New Leaders, New Visions: The Fine Art of Listening

In measuring the Dallas pulse, KEVIN MORIARTY discovers that thinking big is the only way to go

By Sarah Hart

The crystalline façade panels of Dallas Theater Center's brand-new Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre are designed to pivot open, luring the outside world into the performance hall. Pedestrian onlookers might glimpse rehearsals through the glass, while working artists remain visually connected to the daily rhythms of the city's downtown area. And when the new season launches this month with Kevin Moriarty's new staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream—the Wyly's debut production—those panels will burst open to fuse the artistic sphere with the surrounding polis.

Living in a glass house suits Moriarty, who took on the artistic directorship of the Theater Center in 2007 and has shepherded the institution's move into the new building. "These glass walls simply say, 'That's it. Nothing to hide,'" he attests. "We are part of the city. We are permeable. We are not surrounded in concrete. We are behind glass walls in the middle of downtown, open and available to be the town square, the living room of this community."

For Dallas, the construction of the Theater Center's new space—part of a $354-million Dallas Center for the Performing Arts complex, which also includes the Winspear Opera House—completes a long-envisioned downtown arts district and speaks to the enterprising nature of its citizens. More than 130 individuals have given at least $1 million each toward the completion of the project. "And it was not just paid for by individuals," notes Moriarty, "but actually envisioned by individuals—longtime board members of Dallas Theater Center and Dallas Opera who said, 'We want to move this city forward. We want to move this art form forward. We want to wake up this community. What's it going to take?'"

The Texas-sized answer rises cheerfully in red and silver above the business district's tangle of freeways while brightening the skyline. The institution's previous theatre space, famously designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1959, was, in fact, surrounded by concrete, set away from street view in a tree-lined cove. The campaign video suggests boldly that the new Performing Arts Center will "complete the heart of a city." Now, for the first time in its history, Dallas Theater Center will be at the heart of that heart—a visible marker that theatre is part of this community.

Moriarty couldn't be more energized by his adopted home. "I can't tell you how much fun it is to be a part of that can-do spirit," he enthuses. "There's this amazing entrepreneurial spirit here in Dallas. The attitude is that we are building a great American city—not that we have built one, and it's finished, and our job is to be caretakers of it. We in the arts are still defining who we are in relation to the citizens of this city."

A born-and-bred small-town Midwesterner whose first job was as a high school music teacher in rural Minnesota, Moriarty went on to work throughout the tight academic and theatrical communities in New York and New England. It was a course that he never expected would land him in a place like Texas. His studious classical-music path was all but hijacked after the principal of Minnesota's La Crescent High School informed him that the music teacher was also responsible for directing the school play (Moriarty chose Medea and proceeded to stage it with a sizeable dose of spectacle that still marks his work today). He went on to study acting in a non-degree conservatory program under Adrian Hall at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., and to work as a Drama League directing fellow at the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, N.Y. In New York City, he became an assistant director to Michael Mayer, whom he cites as the first of three important mentors. The others are Bob Moss, who proved invaluable when Moriarty succeeded him as artistic director of the Hangar in 2000, and Oskar Eustis, who hired Moriarty as the inaugural head of Trinity Rep/Brown University's MFA directing program and imbued in him a Brechtian theatre-for-use philosophy.

Still, Moriarty notes, even with such generous opportunities to grow in the theatre field, "What I had not had the opportunity to do, really since I was a high school teacher, was to be an organic member of a community larger than the theatre community." That yearning was, he suspects, part of what the Theater Center board found attractive in his candidacy. "I think the board really wanted Dallas Theater Center to be a part of the community, and I think they saw in me that same desire."

As it worked out, the timing of Moriarty's appointment in June '07 proved fortuitous. As he closed out his obligations elsewhere—at the time, he was juggling his dual jobs at the Hangar and Trinity with a freelance directing career—he couldn't immediately relocate full time to Dallas. So, leaving the current season leadership in the capable hands of associate artistic director David Kennedy and managing director Mark Hadley, Moriarty embarked upon what he refers to as his "listening tour," roughly six months of embedding himself in his new community—going to sporting events, to the State Fair, to other theatres, symphonies and art museums, and to a never-ending parade of social soirees. ("I've never been to so many cocktail parties in my life," he jokes. "Dallas loves a good party.") And in talking to government, religious and educational leaders, longtime subscribers, students and peers, Moriarty began to figure out what makes Dallas tick.

What he found was determination with a healthy side of braggadocio ("There is nothing a good Dallasite loves more than being able to say, 'It started here. Nobody else has this'"), voluble opinions ("They're not afraid to tell you that your values or your beliefs or your way of telling a story is not the same as theirs—but they'll be back next week"), and a stubbornly independent streak ("People are here because land is available and affordable, and they want a home for their families; people are here because they've come over the border from Mexico; people are here because the government stays out of your way"). Putting it succinctly, Moriarty echoes a board member who told him early on, "Kevin, Dallas will forgive you if you fail. But they will not forgive you if you think small."

Indeed, when Moriarty finally unleashed his attention-grabbing directorial debut at the Theater Center, The Who's Tommy, in September '08, the local press wasted no time in crowning him a "theatrical Cecil B. DeMille." Dallas theatre writers astutely credited Moriarty's year-long observation period for paying dividends, especially in terms of local talent recognition. "That listening tour was the greatest gift I've ever had as an artistic director," Moriarty says. "I can't imagine my ability to function here without that."

Acting in tune with what he saw and heard, Moriarty programmed, in his first season, Tracy Scott Wilson's The Good Negro during the presidential election to explore complex issues of race, and Itamar Moses's steroids-in-baseball morality tale Back Back Back amidst Dallas's sports-obsessed environment. (The play was made even timelier during rehearsals when news broke that shortstop Alex Rodriguez had used performance-enhancing drugs during his tenure with the Texas Rangers.) And, in perhaps the artistic director's greatest leap of faith, Moriarty brought together a group of local actors to create a play about religion, In the Beginning.

"I am determined to find ways to make what we do in the theatre not be the product, but rather the catalyst for the conversation," Moriarty says. One of the most palpable cultural adjustments he made upon arriving in Dallas was to come to terms with the degree to which churchgoing is part of the everyday conversation. So in seeking a way to explore that dynamic while neither proselytizing nor attacking, Moriarty and his ensemble crafted a literal adaptation of the first 10 chapters of Genesis—from God creating the world through Noah's Ark and the rainbow—intermixed with excerpts from the multifaceted discussions they organized about those chapters in the Dallas community. Then, taking that conversational aim a step further, Moriarty and his cast actually stopped the performance each night for a 20-minute talk with their audience—a move that proved both unsettling and at times empowering for both actors and spectators.

From that experience came the seeds of the Theater Center's new acting company, which also officially launches this fall. Though Moriarty laughingly admits now that he assured the board during his interview process that he would not create an acting company if he were hired, he has assembled his nine-person In the Beginning ensemble as just that. One of the things Moriarty heard most clearly during his listening tour (which also included one-on-one meetings with his entire staff as well as with predecessors Paul Baker, Adrian Hall and Richard Hamburger) was that artists themselves were missing from the new Theater Center framework. Moriarty found that his goal of embedding theatre in the community couldn't properly be achieved until artists were embedded in the institution. (Coincidentally, the Theater Center's last acting company was in the days of Hall, who led both Trinity Rep and Dallas Theater Center in the 1980s; one incoming company member, Sean Hennigan, was also one of Hall's actors.)

The modified acting company—Moriarty anticipates that company members will take on a third of a season's roles, with another third coming from actors in the Dallas community and a final group coming from around the country to cross-ferment ideas and keep the company on its toes—will also fit into the administrative life of the theatre. Already, company member and associate artist Lee Trull is serving as Moriarty's right hand and working with literary management, and Christina Vela is responsible for teenage education programs. Moriarty says he envisions satellite companies through new partnerships with Southern Methodist University's Meadows School of the Arts graduate acting and design programs, and with Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (the latter, a linchpin in the downtown arts district—which also boasts the Dallas Museum of Art and Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center—is located across the street from the Wyly).

Six of the nine company members will join the cast of Midsummer and the company will fill the ensemble throughout the 2009-10 season, which features two musical premieres (Douglas Carter Beane and Lewis Flynn's Give It Up!, a Lysistrata riff pitting the cheerleading squad against a college basketball team; and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's reworking of It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman) as well as Neil LaBute's "beauty" trilogy (The Shape of Things, Fat Pig and reasons to be pretty), and the Theater Center's first-ever production of Death of a Salesman. Many of these ambitious titles are made possible by the capabilities of the Wyly, which boasts an infinitely configurable performance space and 12-story stacked design (created by architects Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Ramus). "Superman requires two things: an orchestra, and the character has to fly," notes Moriarty. "But having a theatre where we can have flying, a proscenium and an orchestra pit doesn't mean that Midsummer has to happen in a proscenium. That show will feel very much as if you're looking down at the play from outdoors." Moriarty also cites the building's role in abetting the Theater Center's ramped-up commitment to new work. "We can commission writers and say: Write for our community, write for our actors—write for us. The building will conform to your vision."

On Oct. 24, at the end of Midsummer's opening night, the Shakespearean fairies will bless the house of Theseus and by extension, Moriarty hopes, the Wyly as well. "Then we'll open the glass doors up to the city of Dallas itself—to our amazing new arts district and the vibrant life beyond it. And we will all celebrate together—actors, audience, fictional characters and real-life people, a great text from the past and a very contemporary production for today. Balloons. Champagne. A communal celebration."

Sarah Hart is a former managing editor of this magazine.