to when planning the season. She had already read My Wife’s Dead Body, which will be directed in October by Ledel’s husband, former Second Thought artistic director Alex Organ, and wondered what Hackler might be working on, especially if it concerned grief.
Hackler offered four scripts almost immediately. Then he told McCain he thought he might have an idea for a play he was scared to write. He sent the first scene of what turned into Healed.
“I sent it to Parker and said, ‘I think this is it. It feels scary. It feels dangerous.’ ” McCain recalls. “By this time, I trust Blake enough to know his process. He is a wild playwright in that he voraciously writes and then it’s done. We offered everyone a development week and he was like, ‘No, I like my process. Bye.’ ”
The season of locally written plays didn’t happen in a vacuum or just because of the success of Heroes of the Fourth Turning. A couple of years ago, Gray approached McCain about starting a playwrights workshop. Thought Process is now in its second year. Eight emerging writers meet monthly to share work and critique one another.
“All of my favorite memories as an actor are when I originated a role, when I helped build something from the ground up,” Gray says, mentioning productions of Pompeii!! at Kitchen Dog, The Handless King at Amphibian Stage and the current h*llo k*tty syndrome at Undermain. “I seek that creation.”
Details
Healed through May 10, My Wife’s Dead Body, from July 9-26, and Incarnate, from Oct. 15-Nov. 1, at Bryant Hall, 3636 Turtle Creek Blvd. $30. Student, senior and industry discounts available at the box office. Previews and Monday performances are pay what you can. secondthoughttheatre.com.
Arts Access is an arts journalism collaboration powered by The Dallas Morning News and KERA.
This community-funded journalism initiative is funded by the Better Together Fund, Carol & Don Glendenning, City of Dallas OAC, Communities Foundation of Texas, The University of Texas at Dallas, The Dallas Foundation, Eugene McDermott Foundation, James & Gayle Halperin Foundation, Jennifer & Peter Altabef and The Meadows Foundation. The News and KERA retain full editorial control of Arts Access’ journalism.
