5 – 11
IN PRODUCTION
{On the Boards}
THE AMEN CORNER
The University of Maryland
Walter Dallas has won recognition and several awards for his work on and Off-Broadway and regionally at such theaters as the Negro Ensemble Company, American Place, Yale Repertory, Crossroads, Alliance and Baltimore’s Center Stage where he was a Director Fellow for the National Endowment for the Arts. At Chicago’s Goodman Theatre he directed the critically acclaimed world premiere of August Wilson’s Seven Guitars, named one of the Top Ten Best Theatre Events of 1995 by Time Magazine and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Awards include an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Arts (May 2002), a local Emmy Award (San Francisco), New York’s prestigious AUDELCO National Achievement Award for Excellence in Black Theatre, and several Bronze Jubilee Awards for Outstanding Direction. He received a Proclamation, “Walter Dallas Day” from Atlanta’s Mayor Maynard Jackson, and two Creative Genius Awards from the Atlanta Circle of Drama Critics. For his production of Having Our Say at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum, he received a 1997 NAACP Theatre Award nomination for Best Director.
His off-Broadway production of Moms garnered an Obie Award for its star, Clarice Taylor, and resulted in two successful national tours. His production of Desire Under the Elms at Chicago’s Court Theatre received two 2000 Black Theatre Alliance Award nominations. World premieres include works by James Baldwin, Leslie Lee, Sam Kelley, Kia Corthron, Ntozake Shange, Samm-Art Williams, Clarice Taylor, Thulani Davis, and others.
His own adaptations of the films Cooley High and Sparkle premiered at Freedom. He also premiered John Henry Redwood’s The Old Settler at the McCarter Theatre.
The Old Settler
University of Maryland, College Park
His world-premiere production of Charles Smith’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, produced by New York’s Acting Company, enjoyed a national tour, a critically acclaimed Off-Broadway run, and earned him a 2002 AUDELCO nomination for Best Director.
Puddn’head Wilson
SPARKLE
Freedom Theatre
COOLEY HIGH
“Back in the 80s, as AD of Freedom Theatre and training program of 700 students in Philly, I got permission from Orion Pictures to do a stage version of Cooley High. It was an experiment to combine traditional, Black theatre, (my audience) and Tyler Perry style theatre (of the 80s) to bring those two diff audiences together and hope that both would be pleased. August Wilson and Woodie King came to bear witness to my audience Dev experiment. It was a smash! The theatre won a National award from Audelco in NYC. Next, I did Sparkle: The Musical with Warner Brothers’ blessings. Again, another smash hit combining the two worlds. My 3rd experiment was going to be Claudine, but I left for the theatre for a University residency before it could happen. PS: The original cast of Cooley saw the show and wanted to support a national tour.
Thanks. Both studios responded much as you did, Dale. They wished me well and charged me nothing! I got permission by making one phone call. I wanted to capture more of the women’s POV in Sparkle, so I asked my friend Ntozake Shange to help me with tweaks to the script. We had fun.”
JITNEY
Also, an award-winning playwright, his latest play, Lazarus, Unstoned, had its world premiere, to popular and critical acclaim, at Freedom Theatre in April of 2002. Of his Lazarus, Unstoned, the Philadelphia Weekly theatre critic wrote: “It’s often said that the role of the director coincided with the birth of vernacular religious drama, and in Philadelphia, nobody is more adept at this style of theatre than Walter Dallas.”
Lazarus, Unstoned
Freedom Theatre
Additional work with new play development has included experiences at Sundance, the O’Neill, the Public Theatre, New Dramatists, and in Africa, England, France, and Russia.
A graduate of Morehouse College and the Yale School of Drama, he also studied music and theology at Harvard University, and dance and theater in traditional African societies at the University of Ghana at Legon. He taught theatre at Antioch College and the University of California, Berkeley. He created the School of Theatre for Philadelphia’s University of the Arts in 1983. In 1992 he left to become artistic director at Freedom Theatre.
Walter Dallas: I met Walter during an audition at Meg Simon/Kumin Casting in the winter of 1989. I was a young actor in NYC and had never heard of him. I auditioned for Pill Hill by Sam Kelly for Yale’s Winter Fest and was cast. I’ve had the honor of working with Walter on at least six other productions since that time. Spunk at Philadelphia Drama Guild in 1991, Two Trains Running by August Wilson In 1994, the world premiere of Seven Guitars by August Wilson In 1995, Jitney by August Wilson In 1997, Stick fly at the Arden Theatre in 2013 and Autumn for the Billie Holiday Theatre in 2016.
Walter, I’d call the quiet storm of directing, quite and precise but roaring and direct when need be. Knowing him mostly as a director and not nearly as social as I’d like I’ve discovered we attended the same high school in Atlanta, Georgia, Henry McNeil Turner High.An incredible photographer as well as having traveled extensively throughout the world with residency in Ghana, Africa. I can still see August and Walter sitting at the work table working on the play, talking to the actors, writing, and listening. I look forward to his next work his brilliance has a prominent place in the work we love. Theatre, Film, and Television. Walter Dallas wrote the script for the Motown musicians documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown. Brilliant.
Jerome Preston Bates (Actor)
Two Trains Running
Philadelphia Drama Guild
*~*
“The delicacy and audacity of ensemble acting”
The Piano Lesson
Arden Theatre
SPUNK
Philadelphia Drama Guild
The Welcome Table
Blue Door
Arden Theatre Company
BLUE DOOR
By Tanya Barfield
Directed by Walter Dallas
Featuring Johnnie Hobbs, Jr. and Kes Khemnu
Lighting by Thom Weaver
Scenery by Daniel Conway
Costumes by Alison Roberts
Sound by Robert Kaplowitz
2010
Photos courtesy of
Thom Weaver
JITNEY
by August Wilson
THE AMEN CORNER
Philadelphia
THE AMEN CORNER – [PROJECT1voice]
By James Baldwin
To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the death of James Baldwin, THE AMEN CORNER was produced at the Gerald Lynch Theater.
Directed by Walter Dallas (August Wilson’s SEVEN GUITARS), it starred Chuck Cooper, Adriane Lenox, and Lillias White
A RAISIN IN THE SUN
By Lorraine Hansberry
EXTENDED BY DEMAND!
In Chicago’s South Side in the early 1950s, a life insurance check sent to the Younger’s home arrives with the promise of change. This African American family then considers buying a house in the all-white Clybourne Park, but conflicting aspirations and a neighborhood’s intolerance threaten the dream’s reality.
Walter Dallas (The Piano Lesson, Blue Door) directs this classic drama that paved the way for the African American voice to be heard on stage.
Arden Theatre Company
presents
A RAISIN IN THE SUN
By Lorraine Hansberry
Directed by Walter Dallas
“That time Walter Dallas told me that people always play Bobo’s moment of bringing Walter Lee the bad news as if it’s only bad news for Walter. That, in fact, Bobo’s lost everything that HE had! That HE just got finished having his own Walter/Mama moment and it’s still fresh when he has to muster up the courage to now, come tell Walter. And he said (direct quote) ‘I want to see Bobo’s snot all over the floor.”
Kash Gokash Goins (Actor)
https://www.facebook.com/jaleesa.capri/videos/10158243756823620/
BOESMAN and LENA
February 7-16, 2014
By Athol Fugard
Directed by Walter Dallas
It is the late 1960s in South Africa as the stranglehold of apartheid tightly grips the country.
In this historical play, we meet an African couple, Boesman and Lena who have been wandering through the bleak mudflats looking for a safe place to pitch their tent. Their universal and powerful story continues to speak to audiences long after the collapse of one of the century’s most vicious regimes of oppression.
Produced in association with the Black Theatre Troupe
Boesman and Lena from ASU Sch of Film, Dance & Theatre on Vimeo.
THE BLUEST EYE
By Lydia R. Diamond
Lorraine Hansberry Theatre (2007)
A novel by Toni Morrison
adapted for the stage by Lydia R. Diamond
She’s delighted to learn that Walter Dallas will be directing “Bluest Eye” at the Hansberry, noting that he staged one of the play’s first productions for a general audience (at Detroit’s Plowshares Theatre) after it premiered in the Steppenwolf’s Young Adults series for high school and junior high students.
“Walter is an amazing director,” Diamond says. Dallas returns the compliment.
“She’s very cool and very talented,” he says by phone from Philadelphia’s New Freedom Theatre, one of the nation’s oldest African American theaters, where he’s been artistic director since 1992. “I’ve adapted some films for the stage,” he says, “so I know the challenges of adapting from one medium to another. Lydia just nails it.”
Delta Secret
Alabama Shakespeare Festival
PHIL HILL
Pill Hill by Samuel Kelly at YALE Repertory Company
SEVEN GUITARS
By the Way, Meet Vera Stark
Vera Stark is actually a play about Black film actresses in 1933 who were trying desperately to get parts in a movie, The Belle of New Orleans, a southern epic set in 1855. Fast forward: in 2003, some professors at a university hold a public debate about the important role the star Vera Stark played in that film and American cinematic history. During that meeting, they show a section of the film. It’s that section that we filmed.
Everyman Theatre in Baltimore.
Photos by Walter Dallas, Director, “Vera Stark” film shoot
STICK FLY
Arden Theatre Company presents
STICK FLY
By Lydia R. Diamond
Directed by Walter Dallas
October 24 – December 22, 2013
One summer weekend in Martha’s Vineyard, the LeVay brothers bring their girlfriends home to meet the parents. Between breakfast and board games, rivalries ignite, opinions flare, and secrets unravel. Join us for this of-the-moment portrait of an affluent African-American family.
THE MOUNTAIN TOP
by Katori Hall Directed by Walter Dallas September 14 – October 8, 2017,
Hassan El-Amin as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Antoinette Robinson as Camae.
Scenic design: Stefanie Hansen Costume design: Andrea Barrier Lighting design: Eileen Smitheimer
Sound design: Kristian Derek Ball
Projection design: Clint Allen
“Dallas directs this deceptively simple two-hander so artfully that it appears artless, deeply mining the relationship of these two.” – Gail Obenreder / Delaware Online
THURGOOD
Olney Theatre Center (2017)
https://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/arts/bs-wk-arts-story-0728-story.html
THURGOOD, a one-man show about the life of Thurgood Marshall, at Olney Theatre Center. Written by George Stevens, Jr., directed by Walter Dallas, and starring Brian Anthony Wilson as Thurgood Marshall
AUTUMN
Richard Wesley (Playwright) and Walter Dallas (Director)
AUTUMN
Walter Dallas and I certainly knew of each other, professionally, and had met occasionally across many years, but we’d never worked together until producer Indira Etwaroo, of the Billie Holiday Theater, brought Walter in to direct the New York premiere of my play, I found myself drawn to his directorial style, which emphasized lean, minimalist acting, brisk and precise movement or blocking, and meticulous attention to the text; all of which made for a fast-paced but never rushed performance. The result was the kind of presentation He was affable, incredibly easy for a playwright to converse with, particularly when discussing the theme and the subtext. As a man, there is not much I can tell you. We never really had the opportunity to socialize much. But, I always remember his warm smile and jovial nature. I remember quite a steady leadership. These are the qualities every writer looks for in his or her director, but are not often found.
That is why there are only a relative handful of directors all the playwrights clamor to work with. Walter is one who exists within that rarified circle. I was blessed to have had the opportunity to have him helm my play. I wish such good fortune for every writer.
{“Dale, Walter was a jewel in the crown of Black Theater.”}
Richard Wesley – Associate professor at New York University
http://thebillieholiday.org/walter-dallas/
(c) All Rights Reserved iforcolor.org (Dale Shields)