BACKSTAGE ACCESS

A BEHIND-THE-SCENES LOOK AT HOW A FULL-THROTTLE PERFORMING ARTS SEASON IS BROUGHT TO LIFE BY STANDOUT CREATIVES.

BY LEE CULLUM

O

ne wedding and a honeymoon. Flight from the borders of a brutal war. Puppets and Persian voices. These are the stories of artists returning to stages in Dallas after on-again-off-again lives on the edges of

their art.

Elizabeth Askren, an early standout at the Hart Institute for Women Conductors and now a member of the faculty, will be back in March to lead Mozart’s Così fan tutte at The Dallas Opera. In a phone interview from Cluj, Romania, where she has been living with her husband and daughter, she talks about Mozart from the standpoint of a pianist, which she started out to be. “Anybody can play [Mozart],” she avers, “few can master him.” She cautions against “anything that risks being oversimplified.”

Oversimplified Askren is not. After graduating from Oberlin Conservatory of Music, she studied both piano and conducting in France and married a French-Romanian violinist named Paul Brie. When he took up IT in Romania, she turned entrepreneurial herself, starting the Transylvanian Opera Academy, among other ventures, while continuing, more and more, to lead orchestras in the US and Europe.

Now, however, she’s faced with the war in Ukraine, right across the Romanian border. At first, she relates, “I opened my home to some families in transit and helped orphans on their way to Israel.” But now doctors in Romania are giving out

Playwright Isaac Gómez. Photograph courtesy of Toda Sola Productions.

Watch out for Isaac Gómez. We will hear from him again and again.

iodine pills for nuclear radiation, just as they are in Ukraine. The Askren/Brie family sees no choice but to move. They’re heading to New York, not too far, they hope, from her parents on the Upper West Side, who can help look after their daughter, Eliane (who prefers Willie) when Askren is traveling. Her husband can pursue funding for his IT company there as well as anywhere, and Eliane will be the fifth generation of the family to attend the Convent of the Sacred Heart.

While war rages in Europe, honeymoons nonetheless still happen. I hear about one of them when I catch Erin Hannigan, principal oboist with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, at DFW airport as she and her new husband, Fred Tuomi, are about to board a plane to Paris, and from there to Marseilles for a French river cruise through Burgundy. They met, she tells me, at the Arizona Music Festival in 2019, got married last July while in lockdown. Now they’re celebrating, but only because her parents are willing to come to Dallas from Colorado to look after their three pets: an aging pit bull, a German shepherd/border collie mix, and Gabby the cat, who hung out in a Costco drain before Erin rescued her, as she has many animals over many years. Indeed, she co-founded Artists for Animals to raise money for these friends in distress.

Like Askren, Hannigan attended Oberlin. After a stint at the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, she came to Dallas, where the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s music director at the time, Jaap van Zweden, quickly elevated her to principal oboist. Since then, she has commissioned and recorded, among others, Serenada Concertante written just for her; taught oboe at SMU; and delighted especially in playing new work. “Knowing the audience is hearing this music for the first time” is a thrill, she says.

Hannigan and Tuomi had been married for almost three months when playwright Isaac Gómez and his fiancé, Rasheed Hall, an actor, returned for their wedding to Chicago—in many ways their creative home. Gómez, originally from El Paso/ Juarez, was drawn to Steppenwolf Theatre and other lively Windy City theaters after graduating from UT Austin. A TV writers’ room lured him to Los Angeles in 2019. He “had no interest in staying” he tells me by phone, but Covid intervened, so he and Hall decided that was where they had to hunker down.

At 31, Gómez has produced an impressive body of work, either commissioned or already done. One of those plays, The Way She Spoke, will be mounted by the Undermain Theatre in June next year. This is a one-woman show about Juarez women and the culture of violence in which they’ve been forced to live, if they lived at all. Gómez went back to the border to search for true stories that would illuminate a shameful world, shrouded in shadows.

Tiana Kaye Johnson. Courtesy of Dallas Theater Center.

Gómez also is working on a seven-hour epic for Steppenwolf that examines “what it is to have blind faith.” In this instance he is focused on the women around the crucified Christ, and, in part two, on the death of Mother Teresa. And he is pursuing a project on his lifelong binge-eating disorder for Lincoln Center. It’s “wild and crazy,” he promises, done in repertory, with one performance in English, the next in Spanish. Watch out for Isaac Gómez. We will hear from him again and again.

To talk with Tiana Kaye Johnson is to know pretty quickly that she is a powerhouse. After notable success with the Brierley Resident Acting Company at the Dallas Theater Center, she is turning now to directing. Her last was a major production in October called Trouble in Mind, a 1955 hit by Alice Childress. In a long conversation by phone, Johnson describes her extensive research for Trouble and zeroes in on the “generational struggle.” Wiletta Mayer is a successful Black actress who knows how to “play the game,” as Johnson tells me, portraying one stereotype after another—mainly based on “a maid, mammy”—while Millie Davis, as Johnson conceives her, is younger, “more combative,” and not interested in going along to get along.

The aim of this production, Johnson stresses, is to delve

into the “complicated history” of film and “go at it in a nuanced way…[to look] at strong emotion [and not] shove it under the rug and never talk about it again. That doesn’t help.” To this end she prepared a syllabus with lists for watching and reading, works like Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World by Wil Haygood; D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation; and Imitation of Life, directed by Douglas Sirk. “The industry didn’t know what to do with Dorothy Dandridge…Billie Holiday, or Ethel Waters,” Johnson laments. “These were glamorous actresses relegated to playing service people.”

At this pivotal moment between two worlds—ease and disease—cooking seems to be the key to sanity for some performing artists in Dallas, including dancer Sean Smith. A star of astonishing virtuosity at Dallas Black Dance Theatre, Smith goes in for Mediterranean fare—hummus, marinated chicken with Greek yogurt, tabouli. “I cook like I have a large family,” Smith explains, “though it’s just me and Elizabeth”—a stray kitten that jumped off a balcony, was found in a parking lot, and landed in his life. Like Hannigan, Smith is devoted to animals in need of a home, but in his case it’s just one.

During Covid, Smith tore his meniscus, which required knee surgery and forced him to slow down, he says. However, he quickly returned to his usual regimen to stay in shape: weight training, stretching, yoga, Pilates, and “I walk all the time,” he tells me. “I don’t drive [and I do a] 30-minute walk to the DBDT” from his apartment in the Design District. Originally

Sean Smith in Execution of a Sentiment. Photograph by Sharen Bradford.

Sean Smith. Photograph by Kent Barker

Above: Jillyn Bryant and Cole Vernon in Dark Matter, Bruce Wood Dance. Photograph by Sharen Bradford. Below: Jillyn Bryant in Carved in Stone. Photograph by Sharen Bradford. from the Vancouver area, trained partly at the Ailey School, Smith has been in Dallas over a decade and wrestles annually with the visa issue. Though he calls himself “pretty nomadic” and “not super social,” he’s still here, and that’s good. To watch Sean Smith in action is to see the extraordinary, concentrated energy of an introvert, never diverted by the extraneous or the second-rate.

Hamid Rahmanian landed at New York’s JFK International Airport the last day of 1993. He was getting out of Iran to find new outlets, any outlets, for the creative energies for which he had no hope at home. The Pratt Institute took him. So did Disney in LA, where he excelled at animation and was nominated for an Oscar but chafed at being told what to do. The best thing that came to him at Disney was Melissa Hibbard, an art director from Oklahoma, who married Rahmanian and moved with him to Brooklyn. Now she produces all his works, including Song of the North, a puppet shadow play of riveting enchantment, due at TITAS January 13 and 14.

Speaking from his studio, Rahmanian recounts the 15 years he has devoted to Shahnameh: The Book of Kings, a long Persian epic poem written around 1010 from which Song of the North is drawn. With puppets, actors, and music behind an animated movie screen, he and Melissa, plus a multifaceted cast, dramatize a love story set in a dangerous world of impending war. It is “a sophisticated narrative [dealing with] mythology, history,” says Rahmanian, not “empty stories” so often produced in America.

When Joy Bollinger, artistic director of Bruce Wood Dance, said she was sending me her “senior dancer” for this article, I expected someone still young, of course, but pushing 40. Jillyn Bryant is 28. Still, she is the longest in tenure at the company, not the oldest. She marvels at the way the ensemble has been, “grounding, maturing, and growing, making it through the pandemic together…stronger, tougher, probably more grateful… with trust and respect for everyone.” Even so, she explains, there has been a “revolving door at Bruce Wood,” as dancers are “more interested in doing projects…something else…to experience enough different aesthetics.” Bryant, however, happily returned to Dallas, her hometown, after studying at Park Point University, Juilliard, and other venues. A tight-knit family of five siblings drew her back, with a boyfriend in marketing eventually added to the mix. Now she is looking forward to many things at Bruce Wood, but especially to dancing Rhapsody in Blue, “one of my all-time favorites,” in the company’s show in early June. She is always on the lookout for the new, the heretofore unknown. “The way we do things, the way we experience life,” she points out, “is not the only way.”

How did Jillyn Bryant—and indeed all the artists I’ve talked with for this piece—develop such powers of expression? Where did they get the depth of insight, the poetic imagination, or the inner resources, learned and earned? From introspection, I suspect—an unexpected, even unwelcome, gain bestowed by Covid. Zoom didn’t work for these dancers, musicians, or actors as well as it did for those who deal with words or numbers. The mutual exchange of physical energy means more to performers, and the loss of it is greater. Somehow artists have assimilated those losses and the necessary spirit of recovery to become the theologians of the age, the pathway to the infinite.P

TITAS Dance/Unbound presents Hamid Rahmanian’s Song of the North. Photograph courtesy of Hamid Rahmanian.

Hamid Rahmanian. Courtesy of the artist.