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It's no contest: Dallas does Detroit

Director Walter Dallas returns to stage Plowshares' 17th season opener

DETROIT – If all of the directors whose shows are currently running at one of Metro Detroit's professional theaters were gathered together and asked, "Which of you has ever won a local Emmy; studied at Yale, Harvard Divinity School and the University of Ghana; had a production named by Time magazine as one of the Top Ten Best Theatre Events of 1995; and once had a big city mayor proclaim a day in your name?" – I suspect only one person would step forward: Atlanta native Walter Dallas.

In town recently to stage "The Bluest Eye," the opening production of Plowshares Theatre Company's 17th season, the award-winning Dallas has not only worked extensively on Broadway, off-Broadway and in numerous regional theaters throughout the country, he's also founded the Proposition Theatre Company in Atlanta and created the School of Theatre for Philadelphia's University of the Arts. Since 1992 he's served as artistic director of Philadelphia's renowned Freedom Theatre.

"I came to Plowshares because Gary Anderson and I have served on several national committees and theater panels together, and we kind of struck it off," Dallas told BTL a few days prior to the show's Oct. 19 opening. "Some of our struggles and triumphs and challenges of running our theater companies were so similar, that a bond developed between us."

The strength of that relationship first brought Dallas to Plowshares in 2001 to direct "Continued Warm." It was a good experience, Dallas recalled. "And we've been looking for a really good opportunity for him to come to my theater in Philadelphia or for me to come back."

Although Dallas met author Toni Morrison at the Philadelphia opening of her opera, "Margaret Garner," directing the adaptation of her book was his first exposure to her writing. "I'd never read her before. I'm always doing theater, so I rarely have an opportunity to just pick up a novel and read it. I'm always reading scripts."

Dallas read Lydia R. Diamond's stage adaptation first, and then its source material. "I wanted to see how the play moves as a play first," he revealed, "and I was just taken by it. It deals with a very familiar theme in a rather unusual way"

Set in the 1940s, "The Bluest Eye" tells the story of a young black girl and her family who are affected everywhere they look by the dominant culture – and who "wore their ugliness as a mantle."

"It deals with how African-Americans are affected by racism in this culture – a culture that says you're not beautiful," the director said. "How does that impact a family?"

It's a subject Dallas – who was born in 1946 – understands well. "I was a little black boy in Atlanta, Georgia. When I was in elementary school, we read 'Dick and Jane' and watched 'Leave it to Beaver,' and certainly my auntie who was raising me didn't wear pleated skirts, two-inch high heels and a string of pearls when she prepared dinner as June Cleaver did. But that was the ideal, and I wanted to be Beaver – not realizing that that was a kind of way of internalizing the racism that I wasn't even aware of. That kind of negative self-perception turns us against ourselves a lot of times, so we then believe we are ugly, or we believe we are invisible. And when we look around and see that everything supports that notion – as every billboard or magazine cover does – you start to believe it."

Directing the play offered Dallas another opportunity to work with some of Detroit's finest talent. "Gary is doing some really, really good work, and trying to bring strong, African-American theater to Detroit. I hope Detroiters value what he's trying to do – and support it," Dallas concluded.

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