As part of the Alley Theatre's inaugural season in its renovated downtown building, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan's All The Way, a co-production with Dallas Theatre Center, will be performed in the new Hubbard Theatre. Members of the Alley's Resident Company will join with members of the Dallas Theater Center to create this monumental play about Lyndon B. Johnson's early days in office, rehearsing and performing in Houston in January 2016 and travelling to Dallas for a second run in March 2016.
Winner of the 2014 Tony Award, this suspenseful Texas-sized new play about one of the most powerful Texans, takes us from the earliest moments of Lyndon B. Johnson's accidental presidency to his hard-won landslide election one year later.
Robert Schenkkan's masterful script paints a gripping portrayal of LBJ, civil rights hero, ruthless bully, and perhaps one of our greatest legislative presidents. With a title harkening back to the slogan for his 1964 campaign, All The Way is a searing and enthralling dramatization that explores political gridlock, strong-arm manipulation, and the morality of politics and power. Contains adult language.
"We are excited to collaborate with
Dallas Theater Center, and especially on this big, brilliant, wonderful new American play" said
Alley Theatre Artistic Director
Gregory Boyd. "All The Way is an exciting and hugely entertaining piece of Theatre about a transformative moment in American life and politics. And That moment resonates as resoundingly now as it ever has. The play catches the spark in the history and brings it thrillingly to theatrical life."
"As a long time fan and admirer of the Alley, I am greatly looking forward to this unprecedented collaboration," said DTC Artistic Director
Kevin Moriarty. "Our production of All The Way will bring together the resident acting companies of our two theaters for the first time to tell the story of a man who was instrumental to the political landscape of Texas and the history of our nation. Seeing the story unfold at the two largest regional theaters in Texas will be a historic theatrical event."
Robert Schenkkan grew up in Austin, Texas, attended the University of Texas as a Plan II Honors student where he receiving a BA in Drama and went on to earn an MFA in Theatre Arts from Cornell University. He authored The Kentucky Cycle, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the first play in the history of the Pulitzer to win before its New York premiere. He has written and published fourteen other full-length plays including his 2014 tony award winner All The Way, which had its 2012 world premiere in Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Other theatre awards include: 2013 Senator Edward M. Kennedy Theater Award, Outer Critics Circle nomination, LA Critics Best Play Award and the
Julie Harris/
Beverly Hills Theatre Guild Award. He co-wrote the feature film, The Quiet American and his television credits include: The Pacific, The Andromeda Strain and Spartacus (USA). He has two Emmy nominations. Schenkkan will receive the 2015 Texas Medal of Arts Award in Theatre on February 24, 2015.
All The Way begins performances at the
Alley Theatre on January 29, opens officially February 3, and runs through February 21, 2016. After its run in Houston, All The Way moves to the
Dallas Theater Center where it begins performances March 3, opens officially March 5, and runs through March 27, 2016.
The cast and creative team for All The Way will be announced at a later date.
ABOUT DALLAS THEATER CENTER - One of the leading regional theaters in the country,
Dallas Theater Center (DTC) performs to an audience of more than 120,000 North Texas residents annually. Founded in 1959, DTC is now a resident company of the AT&T Performing Arts Center and presents its Mainstage season at the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre, designed by REX/OMA, Joshua Prince-Ramus and Rem Koolhaas and at its original home, the
Kalita Humphreys Theater, the only freestanding theater designed and built by
Frank Lloyd Wright. Under the leadership of Artistic Director
Kevin Moriarty and Managing Director Heather M. Kitchen, DTC produces a seven-play subscription series of classics, musicals and new plays and an annual production of A Christmas Carol; extensive education programs, including the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award-winning Project Discovery, SummerStage and partnerships with Southern Methodist University's Meadows School of the Arts and Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts; and community outreach efforts including leading the DFW Foote Festival and recent collaborations with the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Public Library, Dallas Holocaust Museum, North Texas Food Bank, Dallas Opera, and Dallas Black Dance Theater. Throughout its history, DTC has produced many new works, including The Texas Trilogy by
Preston Jones in 1978,
Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, adapted by
Adrian Hall, in 1986, and recent premieres of FLY by
Rajiv Joseph,
Bill Sherman and Kirstin Childs; Fly by Night by
Kim Rosenstock,
Michael Mitnick and
Will Connolly; Giant by
Michael John LaChiusa and
Sybille Pearson; The Trinity River Plays by
Regina Taylor; the revised It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's Superman by
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa,
Charles Strouse and
Lee Adams; Give It Up! (now titled Lysistrata Jones and recently on Broadway) by
Douglas Carter Beane and
Lewis Flinn; Sarah, Plain and Tall by
Julia Jordan, Laurence O'Keefe and
Nell Benjamin; and The Good Negro by
Tracey Scott Wilson.
ABOUT THE ALLEY THEATRE - With its 177 employees, the
Alley Theatre produces 393 performances annually, more than all other performing arts organizations in the Theater District combined. The Alley has attracted over 8 million people to Houston's Theater District since 1968 and has a $34.5 million annual economic impact on the City of Houston ("Arts & Economic Prosperity III: The Economic Impact of Nonprofit Arts & Culture Organizations and their Audiences in the City of Houston," Americans for the Arts, 2005.)
The
Alley Theatre, one of America's leading not-for-profit theatres, is a nationally recognized performing arts company focused on collaborating with resident actors, visiting artists, directors, designers and authors to cultivate the new voices, new work, and new artists of the American theatre. Under the direction of Artistic Director
Gregory Boyd and Managing Director
Dean R. Gladden, the Alley has also brought its productions to 40 American cities, and to Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg and New York's Lincoln Center, as well as to major European festivals (including two in one season at the Venice Biennale) and Broadway. As a recipient of the Special Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre, the Alley creates a wide-ranging repertoire and innovative productions of classics, neglected modern plays, and premieres, as well as new works that will become classics for the future developed through the Alley's New Play Initiative. During the 2014 - 2015 season the
Alley Theatre will be performing at the University of Houston's Wortham Theatre as the Alley's downtown home is being renovated. For more information go to
www.alleytheatre.org/uh.
