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Artist Spotlight: Adrian Hall And The Vanishing Arts Of Theater And Memory

Dane Walters
/
KERA News
Adrian Hall now lives in Van, Texas, the tiny town 80 miles east of Dallas that he grew up in, with a caretaker.

Adrian Hall is a legend in American theater, having run two major companies at once: the Dallas Theater Center and the Trinity Rep in Rhode Island, which won the regional Tony Award in 1981.

He established the DTC's first professional acting ensemble and built the Arts District Theater, a metal warehouse where the  Winspear now stands. Hall is one of our last, living ties to the early resident theater movement and to off-Broadway in the '50s.

And now that history may be disappearing.

Adrian Hall was fired in 1989 after running the Dallas Theater Center for six years. He was fired for essentially being ‘difficult’ — being late with a season of plays to announce, acting high-handed with both staff and board.

As former ‘Dallas Morning News’ theater critic Jeremy Gerard has put it, “I don’t think the Theater Center had a clue what it was getting into when it signed Adrian on.”

Read more on Art&Seek, and follow the Art&Seek Spotlight as it grows.

Jerome Weeks is the Art&Seek producer-reporter for KERA. A professional critic for more than two decades, he was the book columnist for The Dallas Morning News for ten years and the paper’s theater critic for ten years before that. His writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, American Theatre and Men’s Vogue magazines.