The best new events this week are happening on stages all over Tarrant and Denton counties. We’re here to catch you up.
Caryl Churchill wrote Far Away in 2000, but it feels eerily prescient in its depiction of a government that keeps its citizens afraid as a means of control. The main character is a factory worker in a dictatorship who makes hats for prisoners who are about to be executed. Sundown Collaborative Theatre is producing this play that presages The Hunger Games and the post-9/11 security state. A different and much funnier kind of dystopia is on offer at Theatre Arlington. Urinetown is a 2001 musical about a water shortage that presages California’s current predicament and who knows how much else of the Southwest as well? We might all be singing “It’s a Privilege to Pee” one day.
If you’d rather see something with a more hopeful view of the future, Circle Theatre stages the regional premiere of Lauren Gunderson’s I and You, a two-character play about a popular high-school jock and a sarcastic, bedridden classmate who has missed months of school with an illness bonding over their appreciation of Walt Whitman’s poetry. With teen weepers suddenly resurgent at the movie theater, this drama would seem to be hitting our stages at an opportune time.
[box_info]Far Away runs May 1-10 at Green Space Arts Collective, 1828 Westchester St, Denton. Tickets are $8-10. Call 940-220-930. • Urinetown runs May 1-24 at Theatre Arlington, 305 W Main St, Arlington. Tickets are $22. Call 817-275-7661. • I and You runs Apr 30-May 23 at Circle Theatre, 230 W 4th St, FW. Tickets are $10-30. Call 817-877-3040.[/box_info]
