Performing Arts

Lynne Alvarez had always heard stories about Undermain Theatre. But they never quite sank in until she watched the Deep Ellum organization stage her new play, The Snow Queen.Ms. Alvarez goes way back with some of the downtown New York playwrights like Mac Wellman and Jeffrey M. Jones, with whom Undermain has had long relationships. In fact, Undermain was producing these avant-garde leaders when few other companies in the country would touch them. The quality of the Dallas troupe's work developed a reputation in the national theatrical underground, and Ms. Alvarez had heard her friends talk it up.

ELIZABETH M. CLAFFEY/DMN

Mr. Wellman was the one who put the playwright in touch with Undermain artistic director Katherine Owens, who's directing The Snow Queen's world premiere on Saturday. Now Ms. Alvarez has joined the chorus that sings the Dallas company's praises.

"I told Mac, 'God, they are as good as everybody said,' " Ms. Alvarez says. "I guess it's a sign of how provincial I was that I was surprised. It has been a joy."

Ms. Alvarez has written about 20 plays that have been produced all over the country. New York's Primary Stages premiered her Romola & Nijinsky in 2003, for instance. Theatrical publisher Smith and Kraus is currently preparing the second volume of her collected plays for publication.

"I've had her books for years," Ms. Owens says. "They're very politically astute, complicated, exotic."

But Ms. Owens had no idea that Ms. Alvarez was currently living in Dallas until she heard it from Mr. Wellman. Two years ago, a health crisis prompted the playwright to move here to be near her sister and get treatment.

"I never thought I'd write a play again," she says.

But as she got better, Ms. Owens met with her and started asking her about new work. Ms. Alvarez thought about a previous piece she had written that she wanted to expand. The Snow Queen is a kind of contemporary doppelgänger to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. An older woman takes a young man to her place in the far north, and the young woman who loves him goes in search.

"I have seldom written plays where the woman is the centerpiece – and in this play there are two of them," Ms. Alvarez says.

Some playwrights get involved with multiple productions of their work, but this one generally only works on the premiere.

"Depending on who your actor is, you can expand a role," she says – and that's just what she's done for Matthew Posey, one of Undermain's most consistently spellbinding performers in recent years.

Ms. Alvarez, 63, didn't intend to be a playwright at all. The Oregon native's initial ambition was to be a journalist – and she got a job as a reporter for a newspaper in Vera Cruz, Mexico, despite the fact that her Spanish was rudimentary at the time. She stayed nine years, then decided to be a "rebel poet" and joined a group of Puerto Rican poets in New York, although her own heritage, generations back, was Argentine.

The thing was, those poets were great performers. "I was not," Ms. Alvarez says ruefully.

A visit with a friend to the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater got her fascinated with the stage, and she's been writing plays since 1978.

After years living in New York City, joining New Dramatists and making connections, Ms. Alvarez moved upstate. Her husband was the principal of a high school in Cooperstown – where the National Baseball Hall of Fame is located – until he retired recently.

"I really missed a sense of open space – and playwrights don't generally make enough money to have a view of Central Park," she says. But "I had established myself enough that I didn't have to haunt theater hallways anymore."

By this time, in fact, theaters were coming to her. Companies in Louisville, Ky., San Diego and San Francisco, as well as New York, continued to premiere her plays.

Critics have frequently used the term "magical realism" for Ms. Alvarez's work – rather a cliché for writers with Hispanic surnames, from novelist Gabriel García Márquez to playwright Jose Rivera. Ms. Alvarez is skeptical about the label.

"People throw that word around, but the thing about theater is that it's imaginary!" Ms. Alvarez exclaims. "What's fun about the theater is the imagination. You can take a chair and put it in the middle of the stage and call it a submarine and take the people with you. You can create anything you like."

In The Snow Queen, for instance, it's birds.

"I like birds, so there are tons of birds in this one," Ms. Alvarez says.

The playwright's vivid imagination has given some exciting opportunities to Undermain's designers. When Andersen told his stories to children back in the 19th century, he would do elaborate paper cutouts to illustrate them. So designer Linda Noland is constructing her set mostly of paper cut into all kinds of doilylike shapes and silhouettes. Actor Kent Williams is an accomplished puppeteer, so there will be puppets.

Not to speak of all those origami birds.

"It has been a very organic relationship all the way around," Ms. Owens says.

"I hate to say this, because it sounds like I'm buttering somebody up," Ms. Alvarez confides, "but I think Katherine may be the best director I've ever worked with."

Of course, many Dallas theatergoers – not to speak of a lot of avant-garde playwrights around the country – have thought that for a long time.Plan your life

Previews tonight and Friday, opens Saturday at 8:15 p.m. and runs through Dec. 22 at Undermain Theatre, 3200 Main. $15 to $25. 214-747-5515, www.undermain.org.

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