Lawson Taitte

Milton Hinnant / DMN

Pictured are Isabella Russell-Ides, a playwright, and Teresa Coleman Wash, the founder of TeCo Theatrical Productions. Bishop Arts Theater Center will house its first production tonight.

View larger More photos Photo store

Teresa Coleman Wash and Isabella Russell-Ides, playwrights who became producers to get their work before the public, are proving that sisterhood is powerful, even when the sisters are divided by generation and by race.

Ms. Wash has worked for five years to outfit a gleaming new performance space in Oak Cliff, the Bishop Arts Theater Center. Her company, TeCo Theatrical Productions, begins an ambitious inaugural season there tonight with Leonard's Car [when the rainbow is not enuf]. Ms. Russell-Ides has rewritten her prize-winning play for a biracial cast.

"Putting a play into a new theater is like losing your virginity every day," Ms. Russell-Ides quips.

Ms. Wash, a Georgia native, founded TeCo in Atlanta in 1993. After moving to Dallas in 2000, she began producing in the basement of Fair Park's Hall of State. She asked Ms. Russell-Ides to be a judge for her annual playwriting competition. The next year, the California-born Texas poet-playwright submitted a script of her own for the contest. The two have been friends ever since.

In 2003, an anonymous donor gave TeCo a dilapidated former movie theater nearly a mile from the heart of the Bishop Arts historical district. Despite the distance, the theater has the district's homey but gentrified air to it. Ms. Wash raised about $500,000, all from private sources, to finish out the space.

The pristine lobby is also an art gallery. The auditorium holds 170 in stadium seating, with skyboxes instead of a regular balcony. Upstairs, besides dressing rooms and a light booth, there's a brightly lit room for student programs. Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the building is the suite that Ms. Wash calls the "arts business incubator center." It offers office space for up to four other arts groups.

"I said to myself that we really needed this building to pay for itself," Ms. Wash says. "Providing much needed space for other companies is a win-win situation for us both."

For Ms. Russell-Ides, this new version of Leonard's Car is a nifty way to follow up on a major success. At this summer's Festival of Independent Theatres, Echo produced her one-act Coco & Gigi, revised to include black and white actors. The wildly successful production won a Dallas Fort Worth Theater Critics Forum award for best new play.

Now she's doing something similar with Leonard's Car in what will be the play's fifth production, its third in Dallas.

"Part of the attraction of the theater is to leave home and find yourself," Ms. Russell-Ides says. "I think this is a good time to get in the sandbox with the black kids."

TeCo will follow Leonard's Car with four more offerings in its subscription season, including the first North Texas production of any of August Wilson's challenging later scripts. Between these shows, TeCo hopes to make the space available to other companies, including some Latino ones because the neighborhood is predominantly Hispanic.

Ms. Wash says that last year, South Dallas Cultural Center manager Vicki Meeks, a longtime mover and shaker on the Dallas arts scene, gave her some good advice: "She said that instead of convincing people to come here from other neighborhoods, we should be serving the local community."

Although Ms. Wash considers herself primarily an artist – not an administrator or businesswoman – she doesn't plan to direct a show in her spiffy new theater this season.

"I want to go to Hawaii and drink a mai tai," she admits. "I want to start writing again."

That's what all this was about in the first place, isn't it?