To give some context to the story at right, here’s a backward look at new plays in Austin. The city has been blessed with playwrights for some time. You can dip into the archives at UT and find students in the storied Curtain Club producing original material for the stage back in the 1920s. Since 1938, UT’s Department of Theatre & Dance has been offering studies in playwriting. Among its faculty: E.P. Conkle, an esteemed playwright in his day but one who is barely known now. More renowned are those Fantasticks fellows, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, UT drama alums that Austinites like to claim for their own. The department awarded its first doctorate in playwriting in 1965, and it went to none other than the late theatre scholar and philanthropist W.H. “Deacon” Crain.
The Seventies saw Webster Smalley join the UT faculty and found a workshop for student playwrights named for E.F. Conkle. Around the same time, a group of campus theatre rebels created a show called Now the Revolution that caught the eye of theatre producer Joe Papp, who brought it to New York’s Public Theater. Some of these Revolution-aries later founded the musical comedy sensation Esther’s Follies, which has in the last 22 years single-handedly produced more original stage work than any company in town. Later in the decade, Austin playwright Marty Martin garnered national attention for his solo play Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, which actor Pat Carroll toured to great praise. Martin followed it with dozens of scripts — such as I Don’t Want to Be Zelda Anymore, Shaviana,The Necessary Luxury Company, Whitechapel, and, recently, The Dragon and the Pearl — but his work hasn’t been staged widely in Austin since the Eighties.
Shortly after Martin’s Stein hit came Austin’s best-known theatre success story, Greater Tuna. In the early Eighties, actors Jaston Williamsand Joe Sears — along with friend Ed Howard — premiered their two-man satire of life in small-town Texas in a venue on Sixth Street, and from there it bloomed into an unparalleled theatrical phenomenon that has toured the nation for 17 years, been staged by theatres from coast to coast, and spawned two theatrical sequels.
The early Eighties also saw another quantum leap in new drama activity in Austin. Over at UT, Smalley founded the Shoestring Project to aid student writers in getting their work staged. At the Zachary Scott Theatre Center, the new children’s theatre program Project InterAct was creating its own new plays, most of them by company artistic director Alice Wilson (Poe, Razzmatazz, Workin’ Texas, Dreamers All). At Capitol City Playhouse, playwright Marla Macdonald founded the pioneering New Play Development Program, which shepherded new scripts through a process of reading, critique, and production on CCP’s stage. It was the first such effort outside academia and stimulated more activity among local writers than anything previously. By the mid-Eighties, 25 locally written plays were being mounted on Austin stages every season, and the theatre scene boasted a bona fide crop of local dramatists. It also produced the city’s most popular and praised play since Greater Tuna: the Austin-born monologue show In the West, conceived by Jim Fritzler and written by him and members of Big State Productions.The show was revived locally on several occasions, toured the state, was invited to be part of a Texas festival at the Kennedy Center, and inspired the film Deep in the Heart..
It is on this foundation that the new dramatists of today are creating their successes.
This article appears in March 12 • 1999 and March 12 • 1999 (Cover).