As Teatro Dallas producer Mac Welch was planning this year’s International Theatre Festival, one of the groups had an unusual request: It needed him to track down 10 television sets made between 1985 and 1990. Certain brands of that vintage can be manipulated in ways that later models can’t.
“They want to be able to cast images onto the TVs, so they need to be operable,” Welch explains. “Specific TVs can also send a certain amount of power or signal, then you’re able to jam them to ensure they make certain sounds and types of static. I said: ‘That is so clever and way over my head. Just tell me what to get. I have no idea what you’re talking about.’”
Welch has been hunting for the sets ever since, combing thrift stores and antique shops, contacting colleges and theater companies, perusing Facebook Marketplace and posting on his social media accounts. It’s an added challenge to the usual festival work of securing visas and making travel arrangements for foreign artists.
“I’m interested to see how their show pans out,” he says. “It’s the biggest question mark. … That’s my primary experience with Teatro Dallas: It’s the type of theater I would never see anywhere else.”
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Spectrum by Portugal’s ASTA: Teatro e Outras Artes is by far the biggest and most expensive of the three productions in the festival’s 22nd edition, Welch says. ASTA is bringing three actors, two projectors and a technician for what is described as an immersive, sensory experience using sound and imagery to create a kind of post-reality. It’s inspired by Plato’s allegory of the cave in which chained prisoners mistake shadows on a wall for the real thing.
Like Teatro Dallas co-founder Cora Cardona, ASTA is a member of the international theater network Red Escena Iberoamericana. REI is made up of companies, venues, schools and festivals from Spain, Portugal, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Germany and Mexico, where Cardona is now based.
Hugo Kogan of Argentina’s La Granada Teatro is starring in and co-directing the one-man show “Potestad,” which he has been performing for years.
Roque Basualdo
Though the organizations have been working together for a long time, they began more formally cooperating during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Teatro Dallas festival has booked another member as well, Hugo Kogan of Argentina’s La Granada Teatro. Kogan, who has appeared at the festival before, is starring in and co-directing the one-man show Potestad, which he has been performing for years.
Confronting one of the darkest chapters in Argentina’s history, the 1985 play by Eduardo Pavlovsky, a psychotherapist, writer and actor, is about a man caught up in the systematic kidnapping of children during a military dictatorship. It will be performed in Spanish.
“It delves into a father who is now alone, a journey through his grief and past loneliness,” Welch says. “A lot of the play is him realizing that he has, although indirectly, perpetuated a system that resulted in the death of his loved one. He’s acknowledging that he’s justified his entire life allowing for these atrocities to take place. Is there a way that he can forgive himself and come out the other side changed? What do you do when you feel trapped in a system that is also the result of your own doing?
“The big appeal for us is that it is an Argentinian talking about Argentina and the experiences that he has had personally.”
The third show in the festival, Strategic Love Play, came through a personal connection Welch has with its director, Dhruv Iyengar, a Chicago native who grew up in India and briefly lived in North Texas, where he worked with Shakespeare Dallas and Junior Players.
Dhruv Iyengar is the director of “Strategic Love Play,” one of the festival’s shows. The London-based Iyengar briefly lived in North Texas, where he worked with Shakespeare Dallas and Junior Players.
Jordan Fraker
Now based in London, where he went to college, Iyengar runs a company of South Asian theater artists, Purāna Productions. He reached out to Welch about participating in the festival. They decided Strategic Love Play, a two-hander, would be perfect for the Valentine’s Day slot. In 2024, it had an off-Broadway run.
“This was just a no-brainer, the one we really got excited about,” Welch says. “They just finished their London run with really great reviews.”
Written by Miriam Battye and based on her own book, it tackles the transactional nature of romance in the digital age, specifically British pub and dating culture post-pandemic. Described as raw and humorous, it explores intimacy among the algorithms, asking what’s being sacrificed in a culture obsessed with convenience and choice.
All three shows are running one-night-only in the main auditorium of the Latino Cultural Center. While Spectrum and Potestad will be presented proscenium style with the audience in the room’s regular seats, Strategic Love Play will be performed with the audience on stage with the actors.
“It’s a very personal, very intimate play, like you’re at the table with them on their first date,” Welch says. “They found each other on an app.”
Rather than trying to draw the same audience for all three shows, Teatro Dallas is marketing each production to people who might relate to the individual genres and aesthetics. Welch has been reaching out to local pockets of South American immigrants and descendants for Potestad, and dancers and performance artists for the visually oriented Spectrum.
There’s at least one show for everyone, he says, while acknowledging common themes. “All of them have a sense that, ‘Things are passing me by. I’m along for the ride. I’m an indirect victim,’ and what we’re subject to in the technological age. How do we take control?”
Details
The 22nd International Theatre Festival runs Feb. 7, 14 and 21 at 6 p.m. at the Latino Cultural Center, 2600 Live Oak St., Dallas. $25 per show. teatrodallas.org.
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